Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India

414 Pages·2022·9.23 MB·English

by  Nishat Zaidi, A. Sean Pue

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 DH research and teaching
methodologies, and 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.
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 Poetic Innovation in South Asia,” which
includes an extensive sound archive of South Asian poetry and analytical and methodological
writings. Pue holds a PhD degree in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and
Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University.

LITERARY CULTURES
AND DIGITAL
HUMANITIES IN INDIA
Edited by Nishat Zaidi and A. Sean Pue
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2023
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© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Nishat Zaidi and A. Sean Pue;
individual chapters, the contributors
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-05673-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-40675-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-35424-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003354246
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
List of Illustrations ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Nishat Zaidi and A. Sean Pue
PART I
Digital Humanities From the Sidelines: Theoretical
Considerations 17
1 Digital Cultures in India: Digitality and Its Discontents 19
Maya Dodd
2 Community Accountability and Activist Interventions in
the Digital Humanities 38
Dhanashree Thorat
3 Three Models of World Literature 52
Michael Falk
vi Contents
PART II
Archives, Ethics, and Praxis 67
4 Digital Archives for Indian Literatures and Cultures:
Challenges and Prospects 69
Parthasarathi Bhaumik
5 Bichitra: The Online Tagore Variorum Project 84
Spandana Bhowmik
6 Digital Humanities in Practice: A Case Study 99
Prakruti Maniar
7 Archiving “Community’s Voices” in Karbi Anglong:
Collective Memory and Digital Apprehensions 113
Debashree Dattaray
8 From Rekhta to rekhta.org: Digital Remappings of Urdu
Literary Culture and Public Sphere 128
Nishat Zaidi and Mohd Aqib
PART III
Forms in Flux I: Trajectories of Digital Cultures
in Indian Literatures 153
9 “Digitizing Derozio: Exploring Intertexts to English
Romanticism in Collected Poems of Henry Derozio” 155
Amardeep Singh
10 The Internet in the Context of Indian Women’s Poetry in English 168
Shruti Sareen
11 Putting the Local in the Global—Indian Graphic Novels:
The New Vogue of Indian Writing in English 189
Aibhi Biswas
12 Quantitative Stepwise Analysis of the Impact of
Technology in Indian English Novels 1947–2017 206
Shanmugapriya T., Nirmala Menon, and Deborah Sutton
13 (Un)Scripting Hindustani: The Special Case
of Hindi-Urdu Audiobook 225
Abiral Kumar
Contents vii
PART IV
Forms in Flux II: Born Digital 245
14 Journeying Against the Heroes: Subaltern Poetics
in Indian Videogames 247
Souvik Mukherjee
15 Narrative and Play: Some Reflections on Videogames
Based on Bollywood 265
Nishat Haider
16 Hitman 2 and Its Spectre of Mumbai: A City Lost in Translation 282
Samya Brata Roy
17 Electronic Literature in India: Where Is It? Does It Even Exist? 296
Justy Joseph and Nirmala Menon
PART V
Digital Atmospheres 313
18 The Cult of YouTube Mushairas in India’s Small Towns 315
Yousuf Saeed
19 Performative Politics in Digital Spaces: An Analysis of
Lokshahiri (People’s Poetry) on YouTube 326
Avanti Chhatre
20 Encountering the Digital in Folk Songs and Oral History:
Tracing the History and Memory of Migration of Tea
Plantation Labour Through Jhumur Songs 344
Devika Singh Shekhawat
21 Infusing Digital Media Into Theatre in Contemporary
Indian Performances 361
Tanya Jaluthria
Afterword: Rethinking Digital Colonialisms—The Limits
of Postcolonial Digital Humanities 377
Roopika Risam
Index 383
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edited volume emerged out of the two-day international conference “Con-
fronting the ‘Global’, Exploring the ‘Local’: Digital Apprehensions of Poetics and
Indian Literature(s),” hosted by the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia,
on 21 and 22 December 2020 with Michigan State University. This conference
was a part of the collaborative project “Digital Apprehensions of Poetics” funded
by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, through its Scheme for the
Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) with Nishat Zaidi
(JMI, INDIA) as the Indian PI and A. Sean Pue (MSU, USA) as the foreign PI.
We would like to express our gratitude to the Ministry of Education, Government
of India, for funding the project and enabling this research. We would also like to
express our gratitude to the administration of Jamia Millia Islamia, especially the
Vice Chancellor and conference patron Professor Najma Akhtar, who always sup-
ported the project. Finally, we are grateful to the research scholars of the Depart-
ment of English, JMI, for their unconditional support and hard work in organizing
the conference. Zahra Rizvi, Indrani Dasgupta, and Asra Mamnoon deserve a spe-
cial mention for their help in organizing the volume material.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
4.1 Node–link relationships in the social network used by PARI 81
5.1 The Bichitra homepage 85
5.2 Pagewise transcription with manuscript image 87
5.3 Full table of English poems and songs 89
5.4 Search results 90
5.5 Section-level collation result 93
5.6 Section-level collation: one-to-one sidebar 93
5.7 Segment-level collation result 94
5.8 Fine collation result: the four-window display 95
6.1 Screenshot taken on website on 10 April 2021 shows the
arbitrary subject-wise categorization 103
6.2 Screenshot taken on website on 10 April 2021 104
6.3 Screenshot of the landing page of Purple Pencil Project 106
6.4 Screenshot of the final database design 108
8.1 Mother tongue of the participants 145
8.2 Religion of the participants 146
8.3 Age of the participants 146
8.4 When did you read first Urdu book? 148
8.5 In which script do you use rekhta.org? 149
8.6 How many Urdu books do you read every month? 149
8.7 How many books do you read every month? 150
8.8 What do you mostly read or see on Rekhta? 150
12.1 Topic terms: female characters’ facets of the telephone artefacts 211
12.2 Topic terms: discourse of characters of the television artefacts 215
12.3 Topic terms: male characters for the computer artefact 218