Introduction

Graphene is formed of C atoms. C is an element in the IVth column of the periodic table and has four valence electrons in the outermost shell. It can make two types of chemical bonds, namely sp3, which results in diamond known from ancient times, and a more stable sp2, which results in graphite that is known for the last 500 years. A quick look at the discoveries of different allotropes of C is available in Table 4.1. The sp2 hybridization causes planar configuration involving 3 of the 4 electrons, which are 120° apart and are bound by σ bonds that add stiffness (and flatness too) to the linkage between the C–C atoms, while the fourth electron bound to the C atoms via the π bond projects out of the plane, and is available for conduction. Thus, the electronic structure that we shall be discussing elaborately is due to these π electrons.

Graphene was the first discovery of atomically thin perfect two-dimensional (2D) material. Andre Geim and co-workers successfully exfoliated graphene from graphite [2, 3]. Some of the remarkable properties of graphene (which, unfortunately, we shall not worry too much about) include its strength, impermeability, very large thermal conductivity (at least one order larger than copper), as a molecule sensor, transparent (for its usage in displays), in the field of biology, such as neuron growth and DNA sequencing, and many more. Owing to the tremendous fundamental and technological applications of graphene, the discovery earned a Nobel Prize to A. Geim and K. Novoselov, both from the University of Manchester in the UK in 2010.

This chapter reconstructs Flavius Agricola’s life and analyzes his self-presentation across a variety of different lines: the poetic form and references within his verse epitaph, his representation as a reclining diner, the apparent disjuncture between his youthful physique and older face, and the vessel he cradles in his hand.

Like the migrants from many other regions of India, Bengalis cherished high hopes of better lives when they left for British Malaya. As seen in the preceding three chapters, a group of migrants improved the conditions of their lives throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and some became quite successful in their professions. A majority, however, continued to suffer existential challenges under colonial and postcolonial conditions. From their journey to their settlement, the life and times of Bengali expatriates in the Malay world were full of stories of aspiration and struggle. This chapter captures a glimpse of these stories.

Pre-embarkation Difficulties

The embarkation process for migrant labourers was generally dreadful. Their grievances started at the very beginning of their journey. The Government of Bengal erected many depots and sub-depots to collect potential labourers in rural areas. The labourers were taken to a musafir khana (like a modern shelter house) at Calcutta port for overseas embarkation from these depots. One sub-depot at Goalundo (presently Rajbari district in Bangladesh) sent labourers to Calcutta port or the Assam tea gardens. Government medical officers had to prepare annual reports on these depots, which often positively depicted sanitary issues, accommodation and food supplies. However, such positive reports contradict the reality as reflected in other historical sources. For instance, about 615 emigrants were registered in the sub-depots at Garden Reach in Calcutta in May and June of 1918. Although a majority of them were able to reach the Calcutta shelter house, some emigrants were returned on account of their lack of physical fitness, by demand of their relatives, or simply because some of them refused to go any further than the Goalundo depot. Therefore, the pre-embarkation process was anything but easy.

In addition to the contracted or indentured labourers, ‘free’ migrants also embarked from the Calcutta port and experienced a frustrating process. They left their villages and found their way to the Calcutta port by trains or bullock carts. After that, they boarded a ship for a ten- to fifteen-day voyage to Southeast Asian ports. Thousands of them disembarked at Penang or Port Swettenham.

Exporting goods from Bengal into the Malay world took a new turn with British imperial expansion. The EIC established monopolistic maritime trade, which reshaped the commercial network for the circulation of Bengali commodities across the Indian Ocean world, particularly in the intra-Asian markets around the rim of the Bay of Bengal. They transported Bengali commodities to long-distance seaports, including Europe, Africa, the Americas and Australia. The movement of these goods steadily increased, which integrated the market and facilitated Bengali mobility within the British colonies. Most of the formal professions undertaken by the Bengalis in the Malay world have been discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter explores two other aspects related to Bengali migrant employment: the flow of products from Bengal and the involvement of Bengali migrants in trade and commerce. It mainly focuses on Bengali petty traders who played an essential role in shaping a transnational commercial space from the late nineteenth century.

