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.

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.

This introduction provides a broad overview of the literature on caravan trade and economic history of the Middle East up to the nineteenth century. It is first a survey of existing literature on caravan trade with an emphasis on the role of caravans in the creation of regional markets. It moves then to challenging the paradigm of Silk Roads and argues against the idea of a homogeneous decline of overland trade since the seventeenth century. This introduction helps in bringing back Bedouin, camels, steppe and desert as historical actors by discussing sources and scholarly debates (the relationship between nomads and the Ottoman State in particular).

Statelessness in Central Asian republics historically stems from the dissolution of the former Soviet Union in 1991, of which they all were a constituent part. Even though these republics had adopted inclusive and gender-neutral citizenship laws in the post-Soviet period, such laws failed to stipulate legal safeguards against hidden statelessness dimensions in the specific regional context of state succession. These laws, coupled with a conflict between formal law and indigenous practices, restoration of traditionalist societal tendencies, and bureaucratic administrative and technical procedures, created numerous stateless persons of undetermined citizenship, including across the border areas. As in many other parts of the world where statelessness exists, in Central Asia, it mostly affected the rights of women and children. Whereas recent policies of each republic positively address the statelessness problem within their own jurisdiction, such individual initiatives do not offer a long-term solution in a wider regional perspective. For state and non-state actors to be more successful in eliminating future incidences of statelessness, they must consider multiple challenges, including the relationship between gender and statelessness, not just within each separate jurisdiction but from a wider Central Asian regional perspective.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

The book so far has focused on the interaction between L2 and L1 speakers in Chapters 2 to 4 and on how distinct those interactions are, given the same tasks, compared to interactions between L1 and L1 speakers. However, we have no sense of how naturalistic the interactions in the exams that are the focus of these chapters are. In this chapter we present a short-text MDA of discourse units in general conversational English, using the BNC 2014 as our data. The analysis reveals a range of discourse functions at both the micro- and macro-structural levels.

Like the military coups that give them life, projects of extra-constitutional political reform are “reflective and transformative occasions, moments between and betwixt ordinary times, when axiomatic values are invoked even as they are questioned and reformulated” (Coronil 1997: 124). Pakistan's head of state Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan ruled under martial law from 1958 to 1961 and then as president under a constitution of his regime's own design until a mass-resistance campaign led to his regime's demise in 1969. His administration relied upon emergency powers to contain regional and leftist political forces that had become increasingly aligned in the years preceding the coup against the centralizing tendencies of the postcolonial state. Paying attention to the discursive, spatial, and institutional connections between the powers of exception and the regulation and agency of everyday citizens, this chapter examines cultural and spatial pedagogies of nation-state building and citizenship that were launched in the context of Pakistan's first military dictatorship.

Much of this work in nation-state building took place under the Bureau of National Reconstruction, a “revolutionary” state institution created shortly after the 1958 coup. The bureau spearheaded two significant projects of authoritarian political reform. The first sought to impose a unitary Muslim national subject to the exclusion of native ethnic and regional identities, an initiative that centered Urdu, north Indian Islamicate history, and, to a related and lesser degree, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs as pedagogical models of Muslim nationality. This project was launched in conjunction with another initiative also housed within the bureau known as the “Basic Democracies” (BD) scheme. It sought to remake Pakistan's electoral-political landscape by limiting electoral franchise to locally bounded constituencies, leaving Pakistani citizens with few mechanisms at their disposal to represent problems – such as the inequities arising from industrial and agrarian capitalist control, and the growing economic and political dominance of Punjab – that confronted the nation at large. Both projects were part of a larger and coherent extra-constitutional strategy to enhance centralized state control over the country's provincial units (F. Ahmad 1998; Ayres 2009; F. H. Siddiqui 2012; Caron 2016).

This loosely argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the twenty-first century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit "untimely"). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service and experience generally, not anything specifically “high church.”) The first involves the attitudes that characterize what I call the “liturgical stance" towards various doctrines. The second focuses on the “vested” propositional objects of those attitudes. The third looks at how those doctrines are represented, evoked, and embodied in liturgical contexts. My untimely rallying-cry is that younger philosophers of religion might do well to set aside debates regarding knowledge and justified belief, just as their elders set aside debates regarding religious language. When we set aside knowledge in this way, we make room for discussions of faith that in turn shed light on neglected but philosophically interesting aspects of lived religious practice.