I first met the jhupri labourers behind a row of parked buses. They were sprawled out on the backs of their rickshaw vans after a night of work: some were asleep, some smoking, some playing ludo. Rubel was seated on a van with others huddled around him. He wore a white panjabi (kurta) and a sparse beard, giving the impression he was both pious and not in fact a labourer. Unlike the rest of the group who were lean from carrying heavy sacks of vegetables, he was large, or ‘short and fat’ as others would later describe him. Foreigners were not an unfamiliar sight at the bazaar. Nearby offices and a five-star hotel meant visitors passed by on their way elsewhere. Some took photos of the colours and chaos. Foreign sisters from the Missionaries of Charity occasionally shopped here. An Italian priest had for decades visited weekly to help children with small ailments and injuries. Some of the group later claimed that ‘bad foreigners’ used the cheap hotels to meet sex workers, with Australians for some reason singled out as particularly guilty.

As the first foreigner to speak to the group there, Rubel saw it as an opportunity to preach. He gave a speech about Islam that I barely understood and the group found amusing. He then stated provocatively, ‘We are all BNP here. Do you have a problem with that?’ The claim of affiliation to the opposition BNP was an odd one. The election a few months previously in early 2014 had been highly controversial: the opposition had boycotted, the nation had seen widespread violence, and with the Awami League re-elected, public claims of loyalty to their rivals were risky. Whatever Rubel's motivations, the encounter was precisely the opportunity I had been looking for. For the past couple months I had been walking around the city, getting to know it better, looking for a route in to study local politics, somewhere to embed myself and normalise my presence on the pavements, in the bastis and bazaars of the city. Scattered across Dhaka at the time were shelters run by local NGOs to support people living on the streets.

Introduction

The fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) was discovered by Tsui, Stormer and Gossard in 1982 at Bell Labs. They observed that at very high magnetic fields, a 2DEG shows fractional quantization of the Hall conductance. In particular, they got a quantized Hall plateau of magnitude ρxy = 3h/e2, which is accompanied by the vanishing of the longitudinal conductivity, ρxx, at low temperature (T < 5 K) in GaAs and AlGaAs samples. As opposed to the integer quantum Hall effect (IQHE), where an integer number of Landau levels (LLs) are occupied, here in FQHE the LLs are partially occupied. If onemakes themagnetic field large enough, the lowest Landau level (LLL) will be partially filled. Whatwe can expect is that the system will form some kind of a lattice, for example, a Wigner crystal or a charge density wave. Thus, it naively seems to be reasonable that the system would like to minimize its potential energy, since there is no kinetic energy left in the system corresponding to the LLL, and only a trivial zero point energy is present in the system. Thus, the ions tend to stay away from each other and form something similar to a crystal lattice. However, surprisingly that does not happen, and instead the system becomes an incompressible quantum liquid, which has gaps in the energy spectrum at filling 1/m (m: odd, or a rational fraction of the form n/m). So it is inevitable that the systemminimizes its energy by having gaps at fractional values of filling. The reason is that, owing to the presence of a large number of electrons (macroscopically degenerate in any of the LLs), a many-body interaction is induced, which in fact makes the excitations above this incompressible ground state to be fractional. So in essence, the Hall current carries a fractional charge.

Introduction

In the Kingdom of Thailand, known as Siam until 1939, the great Sanskrit epic of the Ramayana, or rather the Thai-language Ramakien, composed under King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok (King Rama I, 1737–1809, r. 1782–1809), is omnipresent. It is the national epic of the Southeast Asian kingdom, taught not only in schools but encountered also in picture books and manga. The epic is deeply embedded in the kingdom's history and culture of everyday life. King Ramkamhaeng (‘Rama, the Bold’, r. 1279–98) of Sukhothai, named after the epic's hero, is today remembered in official historiography not simply as a great king but also as a founding figure of the Thai nation as a cultural community through his invention of the Thai script. He is depicted on banknotes, and major public works are named after him, such as a university and a major thoroughfare in Bangkok. And according to a late seventeenth-century chronicle, the former capital was founded in 1350 as Phra Nakhon Si Ayutthaya. Its founder took the title Ramathibodi (‘Rama, the Mighty’, 1315–69, r. 1351–69) upon ascending to his throne and founded the Phra Ram temple in the capital in 1369, the year of his death.

