The Nation's Taxidermist: Ungovernable Bodies in R.K. Narayan's <i>The Man-Eater of Malgudi</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The taxidermy animal confronts the viewer with an array of strange contradictions, in part owing to the strong colonial resonance of taxidermy as a form. This article examines the representation of taxidermy in R.K. Narayan's 1961 novel The Man-eater of Malgudi. It considers how the novel utilizes the taxidermy body as a conduit for its political critique aimed at the modernization and capitalist expansion of the post-Independence period. At the same time, the taxidermy animals exceed the project of the novel, and expose Narayan's Malgudi itself as a taxidermic representation. By cutting away the complex realities of its context, The Man-eater of Malgudi conducts a problematic act of preservation, one that constructs and holds in stasis an imagined India. This reading connects taxidermy and literature as forms that aim to place nonhuman animal bodies, both spatially and ontologically, within anthropocentric frames.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".