ABSTRACT
Laboratories are contested sites, particularly in postcolonial spaces where imperial oppression was often legitimised through the scientific, political, and cultural valency of laboratories. This chapter, emerging from the experiences of the authors as Indian digital humanities scholars, teachers, and practitioners, examines why DH labs in India may possibly and necessarily be divergent from the “laboratory turn” in the humanities and more specifically in digital humanities, as seen in the Global North. By emphasising that lab-based DH environments are an exception rather than the norm in India, where “existing institutional infrastructure [are] often inadequate, and mostly outdated” (Sneha 2016), this chapter, through representative case studies, explores whether DH labs in a country like India may be a space where the discipline of digital humanities itself becomes a laboratory and a means for thinking about the state and future of the humanities. In juxtaposing the normative legacies, imaginaries, and infrastructures of DH labs alongside postcolonial discontents around laboratories, this intervention highlights examples and proposes strategies through which labs can become decolonised locations for resisting techno-positivist imaginaries by operationalising collaboration, extant affordances, and innovation in humanistic enquiry.
