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ABSTRACT
Digital Humanities (DH), as an emergent field, is increasingly gaining traction within the Indian academe. It is credited with pumping fresh life into studying the Humanities at a time when the relevance of Humanities is being questioned. However, the role of the ‘digital’ in studying the Humanities – whether DH is an autonomous field, or merely a data-driven technique/application, or characterises new methodologies that equip us to probe into new ‘objects of inquiries – is often debated. In this article, we revisit the debates, contentions and contingencies around DH, with the intent to stir up conversations on the concerns about and faultlines of what may be referred to as an ‘Indian framework’ of DH practice. We examine the constituency of DH in India and the epistemic implications of the attempts towards its formalisation, which must be understood as a knowledge project linked to the prevailing episteme. In brief, we examine the ‘epistemic rupture’ that marks the emergence of DH in India.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Bichitra archives a searchable-interactive repository of Rabindranath Tagore’s manuscripts in English and Bengali. The Scottish Cemetery project records the narratives of the people who were buried in the Scottish cemetery in Kolkata in or before 1858.
2. The question of decoloniality has been central to the DH pedagogy. For example, McPherson (“Why are the Digital Humanities so White?”) discusses this issue with reference to the West, while Roy and Menon (“No ‘Making’, Not Now: Decolonizing Digital Humanities in South Asia”) discuss it with reference to South Asia.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sunanda Kar
Sunanda Kar is a PhD research scholar at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Silchar. Her interest lies in literary studies, Digital Humanities, Digital media and film studies.
Avishek Ray
Avishek Ray teaches at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. He the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (SAGE, 2020). He is currently working on two co-authored book projects: the first, on the social life of selfies in India, and the second on digitally-aided mobility in the wake of the pandemic in the context of Kolkata. In 2021, he was awarded a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.