1st Edition
Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India
This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms — in manuscripts — and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies — including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance — for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings.
With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.
Introduction
PART I: Digital Humanities from the Sidelines: Theoretical Considerations
1. Digital Cultures in India: Digitality and its Discontents
Maya Dodd
2. Digital Literary Studies in Uncertain Times
Dhanashree Thorat
3. Reading World Literature at a Distance: Challenges and Opportunities
Michael Falk
PART II: Archives, Ethics, Praxis
4. Digital Archives for Indian Literatures and Cultures: Challenges and Prospects
Parthasarathi Bhowmik
5. Bichitra: The Online Tagore Varororium Project
Spandana Bhowmik
6. Presenting Purple Pencil Project as a case study of Digital Humanities Project in Practice in the field of Indian Literatures
Prakruti Maniar
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7. Archiving “Community’s Voices” in Karbi Anglong: Collective Memory and Digital Apprehensions
Debashree Dattaray
8. Rekhta to Rekhta.org: Digital Remapping of Urdu Literary Culture and Public Sphere
Nishat Zaidi and Aqib Sabir
PART III: Forms in Flux I: Trajectories of Digital Cultures in Indian Literatures
9. Digitizing Derozio: Mapping the Local and the Global Contexts of an Anglo-Indian Poet
Amardeep Singh
10. The Internet in the Context of Indian Women’s Poetry in English
Shruti Sareen
11. Putting the Local in the Global- Indian Graphic Novels the New Vogue of The Indian Writing in English
Aibhi Biswas
12. Quantitative Stepwise Analysis of the Impact of Technology in Indian English Novels 1947–2001
Shanmugapriya T, Nirmala Menon and Deborah Sutton
13. Un-scripting the Narrative: The Special Case of Hindi-Urdu Audiobook
Abiral Kumar
PART IV: Forms in Flux II: Born Digital
14. Voices of the 'Missing': Subaltern Poetics in Indian Videogames
Souvik Mukherjee
15. Narrative and Play: Some Reflections on Videogames Based on Bollywood
Nishat Haider
16. Hitman 2 and its spectre of Mumbai: A city lost in translation.
Samya Brata Roy
17. Electronic Literature in India: Where is it Does it even exist?” by Dr Nirmala Menon and Justy Joseph
PART V: Digital Atmospheres
18. The Cult of YouTube Mushairas in India’s Small Towns
Yousuf Saeed
19. Performative Politics in Digital Spaces: An Analysis of Lokshahiri (People’s Poetry) on YouTube
Avanti Chhatre
20.Encountering the Digital- Jhumur Folk songs, Memory, Migration and the Digital
Devika Shekhawat
21. Infusing Digital Media into Theatre in Contemporary Indian Performances”
Tanya Jaluthria, Independent Scholar
Afterword. Rethinking Digital Colonialisms: The Limits of Postcolonial Digital Humanities
Roopika Risam
Biography
Nishat Zaidi is Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. As a scholar, critic, and translator, she is a recipient of several prestigious grants and has conducted collaborative research with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of Witwatersrand, SA; South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany; and Michigan State University, USA. Her publications include Day and Dastan translated by Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla (2018); Purdah and Polygamy: Life in an Indian Muslim Household, by Iqbalunnisa Hussain, edited and introduced by Nishat Zaidi (2018); Between Worlds: The Travels of Yusuf Khan Kambalposh translated and edited by Mushirul Hasan and Nishat Zaidi (2014) among others. Her forthcoming work is Karbala: A Historical Play (translation of Premchand’s play Karbala with a critical introduction and notes) to be published in 2022.
A. Sean Pue is Associate Professor of Hindi Language and South Asian Literature and Culture at Michigan State University, USA. He is the author of I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry (2014). An Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship allowed Pue to study linguistics and computer/data science and to develop “Publics of Sound: Data Driven Analysis of the of Poetic Innovation in South Asia,” which includes an extensive sound archive of South Asian poetry and analytical and methodological writings. Pue holds a Ph.D. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University.
