Towards a Muslim Digital Humanities in India: Participation, Cultural Infrastructure, and Computational Afterlives
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Indian Muslims are extensively represented in digital environments, yet representation is not participation in producing the cultural record: deciding what is preserved, digitised, described, made discoverable and reused. This article proposes Muslim Digital Humanities in India as a critical, field-building formation organised around that distinction. Through conceptual synthesis and illustrative cases drawn from available scholarship and existing initiatives, it argues that "Muslim" names a situated and internally plural socio-cultural problem-space, differentiated by caste, class and region. It then reads digital inequality as a question of institutional capacity for cultural production; distinguishes computational legibility, a graduated condition built up across stages of digitisation and description, from representational agency, the question of who may select, describe, restrict or decline; and shows that community authority, though it matters, guarantees neither accuracy nor pluralism and confers no representative standing. Upstream choices then bear conditionally on what search, retrieval and AI systems can later encounter. The resulting programme favours distributed custodianship and shared discoverability, and keeps governed access separate from computational reuse. A digital record in which Muslim communities are more readily represented than enabled to participate, the article concludes, is an incomplete digital record of India.
DOI: 10.17613/6n2f1-vvt87
Author: S Anas Ahmad
Institution: Aligarh Muslim University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225630453
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