‘It Is a Different World’

Through the narrow, dusty pathways of the camps, various NGO initiatives in the form of training centres and women-friendly spaces have emerged to teach women, according to one NGO worker, ‘vocational pathways to sustainable livelihoods’, by providing knowledge on topics such as self-empowerment, confidence-building, and gender equality. Many of my interlocutors alluded to the fact that the presence of humanitarian aid organizations provided opportunities that they were not afforded before in Myanmar, such as special assistance and training on domestic abuse and other forms of gender-based violence, for example. These had a profound effect on the way gender relations and roles were changing in the camps, particularly the way gender divisions of labour and ideas were reshaped. Khatun Khalamma found that the presence of a large number of humanitarian agencies and increased NGO initiatives introduced Rohingyas to ‘things we are not used to’. She tells me:

The UN Inter-Agency Response Team, in cooperation with the Bangladeshi government, led the coordination of the humanitarian response, including other development initiatives and programming. Strolling through the camps in the mornings among the bustle of activity in the markets, one can see men gathered around tables in makeshift teahouses watching news on television sets and women indoors tending to the housework. One notices Rohingyas, young and old, holding mobile phone sets and watching the news and connecting to loved ones across borders and oceans. (Note that a mobile phone blackout by the Bangladeshi government took place starting in the fall of 2019 – when I conducted my fieldwork in 2017–2018, they were still readily available and in use.) The arrival of NGOs brought access to technology, television sets in the bazaars, and the presence of the international community through NGO workers, fieldworkers, researchers, and other regular foreign involvement.

Introduction

In 1953, the Arabic litterateur Wadiʿ al-Bustani received the Golden Medal of Merit for his Arabic versification of the Indian Mahabharata in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) building in central Beirut. Camille Chamoun, then president of Lebanon, awarded the honour to this member of the famous literary and scholarly al-Bustani family. Wadiʿ's life encapsulates the high degree of global mobility of intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century. His hometown, Dibbieh, now lay in the newly independent state of Lebanon. He was born in 1888 in what was then still the Ottoman Empire, studied at the prestigious Syrian Protestant College (later the American University of Beirut), worked as an interpreter at the British Consulate of Hodeida in Yemen in 1909, translated Umar al-Khayyam's Persian poems into Arabic in London in 1911, and set sail to India in 1912 to dedicate himself to Indian literary works. While in India, he met Rabindranath Tagore. The following years brought him to Johannesburg in South Africa and through political appointments to Cairo and the British mandate in Palestine. He became a vocal critic of Zionist politics and a founding member of several Muslim–Christian societies, taking part in the countrywide general strike of 1936. Later in life, he turned away from politics and dedicated most of his time to versifying Arabic translations of Indian literary works. In 1953, he finally returned to Lebanon, where he died in 1954.

While scholarship has shed light on translation movements from Sanskrit into Arabic during the early Abbasid period (eighth–tenth centuries), such as the Arabic ‘telling’ of Kalila wa-Dimna, there is a huge gap in academic research in terms of studying such translation itineraries between the Arabic and the Indian literary-intellectual spheres, when it comes to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, there are several recent advances which aim to remedy this by approaching those intellectual exchanges and itineraries from an Indian Ocean perspective. Esmat Elhalaby studied Wadiʿ al-Bustani's life and work through the notion of an ‘Arabic rediscovery of India in the 20th century’. Elhalaby writes an intellectual history across the modern Indian Ocean region and thereby globalizes the Nahda, often framed as the ‘cultural and literary reawakening’, beyond the Middle East.5 He places Wadiʿ within the conceptual framework of ‘a history of global philology and an enabling colonial frame’.

It is somewhat implicit that the readers are familiar with the first course on solid state physics, which mainly deals with electronic systems and teaches us how to distinguish between different forms of matter, such as metals, semiconductors and insulators. An elementary treatise on band structure is introduced in this regard, and in most cases, interacting phenomena, such as magnetism and superconductivity, are taught. The readers are encouraged to look at the classic texts on solid state physics, such as the ones by Kittel, Ashcroft and Mermin.

As a second course, or an advanced course on the subject, more in-depth study of condensed matter physics and its applications to the physical properties of various materials have found a place in the undergraduate curricula for a century or even more. The perspective on teaching the subject has remained unchanged during this period of time. However, the recent developments over the last few decades require a new perspective on teaching and learning about the subject. Quantum Hall effect is one such discovery that has influenced the way condensed matter physics is taught to undergraduate students. The role of topology in condensed matter systems and the fashion in which it is interwoven with the physical observables need to be understood for deeper appreciation of the subject. Thus, to have a quintessential presentation for the undergraduate students, in this book, we have addressed selected topics on the quantum Hall effect, and its close cousin, namely topology, that should comprehensively contribute to the learning of the topics and concepts that have emerged in the not-so-distant past. In this book, we focus on the transport properties of two-dimensional (2D) electronic systems and solely on the role of a constant magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of a electron gas. This brings us to the topic of quantum Hall effect, which is one of the main verticals of the book. The origin of the Landau levels and the passage of the Hall current through edge modes are also discussed. The latter establishes a quantum Hall sample to be the first example of a topological insulator. Hence, our subsequent focus is on the subject topology and its application to quantum Hall systems and in general to condensed matter physics. Introducing the subject from a formal standpoint, we discuss the band structure and topological invariants in 1D.