China as an idea and entity is everywhere today, both materially and symbolically. One way of looking at it is to address the present and future in a world that is profoundly interconnected, although with a resurgence in the idea of borders and barriers. We have a changed mediascape, our planet's sense of brokenness, isolation and fragmentation still infusing the post-Brexit and post-Trump world of nationalism and populist politics with troubling irresolution, but we must also recognise events along the Silk Roads since 2015, where there has been a narrative of strengthening ties, cooperation and a network of relationships with immense global reverberations and continual shifts. This book is not so much clearly concerning these complex geopolitics, notably vis-à-vis India and China, but about looking back and looking forward, in intersecting timeframes, at how these relationships are effected and affected, constrained and cracked. The book could have taken a different form but is confined to relating the representations and shenanigans around a border town during an exacting period.

The burden of the book has been to trace how China figured in the sociopolitical imaginary of the British and thereafter in the postcolonial Indian state, as well as in communist literature in China itself. More specifically, the book considers the Kalimpong border regions between the 1940s and the 1960s (also a consequence of its earlier history of settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) as its main case study to explore these issues. The book's primary subject remains—even more so in the twenty-first century—relevant in terms of the border claims in the region and the anxieties that those provoke. The existential angst is very much present, one could say, in relation to the people of Chinese origin but Indianised in varying degrees, still living in the area or in the diaspora of Kalimpong/Indian Chinese that proliferated around the world.

The predicament of Muhajir national recognition was brought into sharp relief for me one winter evening in Karachi, circa 2009, when I stumbled upon a talk show dedicated to the theme of “language and power” (zubaan aur hukmaraan) on a local private satellite television channel. It featured poets representing each of Pakistan's major regional languages, including Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Pashtu, and Urdu, deliberately and favorably highlighting the country's ethnolinguistic diversity. Despite this, Urdu's status as a universalizing “bridge language” was on full display in this setting, as each poet recited a work in their respective regional mother tongue, followed by a lively discussion in Urdu on the commonalities and differences of imagery, form, and political subject matter.

What caught my attention, however, was the presence of a self-identified “Muhajir poet” in a show dedicated to Pakistan's marginalized native poetic cultures. His delivery was in the kind of chaste “Urdu-e-Mualla” that Pakistan's largely non-Urdu-speaking population has grown accustomed to hearing since the advent of state-run radio and television. Although the gentleman's recitation was delivered in Urdu, his comments stood apart from the other panelists in that he did not emphasize the linguistic particularity of Urdu or Muhajirs. The verse's subject matter was more political and existential in character, casting Muhajirs as beings who had crossed a “river of fire” (aag ka darya) to live in Pakistan. Addressing an immediate and impersonal audience made up of the country's native ethnolinguistic communities, the Muhajir poet expressed grievance – “but you still see us as foreign” (tum abhi bhi ghair samajhte ho) – tinged with defiance: “this land is our final place of refuge (thikaana).” The potency of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) poet's recitation elicited audible calls of appreciation from the non-Muhajir panelists (“wah! wah!”), suggesting a flow of aesthetic and moral acknowledgment of the collective history being portrayed. This scene of aesthetic recognition was short-lived, however. Later in the program, the Muhajir poet suggested that Muhajirs were “that nation (wo qaum) that brought people from the lower middle classes into power.” To this, two of the panelists politely replied in unison, as if to clarify a factual error: “Muhajirs are not a nation (muhajir aik qaum nahi hain).”

This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.

International migrants in Malaya frequently engaged in social and associational activities, often leading to the growth of what may be termed a diasporic civil society. Civil society organisations created a public space in urban areas to secure their interests and represent themselves through various activities, including social services, acts of community solidarity, policy advocacy and cultural activities. Each generation of migrants made its imprint by creating new organisations or promoting existing ones. The Bangla-speaking diaspora shared a similar historical process for space-making in Malaysia and Singapore. The previous chapter focused on Bengali place-making from the lens of political organisations and activism. This chapter explores further Bengali contributions to place-making from the vantage point of civil society, including associational and other activities. The binary processes of globalisation, that is, ‘globalization of the local’ and ‘localization of the global’, could help to articulate the role and engagement of Bengali migrants in the local and international sphere, especially since the end of WWI.

Bengali Civic Spaces within the South Asian Diaspora

During the early twentieth century, South Asian transnational communities formed different organisations under the umbrella term ‘Indian’ mainly for three reasons. First, despite different ethnic backgrounds, the Indian diasporic communities were open to forging cooperation. The Bengalis, among other diverse South Asian migrants, played a vital role in forming organisations and associations of a social and religious nature. For example, Hindu migrants disseminated the idea of reforming Hinduism in Malaya. S. N. Bardhan, a Bengali, was a founding member of the Arya Samaj Sangam, established in 1910. Later, he served as its president from 1911 to 1919. Adi Dravida Sangam, another Hindu reformist organisation, was founded in the 1920s in Singapore. S. C. Goho frequently arranged dialogues there on the Hindu religion. Apart from the religious debates, members of Hindu religious associations occasionally placed their demands before the government. For instance, delegates from the Arya Samaj, Dravida Sangam and Vivekananda Sanmarga Sangam appealed to Singapore's government to introduce an ordinance for the registration of Hindu marriage in the Straits Settlements.

In this chapter, we shall discuss the interplay of symmetry and topology that are essential in understanding the topological protection rendered by the inherent symmetries and how the topological invariants are related to physical quantities.

Introduction

Poincaré conjecture was the first conjecture made on topology which asserts that a three-dimensional (3D) manifold is equivalent to a sphere in 3D subject to the fulfilment of a certain algebraic condition of the form f (x, y, z) = 0, where x, y and z are complex numbers. G. Perelman has (arguably) solved the conjecture in 2006 [4]. However, on practical aspects, just the reverse of what Poincaré had predicted happened. Topology and its relevance to condensed matter physics have emerged in a big way in recent times. The 2016 Nobel Prize awarded to D. J. Thouless, J. M. Kosterlitz, F. D. M. Haldane and C. L. Kane and E. Mele getting the Breakthrough Prize for contribution to fundamental physics in 2019 bear testimony to that.

Topology and geometry are related, but they have a profound difference. Geometry can differentiate between a square from a circle, or between a triangle and a rhombus; however, topology cannot distinguish between them. All it can say is that individually all these shapes are connected by continuous lines and hence are identical. However, topology indeed refers to the study of geometric shapes where the focus is on how properties of objects change under continuous deformation, such as stretching and bending; however, tearing or puncturing is not allowed. The objective is to determine whether such a continuous deformation can lead to a change from one geometric shape to another. The connection to a problem of deformation of geometrical shapes in condensed matter physics may be established if the Hamiltonian for a particular system can be continuously transformed via tuning of one (or more) of the parameter(s) that the Hamiltonian depends on. Should there be no change in the number of energy modes below the Fermi energy during the process of transformation, then the two systems (that is, before and after the transformation) belong to the same topology class. In the process, something remains invariant. If that something does not remain invariant, then there occurs a topological phase transition.

What happens when agents can choose their information at a cost? What kinds of cost functions lead to behavior typically observed in economics and psychology experiments?

A study of passages from Irenaeus, Methodius, Philoxenos of Mabbug, and John of Damascus that have been labeled physicalist by previous scholars reveals that none of these authors teaches physicalist soteriology. Rather they serve to demonstrate that authentic physicalist soteriology is far less common than the much wider body of almost but not quite physicalism in early Christian thought. This chapter offers a methodological primer for the task of identifying authentic physicalism in the Christian tradition.