Conversations on Digital Humanities: Contentions and Contingencies in the Indian Context

This book brings together the essential debates concerning the emergent area of Digital Humanities (DH) in India. Through the interviews, the book attempts to identify the differences and convergences between DH practice in India and that of Global North. The book can be seen as a compendium for exploring multifarious layers of the ‘digital’ and its relationship with humanities, academia, and beyond, thereby giving rise to many complications and contentions within DH in India. Conversations on DH depict the chequered and amorphous nature of DH practice in India―as an academic discipline, as a methodology, as community projects, and as an appendage to the existing discipline of literary studies, toward charting the features of DH as an emerging discourse. For example, some scholars understand DH as a ‘method’, while others regard it as a discipline. Similarly, while some view DH in India as a derivative of DH in the Global South, others consider it distinct from DH in the Global North. This book brings together these different, yet diverse and distinct notions in form of conversations, to provide not a uniform understanding of DH, but a comprehensive view of the paradigm of what can be tentatively understood as ‘Indian DH’. As editors, we ensure that this book captures the pluralities around the concerns of DH, which are determined not by us, but by scholars and practitioners who have been steering the area of DH.

This volume will be of interest to those making their initial entry into the area of DH―particularly, students of literary studies, cultural studies, and media and communication studies. The volume brings together diverse voices concerning not only DH practice but also practices concerning the broader discourse of the digital and digitality; alongside, the volume will allow readers to engage with the evolving landscape of DH with respect to the Indian context.

Avishek Ray teaches at the National Institute of Technology Silchar. He is the author of The Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination: Representation, Agency & Resilience (2022); co-author of Digital Expressions of the Self(ie): The Social Life of Selfies in India (2024) and Temporal Spaces in Calcutta: Digital Networks in the Wake of the Pandemic (2026); editor of Decolonial Travel: Vernacular Mobilities in India (2025); and co-editor of Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere: Religious Politics in India (2020). In 2021, his academic excellence was recognized with the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship.

Sunanda Kar teaches in the Department of Social Sciences and Languages at the Vellore Institute of Technology Chennai. Her research delves into the intersections of literature, new media, and digital cultures. She has published in South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge) and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies (Penn State University Press).