Alienation, Unhomeliness and Desire for Belonging in K.S. Maniam’s The Return
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Malaysia is a multicultural and multi ethnic society in which national and ethnic identities are very critical and widely disputed issues. Accordingly, several Malaysian writers such as K.S. Maniam have addressed the issues in their literary productions. This paper intends to examine the dilemmas, agonies and desolations of Indian community in Malaysia which have been reflected in K.S. Maniam’s autobiographical novel The Return (1981). In the story, Maniam voices out the experiences of Indian minority in the troubled times of Malaysia and their struggle for assimilation and adaptation to the new land as well as their identity crisis. Central characters of the story, Ravi, Periathai and Naina as three different generations of Indian migrant in the landscape of Malaysia attempt to embrace the new land as their home and build their coherent or homogeneous Malaysian identity. This paper also explores Maniam’s protagonist’s (Ravi) identity conflicts and his endeavor to escape from his unsettled identity as an Indian Malaysian. Ravi seeks his identity in mastering English, the colonial language, yet this is the very point of his alienation as he finds out that all his preconceptions about language was false and illusionary.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".