Following the 6 May 1973 rounding-up of Bengali civil servants in Pakistan, the Bhutto government issued a press release from Pakistan's New York Consulate, captioned ‘Bengalis in Pakistan are receiving Human and Generous Treatment’ (Figure 4.1):

Pakistan's internment scheme for the Bengalis underwent transformations over its three-year existence, 1971–1974. When the Pakistani army's crackdown operations commenced in March 1971, the regime did not expect to undertake protracted internment involving thousands of Bengali soldiers and civil servants. The regime had made no real plans for the challenges arising from the Bengali soldiers’ defections. In the first place, the only option available was to house them in temporary holding areas, such as different barracks and cantonments.

More than twenty months after Bangladesh's liberation in December 1971, over a million people across the subcontinent were still held as hostages and bargaining chips. At stake in this tri-partite negotiation were three groups, namely the Biharis in Bangladesh, the Bengalis in Pakistan and the Pakistani POWs in India. Their respective numbers were hotly contested, as were the competing political narratives surrounding their repatriation. Why did their entwined fates linger on for so long before their respective repatriations? An analysis of the now-available archives shows the critical component that their repatriation was in the political negotiations after the war between its three protagonists – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and Indira Gandhi. This chapter examines the details of the diplomatic negotiations, the actual mechanics underlying these exchanges, the reasons for the failure of the repatriation programme and the final agreement on this. The findings show how Bhutto was able to successfully bargain the Bengalis with the POWs while leaving behind the Biharis in Bangladesh. Conversely, Mujib sought the repatriation of Bengalis in Pakistan in exchange for the Biharis, while insisting on prosecuting Pakistani POWs for ‘war crimes’ under principles akin to the Nuremberg Trials. As for India, it intended to cash in the POWs to crack the Jammu and Kashmir dispute alongside its hope of reducing the strength of the Pakistani army for good.

‘Three Hostage Groups’

On 18 April 1972, Mujib assured the Bangladesh parliament that the government was doing everything possible to return all Bengalis held captive by Pakistan, explaining his ‘personal letters’ to world leaders in this regard.

How did the Peloponnesian War change the way in which spaces were arranged and experienced, and how did the pre-existing spaces and spatial imagination of communities play a role in the type of war that was fought? Athens provides a lens through which to see wider changes: the Propylaia was left visibly unfinished to mark the outbreak of war, the temple of Athena Nike exaggerated Athenian infantry competence, and the Long Walls reshaped interstate relationships at the same time as redefining Athenian social experience. They allowed for the evacuation of the Athenian countryside, and the housing of thousands of refugees for long periods of the war. This synoikism was paralleled elsewhere during the war in Thebes, Olynthos and Rhodes with significant and long-lasting effects. The accounts of the variety of ways in which the war tested and frayed the political fabric of Athens make us aware of how communities’ experiences of their own spaces could be transformed by the pressures of war, for instance in the terror of frequent night-time attacks. Finally, the Aigospotamoi monument at Delphi gives a contemporary perspective on the moment of victory and speaks articulately across spatial aspects of the Peloponnesian War as a whole.

A stylistic shibboleth of musical romanticism and early modernism, the breakthrough figures as a salient expressive device in many of Webern’s tonal compositions. This chapter sheds light on the aesthetic function that energetic thresholds fulfil in Webern’s early work, through a close analysis of the Piano Quintet (1907). Described by Theodor W. Adorno as an ‘amalgamation of Brahmsian with Wagnerian elements’, the quintet engages a complex dialectic between ‘formal’ and ‘material’ meaning strata. Linking this dialectic to what is termed the ‘agitating impulse’, a motivic idea set up in the opening bars that adamantly strives towards its resolution yet which is consistently frustrated, this chapter construes the various waves pervading the work not as emancipatory gestures but corporeal manifestations of a subcutaneous anxiety. As such, it is suggested that the quintet offers an original contribution to ‘Romantic’ sonata form practices, and a novel interpretation of the breakthrough.

One of the most interesting, and rapid, recent changes in live stand-up comedy is the increased number of disabled comedians performing. This chapter examines the performances of two disabled comedians – Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones – to explore how their performances may be viewed as social justice comedy through an analysis of the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances. The chapter begins by considering the ways in which disability has been represented in comedy across history. Attention then shifts to how stand-up comedy can be considered a tool for social justice. The focus then turns to the methodological framework used to gather and analyse performances by Laurence Clark and Rosie Jones, before examining how the techniques used, and themes explored, in their performances may have social justice potentials and impacts for disability and disabled people and how the limits to these potentials and impacts can be understood.