Ayutthaya was destroyed in 1767 by an invading army from Burma. After a short intermezzo under the charismatic King Taksin (1734–82, r. 1767–82) ruling from Thonburi, the current capital and dynasty were founded by Taksin's former general, King Phra Phutthayotfa Chulalok. He added Ayutthaya to the city's full name and included Ramathibodi to his full royal title. In addition to having had a new version of the Ramakien written, he also had murals with scenes from the epic added to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, where the kingdom's palladium of the same name is enshrined. The national dance drama of Khon is also based on the epic and can be found recounted in children's literature today. The epic is furthermore the source of proverbs and placenames far from royal palaces, such as Huai Sukhrip, or Sukhrip's Brook, a stream located near the city of Chonburi, close to Bangkok.

With the Occupy protests in the West, which have lately been superseded by the Black Lives Matter movements, we started telling the stories of protest movements in the Global South, with a focus on Kerala. It would also imply that right-making/state-making dialectics ought to be applied to understand and assess state formation and state performance, including that of the Kerala model of development. After the post-independence state formation, the historical landscape of Kerala, by and large, validates the right-making/statemaking thesis despite shortfalls; it appears that after state formation, and until recently, there have been tendencies on the part of the state to put constraints in the process. It strengthened the case for why the confluence of class and race/caste, with its gender expressions, matters for appropriate politics, particularly in leftist groups. Furthermore, research has shown that different communities have been negatively impacted by global crises like the coronavirus pandemic, with the most marginalized members of society bearing the brunt of this burden because they lack access to adequate healthcare, are malnourished, and live in poverty. Neither the exploitation and oppression of global capitalism nor the pandemic is caste- or class-neutral. All the more important is the livelihood and environmental vulnerability of the marginalized in a state which is otherwise known for its social developments and socialist experiments which in turn demands what has been described in this monograph as political ecospatiality.

Threats and enclosures are additional features of the current world, and the pandemic has made individuals who defend their rights even more vulnerable. Countries of the Global South such as Colombia, Niger, Indonesia, and the Philippines are used as examples of neoliberal predations (Burns and LeMoyne 2001; Lucas and Warren 2003; Iwilade 2012; Quimpo 2009). In the case of India, as argued elsewhere, the modalities of emerging power is by and large constituted by the Hindutva–corporate regime; this is further contrasted with the ‘graduated social democratic state’ as in Kerala (Raman 2023). As we describe the problems of the excluded, the future seems as hazy as ever. Yet the ecospatial struggles we narrated so far are optimistic, and so is ecospatiality in its totality, which is in and of itself politics proper.

Introduction

In Figure 9.1, we see a meme made by the Brazilian far-right portraying the president Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as a crusader. How to interpret the engagements with history embodied by images like this one?* Is it a traditional use of the past for a coherent ideological project, or is it something else? We believe that this image and, more broadly, Bolsonarist engagements with history reveal certain dimensions of contemporary historicity – by which we mean the articulation of the past, the present, and the future. In this chapter, we thus analyse how the populist movement embodied by Bolsonaro engages with history in a way that activates its heterogeneous political base. These engagements seem to be different from some aspects of modern chronosophies, such as their abandonment of synchronization and coherent presentation of a national history. Instead, the new Brazilian far-right populist historicity relies more on emotional attachment, a pragmatic and highly fragmented historical performance that, as we claim, is more akin to a historicity that we call ‘updatism’, meaning this historicity in which an empty and self-centred present is loosely and pragmatically related to the past, whereas the future is desired as a reserve for the linear expansion of an updating – and sometimes upgrading – present (see Araujo and Pereira 2019).

