Laura Bear.<i>Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self</i>.:Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self.<i>(Cultures of History.)</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anglo-Indians (a term approximately equal in meaning to Eurasian, although limited to those with British and Indian ancestors) numbered roughly 143,000 in India in 1931. The community came to have a special, albeit enclaved, role in colonial India because of its disproportionately large presence in the railroad workforce. Approximately one-half of all Anglo-Indians came to be railroad employees or dependants thereof, most of whom lived in or near company towns, the “railroad colonies.” They became, in Laura Bear's view, a “railway caste,” whose formation and current predicaments form the main subject matter of her ethnographic history. The close connection to the colonial railroads, a preferential connection ended in 1960, made postcolonial India a difficult transition for the Anglo-Indians. Bear gives us a sensitive account of a subset of this community: those associated with the railroads of Eastern India. Central to this stimulating work is an examination of the intimate and public psycho-social world the Anglo-Indians made through their lives as railroad families: lives subjected to an authoritarian bureaucracy (itself an adjunct of the colonial state); enclaved lives situated in, but not fully of, India and the emerging national aspirations of many Indians. In particular, the author reveals the tension Anglo-Indians experienced from the fact that their jati (caste used in a very extended sense) and desh (roughly a homeland) identities were different from those of most Bengalis—and perhaps most Indians.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.005 |
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".