Indianizing digital humanities: epistemic negotiations, institutional practices, and postcolonial contexts

This article examines Digital Humanities (DH) in India as a contested, unevenly institutionalised field whose trajectory cannot be explained through Euro-American histories of ‘humanities computing’. Instead, it conceptualises Indian DH as a relational formation shaped by archival inheritances, institutional improvisation, and multilingual epistemic practices. Based on interviews with practitioners across universities, research centres, and independent initiatives, the study shows how calls to ‘Indianize’ DH emerge from conditions of scarce institutional support, fragile digital infrastructures, and unstable disciplinary boundaries. The field appears organisationally dispersed – across electives, certificate courses, temporary centres, and short modules – requiring continual efforts to assert academic legitimacy. Yet DH work also extends earlier traditions of digitisation, community archiving, and public documentation that predate formal disciplinary consolidation. Placed within postcolonial debates on technocratic rationality, datafication, and knowledge politics, these findings reveal persistent frictions between imported conceptual frameworks and vernacular intellectual traditions. The article concludes that ‘Indianizing’ DH entails acknowledging these negotiations and the heterogeneous, improvised pathways through which the field continues to take shape.