Tools to dismantle the Master’s DH(ouse): towards a genealogy of Partition, digital necropolitics and Bollywood cinema

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay challenges the patriarchal and Eurocentric biases of the digital humanities (DH) by critically placing the field in a genealogy of postcolonial studies. I do so to counter the ‘genesis narrative’ of DH in which an Italian priest named Father Roberto Busa ‘pioneered’ humanities computing. I draw on postcolonial digital humanities and additional framings to demonstrate Empire's intentional unavailability of technological resources, like census cards, that may have mediated against communal bloodshed while also serving as a testament to early technology that nurtured DH. After detailing the violent production of racialised colonialism's impossibility of an Indian modernity, I turn to Bollywood cinema as a technological realm through which we can trace an alternative genealogy anchored by digital necropolitics, or the right to expose people to harm in cyberspace. I conclude by arguing, especially in the context of the violent present, for the essential need for a way of engaging digital humanities and South Asia beyond canonical productions of both. This essay contributes to current dialogues in postcolonial studies, the digital humanities, and studies in biopolitics/ necropolitics.