Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India

This book explores the use of digitalhumanities (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 . 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

Nishat Zaidiis Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. As ascholar, critic, and translator, she isa 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 andedited 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 ofI 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.