Revisions, Reroutings and Return: Reversing the Teleology of Diaspora in Sunetra Gupta's Memories of Rain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is significant agreement amongst theorists of diaspora and migration that the teleology of diaspora and a search for home is necessarily linear. Vijay Mishra writes about 'the hybrid experience of diaspora people for whom an engineered return to a purist condition is a contradiction in terms' (Mishra, 421) and Avtar Brah argues that home for diasporic people is 'a mythic place of desire' and therefore it is 'a place of no return.' (Brah, 192) William Safran describes the return' of most diasporas as 'a largely eschatological concept' that is used 'to make life more tolerable by holding out a utopia - or eutopia - that stands in contrast to the perceived dystopia in which actual life is lived.' (Safran, 194) Despite such agreement against the myth of return, in Sunetra Gupta's novel, Memories of Rain, we see the protagonist returning to the city she had left ten years ago. For Moni a spiritual return to her originary home is not enough. She must return in body to Calcutta, thus making her journey a circular rather than a linear one. In this article I will examine the reasons for and implications of Moni's return to the homeland after her rejection of the space of diaspora. I consider this return and reversal of diaspora teleology as a move that unsettles and seriously disturbs dichotomies of colonialist and heterosexual desire that are firmly established earlier in the novel. Gupta's novel sets up a series of binary oppositions, the incompatibility of which ultimately lead to Moni's fragmentation and inability to form a diasporic identity for herself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".