Mahasweta Devi's Documentary/fiction as Critical Antidote: Rethinking Bonded Labour, "Women and Development" and the Sex Trade in India. (Research Articles/Rapports De Recherche)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, I argue that Mahasweta Devi's meticulously researched documentary/fiction, which moves fluidly between history, ethnography and reportage, provide a crucial antidote to three vexed problems in South Asian studies: bonded labour, and development and sex trade. Researchers have treated bonded labour, women's work and prostitution as separate discourses. Yet Devi's women characters include wives, sisters and daughters of bonded labourers, women who work as bonded labourers, and bonded prostitutes. By using fictional modes of irony and satire, Devi's documentary/fiction invites multiple readings of sociological criticat frameworks and defies neat conclusions about subalternity that reader might be tempted to make. Dans cet article, je propose que a [much less than]documentaire/roman[much greater than] meticuleusement recherche de Mahasweta Devi, qui passe sans a-coups du romanesque 'histoire, de l'ethnographie au reportage, fournit un antidote essentiel trois problemes presents dans les eludes sud-asiatiques: [much less than]servitude pour dettes[much greater than], [much less than]les femmes et le developpement[much greater than], et le travail de l'industrie du sexe[much greater than]. De facon generale, les chercheur-e-s traitent ces trois domaines de facon distincte, Pourtant, les personnages feminins de Ijevi comprennent des epouses, soeurs et filles de serviteuses de dettes, des femmes travailant elles-memes comme serviteuses de dettes, ainsi que des prostituees. En employant tes modes romanesques de 'ironie et du satire, le [much less than]documentaire/ roman[much greater than] de Devi invite de multiples lectures de cadres sociologiques critiques et refuse les conclusions facites concernant a subalternite qui s'offriraient comme tentations au lectorat. ********** I believe in documentation. After reading my work, reader should face truth of facts, and feel duly ashamed of true face of India. Mahasweta Devi, An Outsider and an Insider at Same Time Sometimes Crook imagines some bespectacled town gentleman who has come by car, and listening to him, is writing down everything.... No such conversation has taken place. Crook has thought it all up. If such a thing had happened, if some bespectacled gentleman had come, words like this are what he would have heard from Crook Nagesia. Mahasweta Devi, Douloti Bountiful Mahasweta Devi's (1) meticulously researched documentary / fiction, which moves fluidly between history, ethnography and reportage, provides a critical antidote to three problems in South Asian studies: bonded labour, and development, and sex trade. Researchers have treated bonded labour, women's work and prostitution as separate discourses, in isolation from one another. Yet Devi's women characters include wives, sisters and daughters of bonded labourers, women who work as bonded labourers, and bonded prostitutes. Most studies on bonded labour focus on men working in agricultural sector before 1976, year in which debt-bondage was officially abolished in India. Devi's stories show that forms of indenture have continued well beyond 1976, and have especially exerted their force on 'invisible labour sectors, such as women, who perform casual or unpaid labour, and prostitutes, who work off debts at compound interest in brothels. Devi's stories contest those studies that have consi stently naturalized and rendered invisible women's bonded labour. By using fictional modes of irony and satire, Devi's stories subvert easy assumptions about subalternity and the modes of oppression (Bardhan, 1990) that tribal, low- or out-of-caste women in sex trade are subject to. Studies on bonded labour in India tend to assume a gender-neutral perspective, thereby focussing on men's debt-bondage to exclusion of women's (Tripathy, 1989; Prakash, 1990; Bose, 1993; Lerche, 1995; Brass, 1998; van der Linden, 1998). …
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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 | 0.012 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".