(Re)casting Caste: Dalit Literary Consciousness in Ajay Navaria’s Unclaimed Terrain and Goyu Shyamala’s Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket but…
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay critically examines two recently translated collections of short stories by Indian Dalit authors Ajay Navaria and Goyu Shyamala. Navayana Press published Unclaimed Terrain (2013) and Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket but… (2012) in English. The creation of Navayana as an independent press in 2003 has represented a unique channel for the promotion of anti-caste writing beyond the Indian sub-continent. It also filled a much-needed space within the Indian Anglophone literary scene. Shyamala's and Navaria's fiction encourages us to see the necessity to approach Dalit literary consciousness in a dialogic association with other minoritarian voices, in particular women's, so as to resist institutionalising trends. The essay reviews how Navaria and Shyamala respectively tackle the issue of untouchability in novel, original ways in their collections. Although springing from divergent locales (Navaria’s Hindi/North Indian city, and Shyamala’s Telugu/South Indian rural, settings), both collections foreground the discursive, iterative, and performative nature of caste. Hence, the recounting of caste is also its re-casting as part of the realm of fiction, imaginative creativeness, and cultural translation.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".