South Asian Digital Humanities

Postcolonial Mediations across Technology's Cultural Canon

Roopika Risam, Rahul K. Gairola, Roopika Risam, Rahul K. Gairola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367504052
• eBook ISBN: 9781000195392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The digital cultural record has a powerful role to play in both new and future strategies of creating new homes within the digital milieu. For example, the development and establishment of new digital archives around South Asian studies not only allows us to create new archives of the past but also to remember and commemorate the past differently. New maps transform how we understand space and place. And new digital comfort zones facilitate connections for those whose family and loved ones are only accessible online. Such interventions are essential to the recuperation of the integrity and soul of a people who have lived through and continue to shoulder the fraught and painful legacies of the British Empire and the communal bloodshed wrought by its demise.

Building on the important history of digital humanities scholarship in South Asia and its diasporas that precedes this work, this book contends that South Asian studies is further positioned to offer a new genealogy of digital humanities, demonstrated through this assemblage of essays that reveal how the digital continues to shape notions of home, belonging, nation, identity, memory, and diaspora through a variety of humanistic methodologies and digital techniques.

South Asian Digital Humanities thus demonstrates that postcolonial digital humanities has great possibility for creating some of the most important social justice scholarship in South Asian studies of the past century. It offers these essays as innovative interventions that complicate the digital cultural record while lodging a 'homelanding' for South Asians within it, positioning digital humanities as a method through which South Asian studies can strategically participate in the ongoing struggle for representation within digital knowledge production.

This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

South Asian Digital Humanities Then and Now

Roopika Risam and Rahul K. Gairola

ABSTRACT

The introduction to this special issue of South Asian Review assesses the history and present of South Asian studies and digital humanities. The essay begins by examining the South Asian Literary Association’s early support for this scholarship, both through conferences panels and publications. It further details the emergence of initiatives such as the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) that have contributed to research at the nexus of digital humanities and South Asian studies, as well as foundational digital humanities projects at these interstices. This introduction further situates South Asian digital humanities as an intervention in postcolonial digital humanities that expands, challenges, and complicates both South Asian technospaces and digital notions of home. The essay concludes with summaries of articles in the special issue, arguing that they demonstrate the possibilities of scholarship that bridges digital humanities and South Asian studies.

The first instance of digital humanities scholarship facilitated by the South Asian Literary Association (SALA) occurred in January 2013 when Rahul K. Gairola organized the “South Asian-izing the Digital Humanities” panel at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Boston. Selected for the MLA’s Presidential Theme, the panel was an early attempt to bring diverse insights of South Asian studies to this elusive yet booming area of study by including SALA members from various ranks, countries, and interests. The following year, Radhika Gajjala and Roopika Risam, with Rahul K. Gairola co-authored the essay “What is Postcolonial Digital Humanities (#DHpoco)?” which was published in salaam: the newsletter of the south asian literary association (Gajjala, Risam, and Gairola 2014, 4). Interest and enthusiasm in both of these initiatives led to a roundtable at SALA’s 2015 annual conference in Vancouver, “Borders, Boundaries, and Margins,” where Gairola built on the earlier momentum and organized the first digital humanities session to appear on a SALA program (Risam 2016, 356). The “Digital South Asia” session featured talks by Deepika Bahri, Sonora Jha, Roopika Risam, and Rahul K. Gairola. A wide-ranging discussion followed, facilitated by Alex Gil, encompassing representations of Partition in digital media distributed on YouTube, social media activism for Indian women through the #WhyLoiter campaign, and how postcolonial thought could be meaningfully integrated into the practices of digital humanities.

In the special issue of South Asian Review that emerged from the 2015 conference, edited by Jana Fedtke and Pranav Jani, Risam (2015b) contributed the essay “South Asian Digital Humanities: An Overview,” which argues that while digital humanities is yet a relatively new methodology within South Asian studies, it offers significant, perhaps even revolutionary, possibilities for literary scholarship and cultural heritage. Risam’s contribution examines a number of initiatives in digital literary studies, digital history, and digital cultural heritage, both in South Asian countries and among their diasporas. Risam further demonstrates the range of interventions that digital humanities facilitates: the Bichitra Online Tagore Variorium, a substantial digital archive of Tagore’s writing based at Jadavpur University; the Allama Iqbal Urdu Cyber Library, the first digital collection of Urdu literature; Deepika Bahri’s Postcolonial Studies at Emory, a website that has introduced postcolonial writers and theory to new audiences since the 1990s; The Digital Himalaya project, with ethnographic material from Nepal; The 1947 Partition Archive, which documents oral histories of Partition; and the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), a project documenting South Asian immigrant experiences in the United States.

