Governmentality, Democracy, and Liberalism: Desire in Samrat Upadhyay’s ‘The Guru of Love’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Samrat Upadhyay’s The Guru of Love (2003), the political and the personal intersect, with the novel as a genre exposing how they are interwoven. In the Nepali-American novelist Upadhyay’s novel, democracy and liberalism operate through the management and redirection of desires, instead of constraining them. The novel itself, as a genre, becomes the canvas for orchestrating this transformative process, engaging both characters and readers. Set against the backdrop of Nepal in the global south, The Guru of Love challenges conventional notions, suggesting that democracy’s efficacy does not hinge on industrialisation and education alone. Instead, democracy itself can serve as a potent political tool for nurturing a citizenry that favours such politics. As this novel shows, the key tenet of liberal and capitalist governance lies in the augmentation and regulation of the individual’s desires. Upadhyay’s novel is a testament to the celebration of individualism and shows the workings of capitalist and liberal deregulation as a mechanism for managing and channelling desires. It portrays how these political ideologies shape and mould the individual’s personal aspirations and society’s political paradigms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 teacher head, 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".