Offering a message of hope and resilience, reflections from climate advocates emphasise the possibility of limiting global warming and mitigating its impacts. Renato Redentor Constantino, senior advisor to the CVF-V20, calls for innovative financial solutions and increased international cooperation to support vulnerable economies. Indigenous voices, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia, stress the importance of preserving traditional knowledge and protecting natural resources. Nakeeyat Dramani Sam from Ghana underscores the urgency of immediate action to safeguard the future for young people. The chapter calls on governments, businesses, and individuals to take decisive action now. The critical role of international agreements like the Paris Agreement is underlined. A powerful call to action urges all stakeholders to seize the remaining opportunities to protect the planet and ensure a sustainable future. United efforts can still create a world where people and the planet thrive amidst climate challenges – if we act fast.

This chapter is the heart of the book’s analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on Christ’s humanity as the instrument of the divinity. It explores the various details of Aquinas’s account, outlining it in five synthetic propositions. These propositions, taken together, form the instrument doctrine as St. Thomas conceives of it. Various ambiguities in Aquinas’s account are presented for consideration, and the chapter makes some judgments about how best to understand Aquinas in his mature works. The chapter concludes with a section on the relationship of language to reality in Christology and why reduplicative propositions, used in a standard mode of theological analysis in the thirteenth century, can clarify how to understand the instrument doctrine.

The middle of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid growth of municipal towns in British India. Act 26 of 1850 provided for the establishment of municipalities if two-thirds of the inhabitants of a locality applied for it. According to the Act, municipal responsibilities included conservation, road repairs, lighting, the framing of by-laws and their enforcement by means of fines, and the levying of indirect taxes. Thereafter, rudimentary municipal organisations emerged in 352 towns and villages in the Bombay Province. In Bengal, there were only four – Serampore, Uttarpara, Nasirabad and Sherpore – but numbers increased rapidly after the passage of the District Municipal Improvement Act (1864), the District Town Act (1868) and the Bengal Municipal Act (1876). By 1881, Bengal had 138 municipal boards (Tinker 1968). In south Bengal, the fifty-mile radius around the metropolis of Calcutta (now Kolkata) contained a large concentration of new municipalities. Across the river from Calcutta, along the riparian tract on the west bank of the Hooghly River, spatially contiguous municipalities emerged north of Howrah.

I

The Tamil Nadu State Legal Aid Board in Madras runs a family counselling centre which is open two days a week. Estranged couples, those who desire to end their marriage or, alternatively, mend a battered relationship, approach the centre to discuss their problems, seek legal advice and voice their fears and apprehensions. The counselling takes place in a room packed with unhappy, worried faces and, often, this space acquires the character of a public tribunal, with so-called domestic matters brought within the remit of a hearing that is potentially open to all, that is, other families waiting their turn. Typically, wife and husband, and their respective kin, harangue each other, resort to pleas and accusations, upbraid counsellors (many of whom are elder citizens) for not heeding their points of view, and seek to build their arguments to a dramatic climax.

Such performances, however diverse in content and differently accentuated in their appeal, heed a certain grammar: for instance, while narrating their tales of woe, women often observe that if the gold pawned away by their husbands, without their knowledge, was redeemed; if the jewellery they brought from their natal homes was restored to them; if the precious-somany- sovereigns-worth necklace that had been pawned or sold to provide working capital for the family's petty vending be recovered, they would end the marriage honourably, without acrimony and without going to court, or strive for a reconciliation, as the case may be. Men, in their turn, insist that a part of the gold thus claimed by the women is actually theirs, earned out of their sweat and blood, their labour and, in fact, had been made over as loving gifts to ungrateful wives.

Doubling as a theorist of literary character, Virginia Woolf was invested in the tribulations of the modern face, which she approached through the twin genres of portraiture and biography. This chapter revolves around Woolf’s staging of the modernist face in her novel Orlando: A Biography (1928). Woolf’s novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity – from Orlando’s memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth in the early modern period to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. At the same time, Woolf’s novel functions as a portrait of Vita Sackville-West, introducing a queer woman into the gallery of memorable historical characters, which Woolf visualized in relation to the all-male National Portrait Gallery in London. Through an engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s recent photographic reflections on Orlando, developed as a response to the racialized opening of the novel, the chapter frames modernist faciality’s mediation by racial difference.

This chapter extends the analysis of the modernist face to Abe’s 1964 novel, which it considers as a text of global modernism. The novel is framed by the conventions of science fiction: the protagonist, a Japanese scientist, has an accident that destroys his face. Studying physiognomic manuals which draw on both Western and Japanese traditions of physiognomy, he builds a new face, which takes the form of an all-powerful mask. This mask acquires a life of its own, prompting philosophical speculation on facial alienation and the ethics of the face. The chapter traces a dialogue between Abe’s novel and Kōjin Karatani’s Origins of Japanese Literature (1980) on the “invention” of the face in Japanese literature. For both novelist and theorist, literature offers an infrastructure for the global travels of the face as a system of signification.