Bengal Commodities across the Indian Ocean World

Before the advent of colonialism, seaports in the Indian Ocean, particularly those located between the coast of Bengal and the Malay Archipelago, were integrated into local, intra-regional and inter-regional networks of merchant communities and zones of commodity exchange. In other words, these commercial zones were structured in micro-, meso- and macro-regions. The increasing dominance of European, and especially EIC, shipping from the mid-eighteenth century did not change this spatial organisation of commercial activities around the seaports. After getting hold of Bencoolen, Bengal and Penang by the end of the eighteenth century, the British controlled the trade network across the northeastern Indian Ocean. During the early nineteenth century, the British took over Malacca and Singapore and formed the Straits Settlements, which included three main seaports: Penang, Malacca and Singapore. These seaports were made duty free for all merchants and were clearinghouses of intra-Asian and long-distance trade. A large quantity of Bengal commodities was transported from the Calcutta port to the ports of the Malay Peninsula, notably Malacca, Penang and Singapore. The EIC re-exported most of the commodities from these seaports to the eastern coast of the Indian Ocean, particularly Java, China, Thailand and Australia. Thus, the British created an exclusive commercial zone between South and Southeast Asia.

Chapter 2 examines how the Mall in St James’s Park – the prime location for promenading in eighteenth-century London – became a key site for writers and artists who turned a humorous eye on the social ambitions of London’s middling sorts. Here, men and women congregated “to see and be seen, to censure and be censured”, as one account put it, and comic accounts of the promenade frequently describe the Mall as a battleground in which new, commercial wealth clashes with forms of inherited status. The literary and visual satires examined here respond to concerns about the blurring of distinctions by suggesting, albeit wishfully, that attempts by the middling sorts to imitate those higher up the social scale are always transparent, and true rank and status always reveals itself.

Most early colonial Bengali migrants travelled and worked under contract and experienced poor health, insecurity and desperation. Nevertheless, with the end of the indenture system, the government gradually introduced regulations to secure migrants’ welfare and interests. British Malaya offered new and extensive work opportunities in different plantations and mines, including rubber and tin mines. Though most workers were Chinese and Tamils, many came from northern India and Bengal. The ethnic identity of Bengali professionals and workers was often conflated with that of non-Bengalis, and their vocations were not officially recorded. However, piecemeal sources can help us to locate many Bengali professionals. This chapter examines various formal and informal occupations that Bengalis engaged in, shedding light on their vibrant presence in colonial and postcolonial Malaya.

At the Construction Site and Cattle Farm

The term ‘coolie’ is widespread in British colonial history in Asia. It broadly refers to hardworking labourers who performed menial jobs; however, the definition of coolie differs according to different perspectives and circumstances. I had used this term consciously and in a non-diminishing manner to reflect the professional category of labourers in colonial registers when they migrated as workers to British Malaya and other colonies. South Asian and Chinese coolies worked in construction sites and rubber estates in the Straits Settlements. Most South Asian coolies were Tamils, and most female coolies were ‘passive victims’ in the migration process and lived in the plantations. Alongside other South Asians, Bengali coolies worked in different sectors, including roads and railways, harbours and cattle farms. The Singapore Governor fully implemented the Indian Immigrants’ Protection Act in order to protect the well-being of labourers, in particular those who came from India and Bengal. L. H. Clayton, the Chairman of the Immigration Committee in Malaya, made provisions for social amenities for labourers and coolies. He showed a keen interest in employing Bengali coolies. However, he noted that the recruitment of Bengali coolies rested on the cooperation of the Indian government. I. R. Belilios (1846–1910), a cattle trader, recruited mostly Bengali5 clerks and coolies for his farm business, and their number significantly increased in the 1890s. Aristarchus Moses, an Armenian Jewish merchant, migrated from Calcutta to Singapore in 1820 and established a trading farm in 1840. Like Belilios, Moses employed Bengalis as stevedores and keepers at his house and warehouses.

