Introduction

After the demise of the communist system in 1989, Poland experienced a rapid and largely successful transition to the market economy and liberal democracy. The democratic institutions, although newly established, seemed well grounded and, for a long time, were not overtly contested by any major political forces, including post-communists. The challenge to the Polish version of the liberal, representative democracy came with the rise to power of the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, or PiS). The latter, founded in 2001, governed for the first time in 2005–2007 and, later, in 2015–2023. The first period was relatively short and could be seen as forming the concepts and methods which were fully implemented only after the second accession to power. The policy of the PiS has been aimed at subverting the rule of law, especially the division of powers and the independence of the judiciary. The core of the rhetoric of the PiS has been the claim of representing ‘the nation’, which so far was mute, culturally neglected, and economically exploited. The PiS presents itself as the first Polish party that embodies the interests and values of ‘average people’ versus elites, provinces versus large cities, ‘true’ Poles versus cosmopolites, and traitors acting on foreign orders (Germany, the European Union [EU]). The indispensable element of its discourse is the condemnation of allegedly corrupt, inept, post-communist, or liberal elites that ruled Poland for most of the time after the 1989 breakthrough (Kim 2021; Sadurski 2019). The key features of the politics and ideology of the PiS place this party, despite many important differences, among other European populist movements of right-wing and nationalistic orientation. The PiS is often seen alongside the Hungarian Fidesz, whose example it openly declares to follow, the French Rassemblement National, the Fratelli d`Italia, and even, to some extent, the Alternative für Deutschland, although any allegiance with the latter is deliberately avoided.

The specific trait of the PiS as a political and social movement is the importance of culture and religion as sources of mass mobilization and identification and, consequently, its political successes and resilience in holding power. Marta Kotwas and Jan Kubik coined the expression ‘symbolic thickening of public culture’ to refer to the specific cultural grounds from which the Polish version of populism arose and benefited (Kotwas and Kubik 2019).

When Perso-Arabic script renditions of the Mahabharata receive popular or academic attention, it is often in defence of elite Indo-Islamic cosmopolitanism. Mughal engagement with the Mahabharata is held up as evidence of interest in Hinduism or pre-Islamic Indic traditions among Muslim South Asian dynasties. Because the Mughal Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnamah (Book of War), was a courtly project, it is easy to overlook the fact that Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script reached broader, and increasingly transregional, publics, especially in the age of lithographic print. Focusing on the preparation and circulation of Persian and Urdu print editions of the Mahabharata, this chapter aims to reorient discussions of Persianate understandings of Sanskrit epics, emphasizing middle-class, popular readerships in both Iran and India.

Following a brief overview of the translation and circulation of the Razmnamah in Mughal India, the chapter analyses lithographic publications of Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the rapid growth of lithographic print in South Asia allowed for the relatively inexpensive publication and circulation of Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. The chapter argues for a reconsideration of the intellectual work of cadres of printers, translators, scribes, and other workers employed by Indian presses. Late nineteenth-century Persian and Urdu Mahabharatas reflected norms of production within a negotiated system of capitalist print labour, distinguishing them from their courtly manuscript predecessors.

The chapter subsequently turns to the transregional consumption and reception of these Mahabharatas in Perso-Arabic script. In the late nineteenth century in both India and Iran, readers within a Persianate cultural–intellectual milieu understood the Mahabharata in a comparative frame, often with reference to the Persian epic poem, the Shahnamah. Popular audiences in Iran often read the two works through an emerging ‘national’ lens that associated epic literature with discrete peoples and nations. In India, on the other hand, middle-class Persian and Urdu readers often used both the Mahabharata–Razmnamah and the Shahnamah to claim an elite Persianate and cosmopolitan past.

Ultimately, the chapter reorients narratives of shared Indo-Iranian intellectual history by critiquing portrayals of Persianate transregional exchange as exclusively elite or courtly projects. Centring lithographic printers and popular reading publics, the chapter interrogates the reinterpretation of the Mahabharata within transregional communities of Persian and Urdu readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Traditionally the different states of matter are described by symmetries that are broken. Typical situations include the freezing of a liquid, which breaks the translational symmetry that the fluid possessed, and the onset of magnetism, where the rotational symmetry is broken by the ordering of the individual magnetic moment vectors. In the early eighties of the previous century a completely new organizational principle of quantum matter was introduced following the discovery of the quantum Hall effect. The robustness of the quantum Hall state was a forerunner of the variety of topologically protected states that forms a large fraction of the condensed matter physics and material science literature at present.

Given the rapid strides that this field has made in the last two decades, it is almost imperative that it should become a part of the senior undergraduate curriculum. This necessitates the existence of a textbook that can address these somewhat esoteric topics at a level which is understandable to those who have not yet decided to specialize in this particular field but very well could, if given a proper exposition. This is a rather difficult task for the author of a textbook of a contemporary topic, and this is where the present book is immensely successful.

I am not a specialist in this subject by any means and found the book to be a comprehensive introduction to the area. I am sure the senior undergraduates and the beginning graduate students will benefit immensely from the book.

Jayanta K. Bhattacharjee

School of Physical Sciences,

Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science

Jadavpur, Kolkata

Introduction

In September 2019, more than 300 representatives of farmers’ organizations, trade union federations, indigenous people's organizations, fisher groups, women's organizations, environmental groups, and a few progressive political parties from Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and various parts of India met in Hyderabad. This four-day-long convention concluded with the founding of the South Asian People's Action on Climate Crisis (SAPACC). The delegates voiced their concerns about the anticipated effects of the impending climate crisis and ‘critiqued the inadequacy of governments’ policies’ (Adve 2019). In the past, India's climate activists focused almost exclusively on multinational corporations and the governments of industrialized countries, who are responsible for causing the climate crisis. They argued that questioning the Indian government would ‘dilute’ the demand for holding industrialized countries accountable. Therefore, the SAPACC's public critiques of India and other countries in South Asia marks an important shift in the evolution of climate movements in the region.

Social movements and civil society organizations work within the complex politico-economic and institutional context of India. On the one hand, the Constitution of India is regarded as highly progressive, affording citizens a variety of civil and political rights and freedoms and a scaffolding of democratic institutions that are functional to some extent. This context is particularly conducive for the functioning of civil society institutions that focus on relatively less controversial and apolitical questions, for example, Gandhian organizations dedicated to the ‘welfare’ of the poor, or those promoting tree-planting programmes. On the other hand, organizations advocating for the rights and entitlement of the poor, and those demanding effective enforcement of constitutional provisions and a welfare state, often confront a state that is extremely opaque and highly vindictive (Banerjee 2008). This ‘Janus-faced nature of the postcolonial state’ explains why some types of environmental movements thrive in Indian society while others face violent threats (Kashwan 2017, 10). Yet these contradictory workings of the Indian state must be understood in the context of global capitalism and its domestic beneficiaries. Instead of weakening state control in the wake of economic liberalization in the early 1990s and beyond, the Indian state has transformed into a highly centralized and extractive state that abuses its authority blatantly to selectively reallocate land and other natural resources (Rajan 2011).

Edward Said (1978) introduced the notion of imaginative geography: Groups with a hunger for land essentially reimagine the landscapes they desire, elevating the notion of themselves as the owners of the land they seek, a process of reinventing the meaning of territorial landscapes as ‘imagined geography’. This would help them frame arguments justifying why they are entitled to take possession of the landscapes they desire. Before the actors themselves see and conquer the land, they entertain themselves under a discursive understanding that they are the owners of the landscapes that they covet. Hence, this imaginative geography is a theory of human action deriving from the interplay of material impulses and human consciousness (Gregory 1999); it is ‘performative’. Reimagining landscapes is the first step to acting upon them and creating the very outcomes on the land being imagined (Gregory 2004: 17–20). In this process, hegemonic forces with territorial ambitions refashion themselves as owners of the territory they desire by asserting themselves as masters and sovereign of the land.

Here, one wonders, what is the landscape that has emerged as part of the subaltern project of the imagined geographies? This entails the counterimagination and a contra-discourse of the imaginative geographies by the oppressed, intertwined with the notion of egalitarianism and justice, which could be realized through ecospatial struggles. If this imagined landscape and the struggle for the same is for livelihood and basic human and ‘post-human’ survival, the struggling poor would be forced to follow the logic of their own ‘moral economy’ that historically protected their rights to subsistence (Thompson 1991). The large number of ‘land-wars’ (Levien 2013) that have been taking place in Latin America and Asia, particularly in India, offers how the subalterns imagine their struggles as part of their livelihood and citizenship rights. If it was Muthanga in Kerala in 2003, it was Chengara in 2007. If Muthanga was occupied by the Adivasis, it was the Dalits – formerly the agrestic slaves and the most marginalized of all the outcastes of the Hindus – that occupied the Chengara part of the colonially evolved Harrisons Malayalam plantations. Even after three and a half decades of land reform experimentation how does one explain the Dalit land struggles in Kerala? Can Chengara replace Occupy Muthanga in terms of strategies, struggles, and outcomes? How far did the state succeed or fail in addressing the Dalit land question, their resource endowments, and livelihood?

