Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism. Mana Kia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020). Pp. 336. $30.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503611955
Bibliographic record
Abstract
revered by her contrary brothers, and as a close political adviser and confidante of her father.In this sense, Gandhi's book also contributes to recent studies on Jahanara.2 One wonders, however, why Dara's other sisters, Roshanara and Gauharara, do not feature significantly in his story.Roshanara supported Aurangzeb in the War of Succession, but no clear reason is given for her animosity toward Dara.These minor quibbles aside, The Emperor Who Never Was is a superbly crafted, engrossingly written, compellingly argued book that is a landmark contribution to the histories of Mughal India, Sufism, and Persian literature.Academics and lay readers alike will delight in its lucid prose, attention to detail, and careful, sensitive examination of several underused archival sources, including Dara's first muraqqa or album (1633), his Samudrasamgama (1655), and Tawakkul Beg's Nuskha-yi Ahwāl-i Shāhī (1666).In weaving a complex tapestry of South Asia in the seventeenth century, Gandhi accomplishes much more than a mere biography of Dara Shukoh: her anecdotal style brings to life court intrigues, battle scenes, epistolary exchanges, meditations on Indic and Islamic philosophy, nuances of the Sufi pīr-murīd (master-disciple) relationship, public perceptions of sovereignty, and skillfully interpreted poetry and paintings.Dara Shukoh's story has had many afterlives in South Asia, but this monograph is testament to the power of timely, persuasive scholarship in reshaping popular imagination.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".