The expansion of cities in the Global South has given shape to a social and material dynamics of “habitation” whose relationship to the emancipatory promise of citizenship is neither uniform nor stable (Holston 2009). Although cities are known for their capacity to generate the kinds of mass action that can lead to the “enlargement” of citizenship rights (Holston and Appadurai 1996), the material exigencies of urbanization, such as housing, infrastructure, and services, pose certain explanatory limits to this characterization. Henry Lefevbre defined this as a shift in urban political consciousness and representation from “production to reproduction,” specifically, toward neighborhood-level questions of occupation, settlement, and habitation (Lefevbre, quoted in Holston 2009; S. Benjamin 2008). Such transformations in urban political participation and activism highlight the growing role of land in producing the “congregations of interests that underpin disjunctures in the way cities get built” (S. Benjamin 2008: 245). This is especially the case in post-Partition Karachi, where the “control of land ownership comes hand in hand with a degree of power and control over the city, its population and its investors” (Hasan et al. 2015: 20).

I argue that in the case of Pakistan, the narrative of the urbanization of the political has been profoundly shaped by the onset, retreat, and return of competing orders of military and civilian “rule.” As a postcolonial political concept, “rule” implies both neocolonial and self-determining modalities of sovereignty in motion, especially in the context of Pakistan, where, as the previous chapter made clear, the institutional and cultural locus of sovereignty remains undecided. One site where the tussle between martial and civilian forms of “rule” has been especially pronounced is at the level of neighborhood urban life. More specifically, repeated and abrupt shifts in the structure of state sovereignty have been accompanied by the attendant waxing and waning of the apparatus of elected local government. One of the most vivid yet underexamined effects of this process on Pakistan's democratic landscape has been the inflation of the powers of such elected “local bodies” during martial rule combined with the sheer absence of any form of elected local government during periods of civilian democracy (until 2015).

The introduction offers an analysis of Edward Penny’s painting A City Shower (1764) and Jonathan Swift’s “A Description of a City Shower” (1710), from which it takes its inspiration, in order to establish the key concerns of the chapters that follow. These include the ways in which an ideal of urban life is so often represented as being embattled or under pressure in representations of walking; the anxieties and concerns about social intermixing in London’s public places; the physical and imaginative ordering and structuring of London’s streets; and the circulation, reworking, and persistence of particular tropes and images that is a hallmark of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts of the city. It also situates the book’s focus within other accounts of the city in this period.

This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

Introduction

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) was discovered by Tsui, Stormer and Gossard in 1982 at Bell Labs. They observed that at very high magnetic fields, a 2DEG shows fractional quantization of the Hall conductance. In particular, they got a quantized Hall plateau of magnitude ρxy = 3h/e2, which is accompanied by the vanishing of the longitudinal conductivity, ρxx, at low temperature (T < 5 K) in GaAs and AlGaAs samples. As opposed to the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE), where an integer number of Landau levels (LLs) are occupied, here in FQHE the LLs are partially occupied. If onemakes themagnetic field large enough, the lowest Landau level (LLL) will be partially filled. Whatwe can expect is that the system will form some kind of a lattice, for example, a Wigner crystal or a charge density wave. Thus, it naively seems to be reasonable that the system would like to minimize its potential energy, since there is no kinetic energy left in the system corresponding to the LLL, and only a trivial zero point energy is present in the system. Thus, the ions tend to stay away from each other and form something similar to a crystal lattice. However, surprisingly that does not happen, and instead the system becomes an incompressible quantum liquid, which has gaps in the energy spectrum at filling 1/m (m: odd, or a rational fraction of the form n/m). So it is inevitable that the systemminimizes its energy by having gaps at fractional values of filling. The reason is that, owing to the presence of a large number of electrons (macroscopically degenerate in any of the LLs), a many-body interaction is induced, which in fact makes the excitations above this incompressible ground state to be fractional. So in essence, the Hall current carries a fractional charge.

