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 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.

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.

This volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of the regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the “vernacular” are positioned in relation to the language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures” during the colonial and post-colonial periods and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. It looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities and their roles in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians, scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of “vernacularity”.

This book examines the validity of the notion of the ‘vernacular’ and the position of the so-called ‘vernaculars’ in colonial and postcolonial settings. It addresses recent formulations and debates regarding the status of regional languages of South Asia in relation to English. The authors explore the range of meanings the term has assumed and trace a history of contestation since the colonial age. They contend that though the ‘vernacular’ in South Asia has, since the nineteenth century, often operated as a hegemonic category relegating the languages thus designated to an inferior status, those languages (and other cultural formations labelled as ‘vernacular’) have also received empowering impulses and vested with qualities like groundedness and strength. The book highlights the need for a critical discussion of the notion of the ‘vernacular’ in the context of the ongoing rise of Anglophonia in South Asia as a whole and post-liberalisation India in particular. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literary and culture studies, history, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies.

The latest installment of a digital humanities bellwether Contending with recent developments like the shocking 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the radical transformation of the social web, and passionate debates about the future of data in higher education, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 brings together a broad array of important, thought-provoking perspectives on the field’s many sides. With a wide range of subjects including gender-based assumptions made by algorithms, the place of the digital humanities within art history, data-based methods for exhuming forgotten histories, video games, three-dimensional printing, and decolonial work, this book assembles a who’s who of the field in more than thirty impactful essays. Contributors: Rafael Alvarado, U of Virginia; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; James Baker, U of Sussex; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; David M. Berry, U of Sussex; Claire Bishop, The Graduate Center, CUNY; James Coltrain, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Crunk Feminist Collective; Johanna Drucker, U of California–Los Angeles; Jennifer Edmond, Trinity College; Marta Effinger-Crichlow, New York City College of Technology–CUNY; M. Beatrice Fazi, U of Sussex; Kevin L. Ferguson, Queens College–CUNY; Curtis Fletcher, U of Southern California; Neil Fraistat, U of Maryland; Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U; Michael Gavin, U of South Carolina; Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers U; Andrew Gomez, U of Puget Sound; Elyse Graham, Stony Brook U; Brian Greenspan, Carleton U; John Hunter, Bucknell U; Steven J. Jackson, Cornell U; Collin Jennings, Miami U; Lauren Kersey, Saint Louis U; Kari Kraus, U of Maryland; Seth Long, U of Nebraska, Kearney; Laura Mandell, Texas A&M U; Rachel Mann, U of South Carolina; Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Lincoln A. Mullen, George Mason U; Trevor Muñoz, U of Maryland; Safiya Umoja Noble, U of Southern California; Jack Norton, Normandale Community College; Bethany Nowviskie, U of Virginia; Élika Ortega, Northeastern U; Marisa Parham, Amherst College; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Kyle Parry, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brad Pasanek, U of Virginia; Stephen Ramsay, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Matt Ratto, U of Toronto; Katie Rawson, U of Pennsylvania; Ben Roberts, U of Sussex; David S. Roh, U of Utah; Mark Sample, Davidson College; Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, New York U; Tim Sherratt, U of Canberra; Bobby L. Smiley, Vanderbilt U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Ted Underwood, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Megan Ward, Oregon State U; Claire Warwick, Durham U; Alban Webb, U of Sussex; Adrian S. Wisnicki, U of Nebraska–Lincoln.

World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of production and reception, saw the germination of a robust, script-centric dramatic culture owing to colonial networks of literary exchange and the newfound, wide availability of print technology. The author demonstrates the upheaval that literary culture underwent as a new class of literati emerged: anthologists, critics, theatre makers, publishers and translators. These people participated in global conversations that left their mark on theory in the early twentieth century. Reading through archives and ephemera, Kedar Arun Kulkarni illustrates how literary cultures in colonised locales converged with and participated fully in key defining moments of world literature, but also diverged from them to create, simultaneously, a unique literary modernity.

Inhalt: - Gautam Liu: Premchands Hindi: Zur Genese des Standardregisters in der gegenwärtigen Hindi-Prosa - Akanksha Yadav, Vinita Chandra: Conditional Vows: Exchange and Reciprocity between the Deity and Laity in Chaṭh - Arian Hopf: Das Rāmāʾin in der Urdu-Literatur - Benjamin Zachariah: Syed Mujtaba Ali's Unpainted Canvas: The Chacha Stories and a Bengali View of Weimar Germany, c. 1929–1932 - Bipasha Bhattacharya: Two Books on Visva-Bharati - Shruti Krishna Bhat: A Path of Liberation that Fetches Prosperity: Juxtaposing the Śākta View of bhukti-mukti and the Philosophy of Action-Liberation