These projects, proposes Risam, are the foundations for what digital humanities can offer South Asianists. Elaborating on how these and other digital projects challenge the hegemonic afterlives of empire that facilitate silenced discourses, she writes:

Existing projects have made primary literary and historical sources available for scholars. They transcend the geographical challenges of physical archives that circumscribe research within South Asia and the diaspora. They have made public the challenges and struggles of the South Asian diaspora, laying claim to new national identities that are rich sites of study. These projects have also challenged national and elite historiographies that have erased subaltern voices, bringing their stories to the center. But there are more projects to be created and more stories to be told. (Risam 2015b, 174)

Our work here to tell the stories that have long gone unheard at the intersections of South Asian studies and the digital milieu is indebted not only to the foundational scholarship that Risam (2016) highlights in her essay and the support of SALA, but also to the organizations and scholars that have facilitated digital humanities scholarship in and on South Asia.

The short-lived but significant South Asia Digital Humanities (SADH) network, an affiliate organization of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH), which fosters global connections among digital humanities practitioners around the world, was created to bring together both scholars within South Asia and South Asianists abroad who engaged with digital research methods. As one of the founders, Padmini Ray Murray, noted in an e-mail correspondence on March 24, 2016, SADH “aims to promote the digital scholarship and dissemination of scholars based in South Asia and elsewhere – and provide a space for this community of scholars whose work pertains to the region.” Specifically, Ray Murray added, SADH also intended to address “questions of access, infrastructure, economic and governmental policy, the exigencies of working in languages other than English, rate of technological growth and obsolescence, and our different institutional histories to broaden these horizons.” In practice, however, the broad scope of the network itself proved to be a challenge to sustain.

The lessons from SADH, however, gave rise to the formation of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) in 2016. Members of DHAI from its formation include Ray Murray (then at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology), Gairola (then at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee), Nirmala Menon (Indian Institute of Technology, Indore), Ashok Thorat (Institute for Advanced Studies in English, Pune), P.P. Sneha (Center for Digital Humanities, Pune), Dibyaduti Roy (Indian Institute of Management, Indore), Souvik Mukherjee (Presidency University, Kolkata), Maya Dodd (Flame University, Pune), and Ruchi Sharma (St. Xavier’s College, Jaipur). Founding members of DHAI have been involved with the Digital Humanities Winter School held by the Center for Digital Humanities and the Institute for Advanced Studies in English in Pune. Other affiliates contributed to the 2018 “Digital Humanities in India” special issue of Asian Quarterly: An International Journal of Contemporary Issues, the first peer-reviewed journal in India to publish a special issue on this topic at the invitation of guest editor Dhanashree Thorat (2018, 4) and Ashok Thorat, Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in English, Pune (India). Following the publication of this special issue, the constituency of DHAI voted to appoint an Interim Executive Committee of 11 scholars based in or with roots in India, and this resolution facilitated the first annual DHAI conference in June 2018 that was jointly organized by Nirmala Menon and Dibyadyuti Roy. To date, DHAI is based in Indore, India and is gaining national and international recognition for its will to examine the interface of the digital with contemporary India, especially in the arena of digital pedagogy and the creation of postcolonial digital archives.

Long before the emergence of DHAI, however, Gairola approached P.S. Chauhan, then Editor of South Asian Review, to request that the Editorial Board consider a special issue on South Asian studies and digital humanities. This issue of South Asian Review, “Digital Humanities and South Asian Studies,” thus emerges from the research, efforts, and initiatives of a number of scholars interested in the intersection of South Asian studies and the digital milieu. Here, we shed light on new projects and stories that have emerged over the last several years, since the 2013 MLA panel in Boston and the 2015 SALA panel in Vancouver.

The essays in the special issue demonstrate a range of scholarly questions, theoretical insights, and practical considerations that digital humanities makes possible within South Asian studies and the kinds of urgent contributions that South Asian studies brings to digital humanities. In turn, they show how perspectives of South Asian Studies transform what digital humanities makes possible. What thus emerges from this special issue is a unique corpus of knowledge situated at the rich and fertile confluences of South Asian studies and digital humanities. We note, however, that the potential interventions at these intersections has only begun to be explored and have high hopes that this collection will facilitate a transnational dialogue on the futures of digital humanities in the geopolitical frame of South Asia.

Deviating from Definition

The move of defining “digital humanities” at the beginning of an introduction is as well-worn a trope as that of defining “postcolonial” in a postcolonial studies essay. Because the essays in this special issue consciously avoid that move, we enact it here to situate the issue for both unfamiliar and skeptical readers. Notoriously resistant to definition, “digital humanities” is a reflection of the research practices undertaken at the intersections of humanistic inquiry and digital methodologies. The scholarship under consideration in the essays that we have curated for our special issue includes a diverse range of approaches perhaps best encapsulated in Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s capacious definition of digital humanities:

It has to do with the work that gets done at the crossroads of digital media and traditional humanistic study. And that happens in two different ways. On one hand, it’s bringing the tools and techniques of digital media to bear on traditional humanistic questions. But it’s also bringing humanistic modes of inquiry to bear on digital media. It’s a sort of moving back and forth across those lines, thinking about what computation is, how it functions in our culture, and then using those computing technologies to think about the more traditional aspects of culture. (Lopez, Rowland, and Fitzpatrick 2015)

The essays in this issue push the boundaries of digital humanities, responding to what Élika Ortega (2015) has defined as the essential question for digital humanities – not what digital humanities is, but “What can digital humanities be?” Thus, our special issue continues the important work of articulating the modes of inquiry made possible when we bring digital humanities and South Asian studies together.