Introduction

This chapter explores the question posed in its title: ‘Does populism challenge the expertise of academic historians?’1 It is well known that populists (or, to be more precise, people who have often been called populists, since at this point I have not suggested a definition of this term) make assertions about the pasts of their own countries and often about historical pasts more generally. In doing so, they are at least in part making knowledge claims about the past and not simply expressing feelings of attachment or aversion. To the extent that their claims have a cognitive content, one might think that this would put populists on a collision course with the narratives that academic historians produce. Moreover, it is well known that ‘the rise of populism in the West has led to attacks on scientific expertise’ (Collins et al. 2020: 1). One might think that this anti-scientific tendency, together with populists’ interest in making claims about the past, would lead them to challenge not just the narratives but also the expertise of academic historians.

But reality turned out to be quite different from what I originally supposed it would be. Although historians are interested in populists, populists rarely show interest in the academic work produced by historians. Even less are populists interested in, or even aware of, the expertise that academic historians claim, by which I mean the toolkit of methods and approaches by which academic historians formulate questions, search for and interpret evidence, evaluate that evidence, and construct accounts of the past well enough grounded to withstand the criticisms offered by their professional colleagues. The fact is, academic historians doing academic work rarely come into the range of view of populists. Even academic historians who step into an activist role and attempt to draw lessons for the present from their study of the past seem to have been barely noticed by populists. I think, for example, of Timothy Snyder's little book On Tyranny (Snyder 2017), written in the wake of the election in 2016 and Donald Trump's election to the presidency of the United States of America (USA), which circulated widely among academics and some other readers, but raised hardly a peep from populists.

In this chapter, we shall discuss three paradigmatic models that show symmetry-protected topological features and are resilient to local perturbations as long as the relevant symmetries are not disturbed. They are Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model and a Kitaev chain with superconducting correlations in one-dimensional (1D) and a ladder system, known as the Creutz ladder in a quasi-1D setup.

Su—Schrieffer—Heeger (SSH) Model

Introduction

To make our concepts clear on the topological phase, and whether a model involves a topological phase transition, we apply it to the simplest model available in the literature. The SSH model denotes a paradigmatic 1D model that hosts a topological phase. It also possesses a physical realization in polyacetylene, which is a long chain organic polymer (polymerization of acetylene) with a formula [C2H2]n (shown in Fig. 3.1). The C–C bond lengths are measured by NMR spectroscopy technique and are found to be 1.36 Å and 1.44 Å for the double and the single bonds respectively. The chain consists of a number of methyne (= CH−) groups covalently bonded to yield a 1D structure, with each C-atom having a p electron. This renders connectivity to the polymer chain.

Possibly intrigued by this bond-length asymmetry, one can write down a tight-binding Hamiltonian of such a system with two different hopping parameters for spinless fermions hopping along the single and the double bonds. These staggered hopping amplitudes are represented by t1 and t2. Let us consider that the chain consists of N unit cells with two sites (that is, two C atoms) per unit cell and denote these two sites as A and B. The hopping between A and B sites in a cell be denoted by t1, while those from B to A across the cell can be denoted by t2. Because of the presence of a single π electron at each of the C atoms, the interparticle interaction effects are completely neglected. We shall show that the staggered hopping or the dimerization has got serious consequences for the topological properties of even such a simple model.

Rubel was only eight or nine when he came to Dhaka. He took a train alone from the north, arrived at a station in the centre of the city and walked to a nearby bazaar where he has worked ever since. Memories of his family and village have blurred over the years, and today he is married with two children and stays in a basti (slum) elsewhere in the city. For people who have grown up on the streets of Dhaka, such stories are common. Some recall odd details of their home but have forgotten the name of their village and even family. Some ran away from poverty and cruelty, and described a widowed mother, a resentful stepparent, a neglectful father, mental illness, abuse at school or the madrasah. For some, the story of their arrival is bound up with a precise moment of fear, such as losing a prized asset and not daring to return home or a particularly brutal argument. For others, the streets have always been their home, growing up in makeshift shacks formed from tarpaulin sheets that dot stretches of pavement, and where even today some babies are born.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the most densely populated cities on earth. People here live in a sprawling mix of apartment blocks, a few upmarket neighbourhoods and large bastis. Others skirt the edges of these in bazaars, transport terminals and pavements. Despite being one of the most populous cities on earth, it is little known in the so-called Global North, so much so that foreigners often pronounce it ‘Dakar’ after the Senegalese capital. As a city it is rarely deemed beautiful by outside eyes, unlike its iconic cousin Kolkata, nor does it boast obvious distinctions to draw tourists or wider interest. When Dhaka does appear in the world's media, it is sometimes in reference to its violent politics, the garment factories which sit at its edges or its frequent designation as one of the least liveable cities in the world. The only Western film to feature Dhaka – a recent Netflix production concerning the abduction of an Indian drug lord's son and a white mercenary hero – was filmed in India and Thailand, and its earlier title of ‘Dhaka’ scrapped for the more marketable Extraction.