To demonstrate the affinity between ‘updatism’ and the specific Bolsonarist version of populism, this chapter is divided into three sections. First, we introduce the concept and the theory of updatism. Next, we characterize the populist dimensions of Bolsonarism – that is, the cultural and political movement represented by Jair Bolsonaro. Then we analyse the new Brazilian populism in its engagements with history, especially the performances of history by the three secretaries of culture of Bolsonaro's government and how the defactualization of reality gains momentum, creating the conditions of possibility for the past to be like a large wardrobe full of prêt-à-porter images and templates. Taken together, we can conclude that the affinities we see between Brazilian populism, or Bolsonarism, and updatist historicity are the following: both flourish in a communicational environment characterized by a shared and simulated reality that defies modern authorities and institutions; both tend to dissolve historical synchronization and thus lead to dispersion and agitation; and both have a more pragmatic engagement with historical content.

As the remnants of Picchi Hannan's gang failed to retake control at Kawran Bazaar, the more egregious aspects of his reign calmed. Kidnappings no longer plagued the business community and threatening demands for payment became less frequent. The severity of crossfire and widespread arrests made it clear that the ruling party and state would no longer patronise and tolerate the likes of Hannan. Those who wished to emulate him would face the same fate. The decline in such santrashis brought about a power vacuum, which for local leaders and cadres of the then ruling BNP represented an opportunity. As long as Hannan had been dominant, the various official wings of the ruling party had been largely sidelined locally, weak by comparison. Yet the condition of the party at the bazaar was still too fragile and politics too uncertain to take advantage. The years of fights and killings had taken their toll on the likes of Siddiq, and the resources of local leaders were depleted from violence and competition.

This power vacuum was prolonged by national politics, with an extended caretaker government in the period 2006–2008. It was widely alleged that during their term in office the BNP were attempting to have a favourable caretaker official in place for the 2006 election, prompting widespread protest. It furthermore seemed obvious to some that the democracy this system held together was one of the most corrupt on earth. In response, the military backed a new caretaker government in early 2007. Rather than calling a general election within ninety days as mandated, it extended its rule to almost two years in a failed attempt to bring radical reform and rid the country of political corruption. At Kawran Bazaar this was portrayed as a period of comparative calm, where businesses ran largely unimpeded and flagrant criminality and violence were minimised by the significant presence of security agencies in everyday life, which continued to arrest, imprison and allegedly ‘crossfire’ santrashi figures. Yet neither Hannan's death nor two years of a caretaker government cleaned Kawran Bazaar of crime and violence.

Through the narratives of everyday experiences, I have sought to examine the transformation of gender identity, relations, and roles of Rohingya women in the refugee camps in Bangladesh – of how they see themselves and how they make a life despite their difficult circumstances. Focusing on the voices of Rohingya women helps to highlight the impacts of forced migration on how the ‘gendered self is transformed’ and the ways in which these women learn to negotiate and navigate new environments, thereby reshaping ‘strategies of selfhood’ (Bhabha 1994; Abusharaf 2009; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2014). While the prevailing scholarly literature on refugees details many of the complexities of displacement, much of the attention is put on the challenges and suffering faced by refugees during and after forced migration. One strand of research that remains underrepresented is a grounded understanding of refugee experiences more broadly – and that of refugee women specifically – that focuses on their ability to reconstruct their lives after displacement. This book is an attempt to look beyond these broad assumptions by providing a lens into the everyday, the mundane, the quotidian parts of Rohingya women's lives in the Kutupalong–Balukhali mega-camp, after experiencing violence and forced migration. Through the narratives, stories, and emotions conveyed in the preceding chapters, I have sought to uncover how the experiences of Rohingya women during and after forced migration, as well as their strategic deployment of varying forms and degrees of economic, social, and cultural capital, help them to recreate a sense of community and ‘life’ in the camps. This book thus showcases the creative capacity of refugee women to apply their own frames of meaning within the camps – frames that are distinct from the commonly promoted or taken-for-granted assumptions of NGOs and humanitarian aid agencies.

Through feminist ethnographic research, this book has shown that the camps have neither destroyed pre-existing conceptions of masculinity and femininity, nor have they left them unchanged – instead, these notions have come to occupy an ‘in-between’ space, opening up the possibilities of empowerment while also reifying gendered expectations. Gendered positions do not remain static – rather, Rohingya women negotiate and navigate patriarchal structures and power asymmetries, highlighting their agentic capacity.

Introduction

Ancient epics have played a significant role in the growth of modern nationalism. At the time of their conception, epics possessed no notion of nationalism. However, over the past three centuries, they have been routinely invoked in many parts of the world for fulfilling modern nationalist claims and aspirations. Political and cultural unity, key features of modern nationalism, were found to be described in ancient epics. Therefore, epics were routinely invoked either as repositories of a nation's past frozen in time (as with Homer or Virgil) or as a genealogical exercise meant to reconstruct an unbroken national–cultural lineage (as with the Ramayana and the Mahabharata). Both processes helped in nationalist revival.

The two epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were used by Indian subcontinental nationalists during the colonial and post-colonial periods to imagine a politically and ethnically (Hindu) unified image of the country. The study of Indian epics was facilitated by modern European Indology and the ‘discovery’ of India's ancient (largely Hindu and Buddhist) heritage during the late eighteenth century. Therefore, unlike the absolute devotional reverence and eschatological infallibility accorded to the epics during pre-modernity, Indians were open to investigating their historical context and using them for didactic–political purposes. History, coming to the aid of religious reverence, produced a strange concoction of nationalist rectitude and a strong antidote to colonial cultural hegemony. The fratricide depicted in the Mahabharata was seen as an act of reclaiming the unjust seizure of territory, rendering the epic's moral lesson ‘analogous to the colonial occupation of India’.

Epic studies developing during the nineteenth century drove European Indologists’ primary interest – namely, determining the remote antiquity of the Mahabharata, deciphering the urtext from latter recensions, and granting it lesser value in comparison to the Greco-Roman classics. European Indological discourses posited India as the opposite of ‘the West’ and hence inferior in character. Indian thought was presented as mythical and symbolic and therefore unworthy of the cold rationality articulated through logical arguments.

Indians attached multifarious significance to its epics. If the Ramayana was the adi-kavya (the original poem), the Mahabharata was varyingly rendered as an itihasa (history) and the ‘fifth Veda’ and even garnered equivalency to a Dharmashastra text. The Mahabharata also carried a powerful moral sermon on righteous violence (the Bhagavadgita), delivered by Krishna, the personification of the Absolute.

Onam, the harvest festival of the Malayalis, marked the moment of departure in August 2001, when the Adivasis of Kerala planted ‘refugee huts’, the kutilkettysamaram, in front of the state secretariat in Thiruvananthapuram in protest against mass starvation deaths in their communities. The protest was historic and innovative; no other protest of this nature has ever been attempted anywhere else in India. What they sought was their right to livelihood resources – land for the landless. While there were several land struggles and movements by Adivasis in Kerala, the immediate provocation for them marching to the state capital was the report of 32 starvation deaths among Adivasis in and around Attappady and Wayanad, the tribal district in the state. They demanded a settlement outside the controversial Kerala Restriction on Transfer by and Restoration of Lands to Scheduled Tribes Bill, 1999, passed by the state legislative assembly, which repealed the original Kerala Scheduled Tribes (Restriction on Transfer of Lands and Restoration of Alienated Lands) Act, 1975. The Adivasi Dalit Samara Samithi (ADSS) argued that of the 75,000 Adivasi families in the state, 45,000 were landless, and the granting of 5 acres to each of those families would require the distribution of 2.25 lakh acres of land. The Adivasis, led by C.K. Janu – an Adiya woman who spearheaded the struggle – conducted their protest in an unprecedented manner. The struggle was considered successful by the ADSS, claiming that their demands for lands were met, at least partly, by the government. When no action was taken by the government to make the promised measures, and instead followed procrastination politics, the tribal alliance renewed their protest, now in the form of Occupy Muthanga. The indigenous people of Wayanad, under the banner of the Adivasi Gothra Maha Sabha (AGMS) – nearly 800 families – entered the Muthanga range of the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary (MWWS) in January 2003 and declared the area their own, a new republic. However, in two months’ time, on 19 February, they were forcefully evacuated with armed police: one Adivasi and a police officer lost their lives; several Adivasis were hurt or injured in the process.

