Rewriting The Past: Historiographic Metafiction In Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear The Nightbird Call
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Paper examines Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call as a work of Historiographic metafiction that interrogates the subtle narratives of partition, 1984 anti-Sikh riots and Indo-Canadian experience. A novel apart from being a representational genre also is an effective and powerful mode of discourse. Negotiations between history and novel are more frequent as compared with other modes of fiction. Novel has become an important medium of problematizing and questioning to a certain extent the discourse of history. . In historical fiction, writers attempted to write undisclosed and concealed chapters of Indian history keeping an alternative perspective towards history with a direct reference to politics, state and nation, Based on Linda Hutcheon ‘s concept of historiographic metafiction, the paper argues that the novel does not merely recount of historical events but subtly interrogates how histories are constructed, remembered and embodied thereby positioning memory as a critical tool for reimagining historiography through the principal characters like Bibi-ji, Leela and Nimmo. Badami thereby foregrounds how the past operates both as a site of trauma and also positioning memory as vital element for reimagining historiography.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".