Childhood statelessness is an urgent global human rights issue. Yet, there is limited ethnographic data on the everyday and varied experiences of stateless children and youth, whose representations in mainstream media and campaign materials tend to transmute them into generalized subjects with an ostensibly universal experience of total abjection. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter examines the process of ‘learning to be stateless’ among Shan youth participants and the impact of statelessness during their various life stages. The chapter argues that statelessness is not necessarily a fully and actively internalized status since birth but a dynamic condition that constantly undergoes re-interpretation by the affected youth at punctuated moments and at various life stages. By examining the contemporary regime of statelessness in a country such as Thailand, where stateless persons have access to certain rights as children but not as adults, this chapter calls attention to the intersection of life stages and statelessness and the complex ways in which such regimes of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion place the emotional and practical burdens on stateless persons as they transition from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

Introduction

Having studied a prototype model Hamiltonian in one-dimensional (1D), we turn our focus towards two-dimensional (2D), now with the lens on graphene. Particularly, we shall explore whether graphene possesses the credibility of becoming a topological insulator. That may happen, provided by some means, we are able to open a spectral gap at the Dirac cones. Since a non-zero Berry phase can be a smoking gun for non-trivial properties, let us first look at the Berry phase of graphene.

This chapter examines the production of the Muslim “evacuee,” whose representation at the time of Partition prompted Pakistan's earliest use of official emergency powers to resolve what came to be known among the region's political and technocratic elite as the “refugee problem.” Official representations framed evacuation as a crisis phenomenon in need of resolution while simultaneously casting the Muslim evacuee as a certain kind of national subject, one whose unexpected arrival and need for care acquired the status of an existential imperative for the state in ways that shaped its authority (Naqvi 2007). They provide an illustration of how mass migration and mass migrants came to be conceived through a largely responsive process of political signification, one that refashioned colonial technologies and Muslim nationalist ideals to meet unprecedented situations. I discuss how this gave shape to a finite political language of exceptions, means, and ends that engendered the Pakistani state as a body positioned above the Muslim-majority provinces. Such maneuvers, I maintain, were part of a transnational and translational political process of official commensuration with mass violence, in which the end of the official transfer of population came to be equated with the end of violence. In the narratives that follow, I describe how the “refugee problem” gave rise to logics of official problematization that engendered the federal state as an entity capable of regulating life and deciding on exceptions. Part of this narrative of problematization included the creation of new, regionally defined distinctions between Muslim migrants originating from “agreed” or ‘non-agreed” areas within the newly independent India to Pakistan, whose future was closely debated in the catastrophic wake of decolonization.

Further aspects of the topography, scale, and effects of Partition's chain of violence and displacement should be outlined at this point. The earliest migrations were prompted by outbreaks of communal violence in the Punjab and sections of Delhi in the weeks before independence and persisted until the early spring of 1948. During this period, approximately 7 million refugees crossed the eastern and western borders between India and Pakistan (Ashraf 1949: 24).

A sense of politics does not generally unfold easily as an unequivocally observable analytic category with significances and meanings that are, of necessity, revealed and concealed. The aim of this chapter is nevertheless to analyse, as clearly as possible, the People's Daily's representations of the border town of Kalimpong in the 1950s and 1960s. Kalimpong, as a meeting point or a metonymic space, came to play a pivotal role in the border politics of the PRC and the ROI for three reasons: (a) Historically a British trade post since the mid-nineteenth century, Kalimpong was favourably located on the Lhasa–Kolkata trade route—the same route used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the early 1950s to transport supplies from China to Tibet after the Battle of Chamdo. (b) A sizeable Tibetan population lived in Kalimpong, especially after the PLA invaded the Kham region, when refugees started to stream into Kalimpong.6 This Tibetan population included residents, traders, refugees and, most importantly for this chapter, influential members of the Kashag (or the Tibetan governing council). (c) A diasporic Chinese population lived in Kalimpong, many of whom were later interned in Deoli after the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Drawing on archival material from the People's Daily, fieldwork notes, along with interviews conducted over a period of six months, and many published primary and secondary sources, we shall attempt to show how Kalimpong functioned as a metonymic ambit in which ROI–PRC relations were to play out in the 1950s and 1960s.

Akin to Pravda's status in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at its height, the People's Daily, as an official organ of the CCP directly controlled by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, provided direct (and sometimes oblique) information on the policies and viewpoints of the government.

