Introduction

Rightly or not, the governments’ engagements with memory policies are often met with a shadow of suspicion. Victims’ associations, intellectuals, and activists from different parts of the world tend to warn their publics of possible abuses of memory and manipulations of the past made by political leaders. Argentina, with a dense history of mobilization around its dictatorial past, is no exception to this rule. During the administrations of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), the discussion about the role played by the state in public remembrance was subject to much contention.

In this chapter, we focus on the way Kirchnerism engaged with the memory of the repression and forced disappearances that took place during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983). Our goal is to analyse Kirchnerist governments’ involvement in public remembrance by considering the main aspects of their narrative together with the political–institutional approach they unfolded towards memory.

In the Argentinian public debate, the discussion concerning Kirchnerist engagements with the past has so far been dominated by a dichotomous approach that swings from considering Kirchnerist uses of the past as illegitimate ‘appropriations’ to considering their engagement as a sort of automatic ‘enshrinement’ of the human rights movement's claims into the national state. We will argue that, instead, we should understand the dominant Kirchnerist memory frame in Argentina as an outcome of an ‘articulation process’ between the government and the human rights movement, formed by an ensemble of heterogeneous organizations that had historically led the struggle for memory and transitional justice in the country. As suggested by Laclau and Mouffe (1985), by ‘articulation’, we do not merely mean an alliance between two preformed entities, but rather a mutual constitution where both the Kirchnerist movement and the human rights organizations (HROs) were transformed in time. As we will argue, this articulation made it possible for memory and human rights to become an object of public policy in an unprecedented way for Argentinian democracy.

Following Laclau (2005a), we adopt a formal approach to populism. According to this perspective, a movement or government is not ‘populist’ because of its ideological contents but due to a specific logic of articulation of contents, whatever these may be.

Introduction

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana have significantly shaped South Asian norms of gender roles. The ideals transmitted through them are still often considered the proper mode of conduct by many actors and social groups, especially those influenced by Sanskritic varna–jati (the Indian caste system) norms. While the most popular female prototype among many actors is Sita from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata offers a number of exemplary characters as well. Not only Draupadi but also characters such as Damayanti and Savitri play an important role in shaping the myth of the ideal woman. The French philosopher Roland Barthes explains in his book Mythologies (1957) that myth is born out of history but disconnects from it and evolves into nature. As the content of the myth seems like an eternal truth, its motive appears invisible. The Mahabharata shaped an understanding of women and their role in society, which was accepted for centuries as the natural rule. The gendered basis of this discourse was rarely explicitly questioned until recent times.

This chapter begins by first tracing the origin of how mythological women became the ideal prototype in the nationalist discourse, which will be followed by a focus on M. K. Gandhi's politics regarding women. Traits which most of the epic female characters share are that they suffer silently and resist through loyalty and devotion – characteristics that modern reformers like Gandhi foregrounded in an attempt to mobilize women for the Indian nationalist cause. While his discourse elevated the status of women to a higher position, it came at a cost, and by fortifying the image of the ideal Indian woman, he put them in a gilded cage. The rest of the chapter will focus on feminist revision of myths, necessary to deconstruct the female prototype born out of the epics, based on the theoretical framework offered by Adrienne Rich's ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ (1972) and Alicia Ostriker's ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking’ (1982). For this, I will take into account several literary texts. Pratibha Ray's (b. 1943) Odia novel Yajnaseni (1984) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's (b. 1956) novel The Palace of Illusions (2008) are two important landmarks in this paradigm shift.

Introduction

In 1909, the Sino-Japanese poet Su Manshu painted an image of Cai Yan (Lady Wenji), a poetess of the late second century who had spent 12 years in captivity abroad before returning to the Han Empire, and sent it to his friend, the art collector Liu Jiping (also known as Liu San). Liu wrote a series of poems to appreciate Su's gift, including the following verses:

Why would a Chinese literatus at the turn of the twentieth century write a poem mentioning the Indian epic Mahabharata to match a seemingly unrelated painting?

Until well into the twentieth century, the name of the Mahabharata had been mostly unknown in East Asia, except for a few isolated references in Buddhist texts. Against the sheer preponderance of Buddhist thought in the intellectual flows between India and China, it might even have seemed futile to look for an East Asian reception of the Mahabharata. Yet, over the centuries, various elements related to the Mahabharata circulated between South Asia and East Asia and played significant roles within East Asian culture itself.

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian thought continued to play a major role in East Asia amidst intense contact between China, Japan, Europe, and India itself. In close interdependence with the notion of the ‘West’, the category of ‘Asia’ emerged in the Japanese and Chinese imaginary by the turn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals developed a globalized sense of their position in the world. India became a renewed object of study but, at the same time, also a ‘method’ to deal with the challenges posed by modernity. Interest in India and its role within ‘Asia’ was a significant element not only in understanding the geopolitical realities and ‘catching up’ with the ‘West,’ but also in the quest for a ‘world beyond the material and epistemological constraints’ posed by Western modernity. While Buddhism still played a crucial role as the connecting bond between the two macroregions of East Asia and South Asia, some intellectuals came to understand it in a wider framework that also encompassed other traditions such as that of the Mahabharata.

Introduction

In our warming world, energy provision is not simply about technology but also politics (Hughes and Lipscy 2013). Energy systems are the result of intensely contested political battles in the domains of technology selection, ownership of capital, environmental externalities, access, and siting. The geographical reach, terms of access, and forms of ownership of electricity infrastructures reflect the prevailing distribution of political and economic power (Bridge, Özkaynak and Turhan 2018). Consequently, this gives rise to injustices such as uneven electricity access, displacement, and voicelessness among marginalized communities. Control over energy infrastructure is not just the result but often also the source of political and social power (Amin 2014; Larkin 2013) – that is, energy shapes politics just as much as politics shape energy.

India is facing the twin imperatives of tackling historic energy poverty through an expansion of its energy system on the one hand and pursuing climate mitigation on the other. India's electricity sector is dominated by coal-fired thermal power, which in turn drives the country's carbon emissions. The energy sector as a whole contributed around 74 per cent of India's total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2015, of which 38 per cent was from public electricity generation (GPI Secretariat 2016). On the other hand, India's average monthly residential electricity consumption is only 90 kilowatt-hour (kWh), which is one-third of the global average and one-tenth of that of the US (Chunekar and Sreenivas 2019). Despite official estimates of 100 per cent electrification, many households still receive poor quality electricity for only a few hours each day (S. D’Souza 2019). The growing feasibility of renewable energy (RE) indicates a potential opportunity to address both climate mitigation and energy poverty challenges. India announced a target of 450 gigawatt (GW) of RE by 2030 as against a total installed capacity of 370 GW in April 2020 (PMO India 2019). As we progress towards a low-carbon system, what are the implications of this transition, given existing patterns of injustice and the prospects of their reproduction in our twenty-first-century energy infrastructure?

India's electricity system can be characterized by its gigantic scale; the primary state ownership of its generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure; cross-subsidization from commercial and industrial consumers to agricultural consumers; and its federal nature.

Introduction

The date of discovery of the quantum Hall effect (QHE) is known pretty accurately. It occurred at 2:00 a.m. on 5 February 1980 at the high magnetic lab in Grenoble, France (see Fig. 1.1). There was an ongoing research on the transport properties of silicon field-effect transistors (FETs). The main motive was to improve the mobility of these FET devices. The devices that were provided by Dorda and Pepper allowed direct measurement of the resistivity tensor. The system is a highly degenerate two-dimensional (2D) electron gas contained in the inversion layer of a metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) operated at low temperatures and strong magnetic fields. The original notes appear in Fig. 1.1, where it is clearly stated that the Hall resistivity involves universal constants and hence signals towards the involvement of a very fundamental phenomenon.

In the classical version of the phenomenon discovered by E. Hall in 1879, just over a hundred years before the discovery of its quantum analogue, one may consider a sample with a planar geometry so as to restrict the carriers to move in a 2D plane. Next, turn on a bias voltage so that a current flows in one of the longitudinal directions and a strong magnetic field perpendicular to the plane of the gas (see Fig. 1.2). Because of the Lorentz force, the carriers drift towards a direction transverse to the direction of the current flowing in the sample. At equilibrium, a voltage develops in the transverse direction, which is known as the Hall voltage. The Hall resistivity, R, defined as the Hall voltage divided by the longitudinal current, is found to linearly depend on the magnetic field, B, and inversely on the carrier density, n, through R = B/nq (q is the charge). A related and possibly more familiar quantity is the Hall coefficient, denoted by RH = R/B, which via its sign yields information on the type of the majority carriers, that is, whether they are electrons or holes.

At very low temperature or at very high values of the magnetic field (or at both), the resistivity of the sample assumes quantized values of the form rxy = h/ne2. Initially, n was found to be an integer with extraordinary precession (one part in ∼ 108). This is shown in Fig. 1.3.

Nehruvian developmentalism reigned supreme in newly independent India in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was against this backdrop that the Soviet-inspired Communist Party came to power in Kerala in 1957, a year after state formation, creating history as the first democratically elected communist government1 in the world. It epitomized a smooth transition to power for the communists, based on the premise of peaceful coexistence as legitimized by Khrushchev in post-Stalinist USSR. While Nehru found inspiration in the Soviet principles of socialism, E.M. Sankaran Namboodirippad, the first communist chief minister of Kerala, in turn, admitted to having borrowed Marxism from Nehru, along with which he would also have been persuaded to open up the newly formed Kerala to state-driven developmentalism. The industrial road was thus extended from Delhi to Kerala with the left government facilitating the entry of Indian capital, the Birlas, to the state by establishing the Gwalior Rayons Silk Manufacturing (Wvg.) Company Ltd, Mavoor, on the outskirts of Kozhikode, which soon became a hub of industrial activity with the company setting up a rayon factory that attracted a huge mass of industrial workers. With hundreds of thousands of jobs on offer, the factory provided fresh employment opportunities for the families in the region; however, the initial euphoria gave way to protests when the pollution of the Chaliyar River by factory effluents became evident, virtually destroying the livelihoods of large numbers of families and rendering the water unusable, eventually forcing the Birlas to leave the state. Although the company did shut down its factory, it left in its wake devastated bamboo forests and a state economy that had suffered heavy losses by supporting the business venture; their departure was thus welcomed by the public even though it meant the loss of livelihood for a huge number of workers.

Mapping Resources: Agreements after Agreements

Surveying and mapping were key instruments of colonialism that remained in use in state-driven development projects in collaboration with big capital, as in the case of bamboo resource mapping and indigenous livelihood in Nilambur-Waynad facilitating the territorial enclosure of resources for the Indian big bourgeoisie in Mavoor. The communist government appointed Sivarajan, the then assistant conservator of forests, to survey the availability of bamboo resources and also assist the state in establishing resource territorial borders for the proposed rayon pulp factory (see Sivarajan 1959).

Introduction

The emotion of nostalgia plays a vital role in the appeal, expression, and consequences of different forms of populism. As a response to the preceding chapters in this book, this chapter considers the issues of affect or emotion1 revealed as history mobilized by populists and populist movements and analyses the work that emotions perform in this process. The aim is to offer some thoughts on how we might constructively think about and analyse emotions in these contexts through considering critical notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘registers of engagement’. As the chapters in this book reveal, one of the defining features of populism is how it draws on the past to create, following Paul Taggart (2002), concepts of ‘heartland’ (Chapter 3), as well as the construction of historically situated undervalued and excluded ‘folk’ or ‘the people’ pitted against ‘elites’ (Mudde 2004; Chapters 1, 5, 7, 8, and 11), the utilization of historical mythologizing to solidify the peoples’ ‘hero’ (Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 9), the legitimation of certain memory holders of ‘the people’ (Chapters 2 and 6), or, indeed, the disassociation of the present with the past to create historical alternatives (Chapter 10). The appeal to right-wing populism of revisionist, mythologized, or overly selective histories that avoid ambiguity and emphasize the positive, heroic, and patriotic or nationalistic pride is based on the emotional valence of these histories and the work they do in managing present-day emotions or affective states.

I focus on right-wing populism because, as Stuart Hall (1979) has observed, the right continues to be far more effective than the left in organizing populist politics. There are lessons to be learnt by the left in analysing how particular emotions, specifically nostalgia, are used, which can facilitate the development of ways to challenge right-wing populism. Indeed, the affective repertoires of populism and how and why emotions are managed and mobilized are significantly different between those who hold conservative or progressive ideological positions (Jost 2019). I do not equate populism with ideology and follow Ernesto Laclau's definition (2004, 2005) that populism is most usefully understood as a particular logic of politics. Nonetheless, understanding the ideological contexts and implications of how certain emotions are expressed and managed is essential for understanding their utility within right-wing populist movements.

I end this book by returning to the beginning. Throughout my fieldwork, I thought of Rahima often and reflected on her haunting description of ‘floating through life’. How is she doing now? Did she still feel like she was floating? What did she really mean by ‘we will only keep floating until the day we die’? I wanted so terribly to ask her these questions the next time we planned to meet. But I never got the chance. Less than three weeks after our first meeting on that hot summer evening in August 2017, Rahima passed away. Nobody was able to tell for sure how or what the reason was. Some say it was due to a sudden fever and diarrhoea; others say it was because of unbearable grief after learning that her husband was murdered by the Myanmar army while in jail.

There is death in the Rohingya refugee camps – a lot of it. I intentionally did not dwell on death in this book as I wanted to focus on life – life that is messy and difficult and filled with immense pain, though nonetheless hopeful and resilient despite all odds. But as hard as she tried to remain hopeful for her children, it was not enough for Rahima. I pray that she has finally reached the shores.

‘If you want to know what it is really like here you must come at night,’ I was often told when first getting to know the jhupri labourers. They spoke of the mess (jhamela) and the fighting (ganjam). The image they draw upon most to convey life here is the sight of labourers competing for work. By day the bazaar and adjacent avenue are clogged with imported Japanese cars, dilapidated buses, CNGs and rickshaws, all slowly inching forward in the shadows of the new metro rail, protesting each metre gained with a cacophony of horns. By late evening the traffic around Kawran Bazaar calms but is replaced with a different jostling for space. As labourers catch sight of arriving trucks, they speed their flat-backed rickshaw vans towards them. Rather than face forward, they often reverse, running while swivelling the handlebars so as to arrive ready to receive sacks. With neither brakes nor chains, the labourers are masters of weaving and dodging obstacles at high speed, forcing each other off course and lobbing insults at rivals. Those who arrive first wait the least, are likely to get more of the goods to deliver and hence higher payment at the end of the night. Fights and injuries are common. Liton described the scene as: ‘The van drivers barricade the truck[s] like an army.’ The image then suggests chaos, a ruthlessness and precarity for people relying on their health and needing to work here day to day to survive and support families. In reality, however, the majority of the trucks are not unloaded in this manner and the jhupri labourers rarely race for work. Instead, most labourers wait in a queue (serial) or follow instructions from a labour leader. Work, in other words, is highly ordered. Yet the claims of precarity that the jhupri labourers evoke with these images are still very real, only materialised in a different way. Risks stem not so much from the need to race and jostle for work, but rather from the dependencies which give order to work.

Introduction

Having studied a prototype model Hamiltonian in one-dimensional (1D), we turn our focus towards two-dimensional (2D), now with the lens on graphene. Particularly, we shall explore whether graphene possesses the credibility of becoming a topological insulator. That may happen, provided by some means, we are able to open a spectral gap at the Dirac cones. Since a non-zero Berry phase can be a smoking gun for non-trivial properties, let us first look at the Berry phase of graphene.

Introduction

This chapter suggests that the Mahabharata has played a central role in the forging of concepts and practices of sovereignty in modern India. I argue that while British and Indian elites deployed the Mahabharata to legitimate the construction of centralized regimes of state sovereignty – imperial sovereignty and nation-state sovereignty – more socially marginal actors, such as ‘lower-caste’ and female activists, as well as sections of the middle-class literati, used the epic to express more democratic, polycentric models of sovereignty. These debates reverberated across state legislatures and princely courts, literary gatherings and peasant assemblies, theatres and secret revolutionary meetings. As Indians journeyed abroad, the Mahabharata came alive in political ritual and deliberation, uniting Indians with other anti-colonial Asians who were carving out their own projects of national sovereignty. The Mahabharata thus helped in decolonizing and democratizing sovereignty in South Asia. In every way, it fulfils the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel's (1770–1831) definition of epics as embodying ‘the spirits of peoples’, ‘the proper foundations of a national consciousness’.

The Mahabharata and State Formation in Early Modern India

The Mahabharata was central to state formation in early modern South Asia. In the 1580s, the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) commissioned a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, called the Razmnamah (Book of War). There were earlier precedents of Indo-Muslim rulers and officials commissioning translations of the epic. The fifteenth-century ruler of Kashmir, Zayn al-Abidin, is said to have commissioned a translation into Persian, though the text has not survived. Later, Laskar Paragal Khan, governor of Chittagong in eastern Bengal, driven by intellectual curiosity (kutuhale puchhilek), asked Kavindra Parameshvar Das to author a Bengali translation in the early sixteenth century. Parameshwar, in turn, eulogized his patron as an incarnation of righteousness (dharma avatar). Translations of the Mahabharata legitimated regional state formation across South Asia.

However, the Mughal project had a wider pan-subcontinental legacy. Akbar aimed to create an Indo-Persian grammar of kingship that would enable mutual intelligibility and dialogue between Hindu and Muslim subjects across the empire. Audrey Truschke has argued that the translation occasionally abbreviated religious–philosophical discussions present in the epic, including criticisms of kingship and war, while emphasizing and expanding the discussions on just monarchy. The Mahabharata combined themes of martial heroism and ethical kingship in a manner that eminently suited the Mughal ruling classes.

Populist Discourse, Historical Narratives, and the Hazards of Essentialism

There is a growing consensus that populism should not be approached as a clearly identifiable or coherent ideology (Morgan 2022). Instead, it might be better to analyse populism as a discourse revolving around the creation of political identity (Ostiguy 2017). Like most collective identities, populism is constructed by denying other identities. Beyond the usual left–right axis, populists pit ‘the people’ against a minority blamed for monopolizing economic and institutional resources – the elite, or those at the top (Laclau 2005).

As a reaction to the destabilization of ‘ontological securities’, populism tends to be seen as either relying on or leading to essentialist conceptions of social and political identities (Steele and Homolar 2019; Bartoszewicz 2021). It is based upon Manichean friend–enemy counter-concepts (Junge 2011), which grant it a strong ontological grounding. On the other hand, it engages in a counter-hegemonic struggle vis-à-vis an oligarchy portrayed as, in essence, deeply corrupt. Its antagonistic rhetoric is prone to the naturalization of otherness, but it typically does not entail the tactic of adopting essentialist self-identification often used by subaltern groups engaged in identity politics (Panizza 2017; Bell 2021).

