Fiction or History in the Making of the Past: A Dialogue between the Public and the Private in Maharaja Kumari Binodini Devi’s <i>Boro Sahib Ongbi Sanatombi</i> (The Princess and the Political Agent)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conventionally, the focus of history writing is ‘public’ lives and ‘public’ events. Maharaja Kumari Binodini Devi’s Boro Sahib Ongbi Sanatombi (The princess and the political agent, 1976), however, inverts this dominant tradition, diverting the attention of the reader from the larger ‘public’ events in Manipur’s history to a very specific and ‘private’ love relationship between her aunt Maharaja Kumari Sanatombi Devi and Major Horatio St. John Maxwell, the first political agent of British-occupied Manipur. This paper shows how the liminal form of Binodini’s book allows it to become a site for contestation and negotiation between public and private histories as it simultaneously confuses the line between history and fiction. To prove its point, it reveals first the blurring of the line between history and fiction in Boro Sahib Ongbi Sanatombi, and then demonstrates the relation between public and private histories in the book. Finally, the paper analyses the public–private (histories) distinction in a colonial relationship as illustrated in the book.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".