Clay and Conflict: Cultural Memory, Religious Violence, and Artistic Resistance in Anuradha Roy’s The Earthspinner
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anuradha Roy’s novel The Earthspinner (2021) provides a richly layered narrative that interrogates the entangled relationships between artistic creation, cultural identity, religious fundamentalism, and national belonging. Situated in contemporary India where ideological extremism increasingly threatens personal freedoms Roy constructs a subtle but piercing meditation on how art both resists and is wounded by sociopolitical violence. Through the character of Elango, a traditional potter whose passion for sculpting a forbidden love into clay leads to tragic consequences, Roy maps the fraught terrain between personal expression and cultural censorship. This paper explores the novel through the critical lens of cultural studies, a framework that investigates how ideology, power, class, and identity intersect within and around cultural production. Drawing upon theorists such as Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhabha, and Raymond Williams, the research analyzes how Roy’s novel dismantles dominant narratives of cultural nationalism and reclaims the marginal voices of artisans, lovers, and dissenters. The narrative's oscillation between rural and urban landscapes, Hindu-Muslim relations, and modernity and tradition functions as a reflective canvas for examining India’s cultural fragmentation. Furthermore, the protagonist’s art becomes a contested site of symbolic resistance, shaped by inherited myths but disrupted by authoritarian dogma. This paper also investigates how Roy critiques the cultural commodification of art while still offering it as a fragile space of hope and self-making. In treating pottery as both metaphor and medium, The Earthspinner invites readers to consider the stakes of creativity in a divided nation. Ultimately, the novel positions artistic practice not as escapism but as an act of cultural survival and spiritual defiance.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".