Still, populism remains an identity discourse that targets the emotions of an allegedly underrepresented ‘we’ (Ferrada Stoehrel 2017). Ideational approaches to populism stress that, beyond exposing the power elite, populist discourse has among its goals the mobilization of a homogeneous community of decent and rightful commoners (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2019). This leads to a number of prevalent narratives in populist discourse, which are increasingly seen as a form of performative storytelling through which leaders provide meaning to extended injustices and offer simple alternatives that are appealing to the majority (Ungureanu and Popartan 2020; Nordensvard and Ketola 2021).

Specifically, populist narratives construct in-group identity by referring to the ‘people’ (Panizza 2017). Providing the people with a narrative inscribes an essentialist tension into populist discourse. Some advocates of populism are aware of this hazard: post-Marxists, in particular, critically tackle the potential hazard of essentialism by conceptualizing the people as an ‘empty signifier’ for populist ideologues to fill with contextual grievances and values (Laclau 2005).

Introduction

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain published a remarkable report in 1991 in which they differentiated between ‘survival emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’. It would not be an exaggeration to say that no other report has had a comparable impact on global debates and scholarship on climate justice. This distinction between survival and luxury emissions has been central to some of the most important pieces of scholarship and advocacy on climate justice (Shue 1993). Based on this report, common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) became the defining feature of the Indian government's position in international climate negotiations (Jasanoff 1993). Despite having such a massive influence on international climate negotiations, the distinction between survival and luxury emissions is rarely referenced in domestic climate policy debates. Even as climate disasters, including cyclones, floods, and heatwaves, become more intense, there is limited public debate on climate action and policy in India (J. Das 2020). On the other hand, while there is robust scholarship on India's climate policy and action in the international arena, engagement with questions of domestic climate justice within Indian academia is quite sparse (Fisher 2015; Chu and Michael 2019). The potential for domestic injustices was apparent even in 1991 and was duly acknowledged in the same Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) report that made CBDR foundational to India's position in international negotiations:

For a variety of reasons that require deeper inquiry, questions of domestic climate justice fell through the intertwined cracks of international climate change politics and sectoral silos that are endemic to both academic research and grassroots social movement organization (Gupta 2014). Many argued, quite appropriately, that the policy priority should be addressing issues of employment, food security, education, and primary healthcare for the poorest people in India and other countries in the Global South.

Karima's Wedding

Preparations for Karima's wedding to Hossain were under way. It was Thursday afternoon in April 2018 and the narrow alleyway in this part of the Balukhali camp – 2 miles away from the entrance of the camp – was teeming with life and excitement. The wedding was only a few hours away, baad ‘Asr (after the late afternoon prayer). Eighteen-year-old Karima was in her shelter with her future sister-in-law, niece, and other relatives who had gathered to watch the bride prepare for her big day. Strings of artificial orange and pink flowers hung all around the room. Karima's hands had decorative floral patterns inked in mehndi (henna) the night before, and she sat patiently as her sister-in-law applied makeup and lipstick. A strikingly red scarf was adorned on her head and also covered some of her face. As I headed outside to see what the men were up to during this time, I noticed two young girls peeking their heads and giggling through the door of Karima's shelter. I stopped to chat with them and inquired what they thought of the wedding taking place. ‘Did you know they met in the camp?! How lucky she is!’, one of the girls exclaimed, covering her mouth as she giggled. Karima's male relative, who was walking by, shouted at the girls upon hearing them: ‘Hey! Speak quietly about these things!’. The girls hid their faces with their scarves and quickly darted off.

Outside the shelter, the men of Karima's family and community gathered around the huzur (local religious leader), who sat with Karima's father and uncles to negotiate the mahr (Islamic gift to the bride from the groom) and dowry (from the bride to the groom). The majhee was also present to ensure that everything was running smoothly. After a few minutes of back-and-forth between the male relatives of the bride and groom, the atmosphere started getting tense. The discussion became increasingly dotted with minor shouting outbursts as both sides made demands about the marriage. At one point, Karima's father shouted: ‘Nothing has happened with her and Hossain! My daughter is pure and no zulm has ever happened to her.