While avoiding the impulse to defend digital humanities inquiry in South Asian studies would be ideal, we recognize that digital humanities as an area of study has its public detractors, including those whose work is influential for postcolonial studies. In a widely disseminated essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Timothy Brennan (2017) argues,

For all its resources, the digital humanities makes a rookie mistake: It confuses more information for more knowledge. The digital humanities ignores a nagging theoretical dilemma: The interpretive problems that computers solve are not the ones that have long stumped critics. On the contrary, the technology demands that it be asked only what it can answer, changing the questions to conform to its own limitations.

Brennan (2017) goes on to characterize digital humanists as succumbing to “the fetish of science, neoliberal defunding,” thus becoming traitors to their academic comrades by joining “the corporate attack on a professoriate that has what they [untenured junior academics] want.”

Although we would shy away from such sweeping character judgments of junior colleagues, we concede that Brennan’s wariness of claims to use technology to understand humanistic inquiry is understandable. Integrated into our approach to digital humanities, however, are our own sympathies for Marxist analysis and rigorous training in cultural studies methodologies. This positions us to use digital humanities to interrogate, for example, the totalizing impulses of algorithms and the mechanistic reduction of human labor to bits and bytes of data. Further, it is this very training that positions us to ask critical questions of the practices of digital humanities, which include the quantitative textual analysis that Brennan critiques as well as myriad practices including digital archives, digital mapping, social media analysis, and more that digital humanities facilitates. We also note, with deep concern, how administrators within neoliberal universities envision the deployment of technology within education to maximize profit while, in turn, devaluing human labor and lives.

But as scholars who see great potential in the ways that digital platforms can transform our pedagogy, and subsequently students’ lives, we support the increased integration of digital humanities in both our teaching and research. These are issues that have been widely explored within digital humanities scholarship, which, like postcolonial studies, features no dearth of debates about its own values, practices, and utility. Therefore, we situate interventions in South Asian studies through digital humanities in what Roopika Risam terms “postcolonial digital humanities”: “an intervention in digital knowledge production through theory, praxis, and pedagogy at the nexus of the humanities and sciences” and “an approach to uncovering and intervening the disruptions within the digital cultural record produced by colonialism and neocolonialism” (2018, 3).

This approach to digital humanities is informed by a variety of interventions within digital humanities, from the need for increased attention to the role of multilingualism in digital research methods in humanistic inquiry (Fiormonte 2015; Gil and Ortega 2016), to the role of cultural critique within the variety of digital humanities methods (Liu 2012; Berry and Fagerjold 2017), to the significance of intersectional feminist practices that explore connections between race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and other axes of privilege and oppression to digital humanities research and pedagogy (Risam 2015a; Losh and Wernimont 2018). As such, postcolonial digital humanities is a timely and necessary heuristic that demonstrates that digital humanities itself is and can be more than the caricature of quantitative textual analysis to which Brennan alludes. Instead, it raises the critical question of how the digital afterlives of colonialism shape the formation of the digital cultural record and, in turn, the cultural memory of humanity.

As digital humanities interventions continue to expand, they raise the question of where and how South Asians will be represented. In his book, A New Republic of Letters, Jerome McGann offers what he calls “a truth now universally acknowledged”: “the whole of our cultural inheritance has to be re-curated and reedited in digital forms and institutional structures” (McGann 2014, 1). This system, for McGann, constitutes a new republic of letters, an allusion to the Enlightenment era intellectual community of scholars and writers in Europe and the United States who sought connections across national boundaries while also preserving both linguistic and cultural differences. Conversely, the new republic of letters that McGann articulates is comprised of digital actors and objects, facilitated through networks of knowledge and communication, as well as by dig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword: From Subaltern Studies to South Asian Digital Humanities
• 1 South Asian Digital Humanities Then and Now
• 2 Digital Humanities on the Ground: Post-Access Politics and the Second Wave of Digital Humanities
• 3 Emulation as Mimicry: Reading the Salman Rushdie Digital Archive
• 4 Inside and Outside the Literary Marketplace: The Digital Products of Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie
• 5 Gender-Based Violence in Contemporary Digital Graphic Narratives From India
• 6 Acoustic Traces of Poetry in South Asia
• 7 Beyond the Archive Gap: The Kiplings and the Famines of British Colonial India
• 8 Colonial Topographies of Internet Infrastructure: The Sedimented and Linked Networks of the Telegraph and Submarine Fiber Optic Internet
• Afterword: The Vision and the Work into the 21st Century
• Index