Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India

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.

Introduction PART I: Digital Humanities from the Sidelines: Theoretical Considerations 1. Digital Cultures in India: Digitality and its Discontents 2. Digital Literary Studies in Uncertain Times 3. Reading World Literature at a Distance: Challenges and Opportunities PART II: Archives, Ethics, Praxis 4. Digital Archives for Indian Literatures and Cultures: Challenges and Prospects 5. Bichitra: The Online Tagore Varororium Project 6. Presenting Purple Pencil Project as a case study of Digital Humanities Project in Practice in the field of Indian Literatures 7. Archiving “Community’s Voices” in Karbi Anglong: Collective Memory and Digital Apprehensions 8. Rekhta to Rekhta.org: Digital Remapping of Urdu Literary Culture and Public Sphere 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 10. The Internet in the Context of Indian Women’s Poetry in English 11. Putting the Local in the Global- Indian Graphic Novels the New Vogue of The Indian Writing in English 12. Quantitative Stepwise Analysis of the Impact of Technology in Indian English Novels 1947-2001 13. Un-scripting the Narrative: The Special Case of Hindi-Urdu Audiobook PART IV: Forms in Flux II: Born Digital 14. Voices of the 'Missing': Subaltern Poetics in Indian Videogames 15. Narrative and Play: Some Reflections on Videogames Based on Bollywood 16. Hitman 2 and its spectre of Mumbai: A city lost in translation. 17. Electronic Literature in India: Where is it Does it even exist?” Nirmala Menon and Justy Joseph PART V: Digital Atmospheres 18. The Cult of YouTube Mushairas in India’s Small Towns 19. Performative Politics in Digital Spaces: An Analysis of Lokshahiri (People’s Poetry) on YouTube 20.Encountering the Digital- Jhumur Folk songs, Memory, Migration and the Digital 21. Infusing Digital Media into Theatre in Contemporary Indian Performances” Afterword. Rethinking Digital Colonialisms: The Limits of Postcolonial Digital Humanities