By Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor

Narayanan and Kapoor urge readers to resist the temptation to think of AI systems as fundamentally ‘unknowable’, as a priori hype obstructs accountability from people making billions by deploying AI tools to predict complex social phenomena. Prediction here also suffers from what is called ‘teaching to the test’ (p. 22), where the training occurs on the same data that is later used for evaluation to achieve high-performing results.


Reviewed by: Yusra Khan
Orient BlackSwan

This approach is further developed in Sachin Ketkar’s piece (‘World Literature and Literary Historiography of Pre-colonial South Asian Vernaculars: Towards a Methodological Model’) on Marathi literary historiography, which interrogates the colonial portrayal of decline during the Islamic period by revisiting the intercultural richness of figures like Namdeo.


Reviewed by: Kamalakar Bhat
By B. Mangalam

The introductory chapter traces the rise of Dalit consciousness in the Tamil literary world, exploring how Dalit writing moved away from a Marxist and Periyarist framework and carved its own space. The author marks the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the centenary celebrations of Dr BR Ambedkar’s birth in 1990 as significant events that impacted the Tamil literary discourse.


Reviewed by: Aazhi Arasi A
Series edited by Mini Krishnan. Translated from the original Malayalam by Venugopal Menon

The collection also contains short stories written by women writers, and here the overarching theme is the dynamics between men and women and the patriarchal attitudes which impact such interactions. The story ‘I Felt Ashamed’ by Kalyanikutty, reputed to be the first ever story written by a Malayali woman, deals with a woman’s aspiration for marrying the man she wants to, but caste restrictions prevent her and thus in her dream state, she sees the future she cannot have in real life. In ‘Witless Woman’ by M Saraswatibhai,


Reviewed by: Jubi C John
Series Edited by Mini Krishnan. Translated by Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre and K.K. Mohapatra

Consider for example Fakir Mohan Senapati’s ‘Rebati’, published in 1898. Hailed as a double triumph, ‘Rebati’ not only inaugurates the first modern Odia short story, but also subtly advances a reformist vision through a young girl’s desire for education. The story, however, unfolds as a quiet tragedy and not as a tale of triumph. Rebati’s aspiration to study is portrayed as the spark that sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events.


Reviewed by: S Deepika
By Vincent Delecroix. Translated from the original French by Helen Stevenson

Delecroix’s choice of the naval officer as the protagonist of this work is a refreshingly intelligent one as it simultaneously hooks the reader—who is now keen to understand the rationale behind the narrator’s actions which have been largely interpreted as monstrous—and also opens up other critical and reflexive possibilities. Contrary to our expectations, the narrator does not accede to responsibility for the migrant deaths or express guilt of any kind. She defends her attitude and actions on multiple grounds including the objective and logical disposition which her professional training as a naval officer demands, and other technical arguments such as that the migrants were in the English territorial waters and not that of the French when the boat capsized.


Reviewed by: Ann Susan Aleyas