The ethnic panic spawned by the riots of the mid-1980s allowed the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) to come to the forefront of a process of ethnic fortification and siege, culminating in the creation of MQM-controlled “no-go areas” (ilaaqa ghair). The movement's militant inscription of Muhajirs as an urban ethno-majority involved the use of violence to expel non-Muhajir concentrations in the cities of the province. It also included the creation of a network of local “unit” offices that mapped onto Karachi's existing union council (UC) structure (whose grounded transformation of this apparatus of extra-constitutional political regulation is recounted in the next chapter). This was quickly followed by the dispersal of violent territorialism in most of the city's lower-income Muhajir strongholds, leading to the entrenchment of practices of private government and criminal accumulation that primarily ended up targeting members of the Muhajir community. In Karachi, much of this violence has been propagated by MQM recruits, comprised primarily of Pakistan-born Muhajir men from the city's middle- and lower-class neighborhoods. As I came to learn, part of the experience of life in the no-go area at this time meant dealing not only with the immediate threat of intrusion by an ethnic other but with the existence of a new brand of strangers within, in the form of newly galvanized activists. The latter's willingness and capacity to use violence against members of their own ethnic/local communities poses significant questions about the role of ethnicity, democratic power, and urban space in constituting the subject of Muhajir nationalism.

The MQM's sudden mobilization of Karachi's Muhajir youth gave rise to transgressive expressions of political sociality, “fun” and “spectacle” that challenged elite, official, as well as certain generational doxas of nationhood and urban life (Verkaaik 2004). Oskar Verkaaik argues that ethnic violence has consequently “helped create Muhajir political identity” (Verkaaik 2016). This insight aligns with the work of Nichola Khan on Muhajir militancy. According to Khan, the violence enacted by MQM militants is not just destructive but also “generative insofar as it restores or intensifies the self” (N. Khan 2017: 43).

This book has pressed a range of approaches to the study of postcolonial political modernity to give shape to a genealogy of Muhajir questioning, a historically and spatially sensitive contextualization of the capacity of Muhajir nationalism in the present to question universality “from within” and remake it, in the non-elite context of the urban state of emergency, “from below.” The time of Muhajir nationalism is not the time of origins but the more arrested time of the “no longer” (Guha 1998; see Foucault 1977). By questioning their preceding attachments to Pakistan, Muhajir nationalism calls on Muhajirs to do nothing less than question themselves. Such a demand complicates our ideals of whose imagination and whose essences merit deconstruction as forms of nationalist discourse. It follows that the element of questioning, refusal, and transformation within the Muhajir nationalist imaginary complicates any attempt to periodize and interpret the history of Muhajir community formation. Since the time of independence, the groupness of Muhajirs has been imagined in terms of their exemplary embodiment of the extra-territorial ideal of Muslim nationalism. What can be said about the shifting official and popular registers of nationalist and democratic recognition in relation to which such questioning has taken place, at least since the late colonial period? And what light does this shed on the making of collective political identities, institutions, and spaces in Pakistan and South Asia today? At this stage, I wish to reintroduce some of the larger themes I have explored so far: (a) the categorical newness of Muhajirs (being the product of Pakistan's independence, Muhajirs are not marked as such within the colonial archive, (b) the subjective, material, and institutional role of mass migration in shaping Muhajirs into a certain kind of new ethnicity, and (c) the relationship of this process of representation to Pakistan's wider and freighted narrative of postcolonial nation-state formation.

What do nationalism and nationhood mean to groups, such as Muhajirs, whose self-understanding as an ethnic community does not neatly comport with the idea of the essentialist “subject of certainty”? Essentialism can be thought of as a metalinguistic practice that ties the being of an object (in this case, the past and future interests and actions of a group) to a “self-actualizing” nature removed from the heterogeneous shaping effects of history (Cheah 2003).