Transcreating Sanskrit Humour through Kūṭiyāṭṭam: the Translation and Performance of the Rasasadana Bhāṇa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay develops a collaborative, performance-oriented approach to the task of translating a nineteenth-century Sanskrit play, the Rasasadana Bhāṇa of Godavarma Yuvaraja. The bhāṇa is a genre of Sanskrit comedic monologue, with examples dating from the late Gupta period (c. 500 ce), that has had a significant but largely overlooked presence in Kerala since the fourteenth century. To better understand this presence, and to explore the potential of performance for aiding in translation practice we partnered with the Nepathya Centre for Excellence (Moozhikkulam, Kerala) to produce digital “transcreations” of select verses from the Rasasadana performed in a Kūṭiyāṭṭam style. This essay outlines our methodology and presents key outcomes from a series of collaborative research sessions conducted remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. We assess how the juxtaposition of English translation and Kūṭiyāṭṭam performance may help to reveal the cultural power of Sanskrit humour in early modern Kerala.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".