That bit on the ‘messy map’, the corner around Kalimpong, has been on edge in more senses than one. During the Doklam crisis of 2017, as China and India faced off against each other, the tension of a looming skirmish—if not full-scale war—radiated through this junction between China, Nepal, Bhutan and the former Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim. This tense dynamic rumbled over into a replay in the Galwan Valley standoff in May–July 2020, as skirmishes were also reported during July–August on the border between Sikkim and China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

Anxieties flared up in Kalimpong. Kalimpong, after all, is a privileged prism, a unique entry point for looking not only at the India and China undercurrents but also at China in India. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the chapters that follow in this book. While the events covered in them start in the 1910s but are mainly between the 1940s and early 1960s, this overture attempts to corroborate the longer history of how Kalimpong was intimately connected to the northeastern border leading into Tibet and China. This history is largely inaugurated by British frontier anxiety as well as the lure that Tibet as a ‘forbidden’ land held for the colonial imaginaire in its singular way of living, seeing and making of the world. Thus, the ‘opening’ of Kalimpong along with the ‘opening’ of Tibet is recounted in this chapter, first in the section on frontiers and Lord Curzon (1859–1925) and then in the section on survey, settlement and Charles Bell (1870–1945).

Karima's Wedding

Preparations for Karima's wedding to Hossain were under way. It was Thursday afternoon in April 2018 and the narrow alleyway in this part of the Balukhali camp – 2 miles away from the entrance of the camp – was teeming with life and excitement. The wedding was only a few hours away, baad ‘Asr (after the late afternoon prayer). Eighteen-year-old Karima was in her shelter with her future sister-in-law, niece, and other relatives who had gathered to watch the bride prepare for her big day. Strings of artificial orange and pink flowers hung all around the room. Karima's hands had decorative floral patterns inked in mehndi (henna) the night before, and she sat patiently as her sister-in-law applied makeup and lipstick. A strikingly red scarf was adorned on her head and also covered some of her face. As I headed outside to see what the men were up to during this time, I noticed two young girls peeking their heads and giggling through the door of Karima's shelter. I stopped to chat with them and inquired what they thought of the wedding taking place. ‘Did you know they met in the camp?! How lucky she is!’, one of the girls exclaimed, covering her mouth as she giggled. Karima's male relative, who was walking by, shouted at the girls upon hearing them: ‘Hey! Speak quietly about these things!’. The girls hid their faces with their scarves and quickly darted off.

Outside the shelter, the men of Karima's family and community gathered around the huzur (local religious leader), who sat with Karima's father and uncles to negotiate the mahr (Islamic gift to the bride from the groom) and dowry (from the bride to the groom). The majhee was also present to ensure that everything was running smoothly. After a few minutes of back-and-forth between the male relatives of the bride and groom, the atmosphere started getting tense. The discussion became increasingly dotted with minor shouting outbursts as both sides made demands about the marriage. At one point, Karima's father shouted: ‘Nothing has happened with her and Hossain! My daughter is pure and no zulm has ever happened to her.

Chapter 1 examines John Gay’s Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), offering an account of its distinctive form of mobility and spectatorship and its meditation on poetry’s relationship to commerce. It situates Trivia within a number of early eighteenth-century accounts of London, including Ned Ward’s monthly periodical The London Spy (1698-1700), Tom Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (1700), and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s periodicals The Tatler (1709–10) and The Spectator (1711–14) – works which were themselves influenced by various sources including character books, Renaissance coney-catching books, and Alain René Le Sage’s Diable Boiteux (1707). Together, the works examined here offer important models for urban mobility that would be influential to writers and artists throughout the period under discussion.

In the novel Zameen (Land), the Pakistani writer Khadija Mastur tells the story of Sajida, a young woman who has fled to Pakistan around the time of Partition with her ailing father. The fate of her mother is unclear, however, floating in silence above the disordered surface of life in one of Pakistan's refugee camps. The transit camp in Zameen is an inherently unstable space. For Sajida, its offer of refuge is closely hewn to the trauma of what has just been witnessed and the unceasing anticipation of an uncertain future.

One day, Sajida learns that her father has died, leaving her to face the future alone. A young man who is unrelated but close in age approaches her and entreats her: “Baji (sister) come with me. I’ve got a mother. We have a small house and I have no sister. I’ll help you, I’ll….” At this point the man is cut off by the matron of the camp gulley, whose interjecting presence reminds us that the very possibility of such an open encounter between a man and woman is itself a sign of crisis and loss. “Eh Boy! Use your head (aql) when you speak. If a young girl will leave with you, what will the world (duniya) say to that?” One cannot help but feel that the matron is sensing an opportunity for herself. We feel Sajida's world getting darker. The boy responds, “Aunty, this is not the world. This is Pakistan and this is my baji, baji!” (Mastur 1983: 1–10, emphasis mine).

To state that Pakistan is “not the world” and that “you are my sister” is to call emancipated nationality into being in the encounter with catastrophe, through and against which both assume a certain kind of transcendent force. Such immanent or “minor” enactments of Pakistani nationalism are shot through with the force of radical immanence, yielding a structure of feeling that locates national freedom in the subjective imperative to respond and survive. Countering the “world-destroying” effects of Partition (V. Das 2006), embodied in the skepticism of the camp matron, the young man's reply to her takes the form of a series of indexical statements: “this is not the world” … “this is Pakistan” … “she is my sister.”