ABSTRACT
Through looking at the material and social contexts within which Indian Digital Humanities (DH) communities and their engagements are imagined, challenged, and performed, this chapter examines the perils, problems, and possibilities of associating community and engagement with Indian DH. Addressing a crucial query posed by this volume regarding the engagement of communities impacted by Digital Humanities research and its stakeholders, this chapter suggests the need to locate postcolonial digitality—conceptualized as the realization of digital affordances in specific postcolonial contexts—and its relationship to community building and engagement, within its analog relationships, histories, and infrastructures. This intervention is divided into three sections with an introductory prologue that traces the history of digital (computing) infrastructures in India and its (lack of a) relationship with community and engagement, which provides necessary context for the ensuing section that analyzes representative institutional stakeholders in Indian DH and their relationship to community building. The third and final section argues that a dearth of shared institutional resources for DH community building in the Indian context results in online-only and new media-based ad hoc collectives, becoming floating virtual communities and epitomizing a form of DH commons in low-resource and Majority World contexts.