Introduction

Indian cities are especially vulnerable to climate change due to their rapid population growth, high levels of socioeconomic inequality, and the general inability of infrastructure and public services to adapt to projected impacts (Revi 2008; Sharma and Tomar 2010). Although the neoliberal reforms introduced in India since the early 1990s have enabled the broader participation of non-state actors in decision-making, an ideological preference for entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance have largely led to the withdrawal of the state from delivering basic services (Datta 2015). Revenue shortfalls and lack of administrative capacity have further decreased the ability of cities to deal with climate impacts and risks (Cook and Chu 2018; Sharma et al. 2014). These effects are felt most acutely by the urban poor, who are disproportionately exposed (Michael and Vakulabharanam 2016; Satterthwaite et al. 2007).

Since the 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of climate change among government officials. For the next two decades, governmental interventions in Indian cities were confined to climate mitigation and targeted select manufacturing, construction, and energy sectors (Dubash et al. 2018). To be fair, climate adaptation was still a relatively nascent priority for India, and its policy focus was on furthering its geopolitical role in global climate negotiations. As a nation that saw itself as a rapidly industrializing global power, India aggressively pushed for the country's ‘right to development’ despite its significant exposure to climate change impacts (Gupta 2010). Indian negotiators highlighted how industrialized nations could support India through technology, resource, and capacity transfers that will allow it to ‘leap frog’ from fossil-fuel-intensive to more sustainable forms of development. Widespread awareness of climate adaptation only emerged in the late 2000s, spearheaded by transnational, civil society, and national scientific bodies that documented changing climatic patterns and advocated that subnational governments play a role in addressing climate risks (Khosla and Bhardwaj 2019b; Sharma, Singh, and Singh 2014; Sharma et al. 2014). Since then, and as climate adaptation has moved from the policy to the implementation space, there have been growing concerns that structural inequalities in urban development in India may dilute or even redirect the intended benefits of climate adaptation.

Introduction

The feminization of agriculture, or the sharp increase in the number of women in farming, is the result of a deep and ongoing agrarian crisis. Some scholars have more aptly named this phenomenon the ‘feminization of the agrarian crisis’ to capture how the ongoing agrarian crisis places a greater burden on women farmers than it does on their male counterparts. Patriarchal norms and attitudes prevent women from owning and controlling land, and women from marginalized castes and classes are the most disadvantaged (Pattnaik et al. 2018). Over 70 per cent of women in rural India are engaged in farming, but since the majority do not formally own land, they are not officially recognized as farmers and are instead considered as ‘farm helpers’ (Agarwal 2021). Given the substantial inequalities that affect women's ownership of and control over land, they cannot avail the benefits of land ownership – economic security, social status, and state support, among others.

This chapter looks at climate justice in the context of women in agriculture. Climate change and gender inequalities are deeply intertwined. Governments and civil society actors have launched various programmes aimed at climate resilience and adaptation in agriculture. However, when analysed through the lens of climate justice, these efforts do not always promote social equity. On the contrary, in some cases, mainstream climate solutions threaten women's land rights and farm-based livelihoods.

Using the novel framework of agrarian climate justice, which combines ideas from agrarian justice and climate justice, we explore women's land rights within agroecology programmes in India. We argue that advancing women's collective land rights through climate initiatives can achieve the twin aims of climate resilience and agrarian justice. We focus on agrarian land and do not look at forest lands, which, although equally important, are outside the scope of this chapter. Drawing from feminist scholars’ work on intersectionality, we emphasize the importance of an intersectional understanding of the differences between women based on intersecting identities of caste, class, age, education, and marital status, among others (Lutz, Herrera Vivar, and Supik 2011). Such an understanding is important to ensure that climate policies reduce, instead of reproduce, inequalities.