Conversations on Digital Humanities

This book brings together the essential debates concerning the emergent area of Digital Humanities in India. Through the interviews, the book attempts to identify the differences and convergences between DH practice in 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 which have bestowed DH (in India) with many complications and contentions. Conversations on the Digital Humanities depicts 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 existing discipline of literary studies, towards charting the features of DH as an emerging discourse. For example, for some scholars DH is understood as a ‘method’, while others consider it to be a discipline; similarly, while some scholars agree DH in India as a derivative of DH in the Global South, others consider DH as in India as different from DH in the Global North. This book brings together these different, yet diverse and distinct notions in form of conversations, not to provide 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, that 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, media and communication studies. The volume brings together diverse voices concerning not only Digital Humanities 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 Digital Humanities 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, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology Silchar, is nearing the completion of her doctoral studies. Her research delves into the intersections of literature, new media studies, and digital humanities. Sunanda has contributed scholarly articles to renowned journals such as South Asian Popular Culture and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies.