This article examines the state of transition at which Sindhi-language libraries in India are located. These have become archives without being recognised as such within state or institutional frameworks. These libraries run by cultural organisations or academic institutions, house rare books and magazines, most of which no longer exist in print circulation. With a decline in readership and physical deterioration of print and other materials and the disappearance of language from contexts of governance/administration, education, and private space such as the family, these spaces deserve to be seen as housing archival material of rare value and immense importance to history and heritage, and as sites of cultural memory and language preservation. Their current condition of in-betweenness, or rather, nowhereness, has been conceptualised in this article as archiving frictions. These frictions are tensions that arise when these institutions encounter bureaucratic labyrinths, infrastructural isolation, and uncertain digital futures. The article draws on publicly circulated oral testimonies recorded with custodians of these libraries to identify three interrelated frictions: belonging, isolation, and anticipation. The concept of “archiving frictions” extends archival theory while thinking with the spectrum of archival theory that includes Derrida’s idea of archive as law/origin and Steedman’s idea of archive as dust, by bringing in a minority language context of a stateless community in India. It is offered here as an example of hope that can be extended to elsewhere in the Global South, especially in the context of preservation of minority, multiscriptal, cultural, and linguistic preservation.

As a concept within applied linguistics, areal linguistics concerns itself with investigating the nature of structural similarities among languages produced by contact rather than by history or by genetic similarities. A critical look at its descriptive linguistic agendas reveals that the domain needs to be revisited in terms of questions of power relations and linguistic inequalities within specific linguistic areas. Such investigations reconfigure the dynamics of geography and regionality within language as a site of power. This study seeks to make an intervention into India as a linguistic area with a focus on Sindhi, a non-regional language in India. Given that the language and the community do not have a state or a linguistic territory within India, the condition of Sindhi is characterized by a sense of precarity. Seen through the prism of India as a linguistic area, this precarity is not quite visible. In revisiting the celebrated concept of India as a linguistic area, this study suggests ways of asking contemporary questions about areal linguistics that go beyond describing the nature of contact among languages, and instead ask how this contact impacts the markers of hegemony over minor languages in terms of technological, epistemological, and aesthetic leverage.

James O’Sullivan’s edited volume is, to use his words, likely to attract three kinds of readers: DH-experts, DH-curious, and naysayers. This review examines what the book offers to each category of readers, as a way of approaching the Herculean task of capturing a glimpse of 43 chapters that touch upon the domain in diverse ways. The self-critical spirit consistently demonstrated across chapters will stimulate dialogue regarding the gains made by DH when analysing culture textually.

Affect towards islands is a unique approach to engage with in discussions of the phenomenology of fictional islands. This affect complements the already identified tropes within island poetics: those of sensorial exploration, spatial practices, and textural detailing of islands. This article turns to a work of fiction about a fictional island based on the island city of Kochi in south India to unpack an alternative aesthetic of spatiality, the kind that changes the personal/ political relationship to personal/spatial one. We argue that the novel, Litanies of Dutch Battery (the novel in question) by N.S. Madhavan, expands inquiries into phenomenology of fictional islands by making space for corporeal memory and collective memory in storytelling. These memory-oriented narrative devices, we suggest, “provincialize” island poetics to add a hermeneutic of postcolonial angst to the repertoire of formal features of literary islandness.

An interest in Jewish topographies involves looking at Jewish presence in locations that help relocalize Jewish space. In this article, we argue that the task of reading Jewish identity as a diaspora community calls for a location and geography specific response, especially in aesthetic discourses that unfold Jewish identity situated outside the Eurocentric contexts. Such location-specific readings can enable a “provincializing” of the West-centric construct of Jewish identity. We argue that Malayalam author Sethu's novel Aliyah: The Last Jew of the Village is an interesting case in point. Set in the middle of the twentieth century, the novel deals with the ways in which the Jews living near Cochin, an island-city in the southern province of Kerala in India, respond to the call for a “return” to Israel. As the Jews and other communities respond to the developments around a possible return, the Jewish and non-Jewish characters in the novel all unpack a different discourse about how Jews belong to Cochin, a phenomenon that can be appreciated once one begins to understand that Jews, as a quintessential diaspora community, have had multiple histories of inhabiting geographies. Foregrounding these locations, through provincializing, might offer possibilities of challenging stereotypes in literary critiques.

Linguistic diversity does not find adequate space in LIS discourses around libraries in India and other regions with similar kinds of linguistic heritage. This study focuses on the state of Sindhi literature in India through a look at the libraries that house the works of Sindhi literary activity in post-Partition India. The objective is to highlight the role of libraries within language revitalization efforts. This study puts forth a five-point framework for digital transformation of Sindhi libraries in India which can help broaden the digital transformation efforts elsewhere in the Global South especially with minor languages and dialects. While the five-point framework is customized to the specific challenges faced by Sindhi regarding its script (and includes designing solutions for OCR, transliteration, and text to speech interaction), its principles could be applied to several other linguistic contexts, especially in the Global South. It, thus, seeks to bring LIS into sharp focus within the social imagination of communities of readers and as speakers of a language, and not just as academic institutions alone.

Purpose: Given that Indian languages in general are under-represented on the internet and that languages of minority linguistic groups find very little space on digital platforms, it is imperative for institutions such as libraries to cater to smaller communities and their educational needs while also reaching out to them in their own languages. This study aims to deliberate on strategies for enlisting community support for gathering diverse learning resources in different languages and for enlisting participation in activities such as crowdsourcing in initiatives such as annotations and transliteration. Design/methodology/approach: This paper calls for interventions that imagine and create infrastructure for the flourishing of smaller libraries that can draw from and feed into large-scale national and international libraries. Offering a conceptual framework to rethink the country’s approach toward minor languages, it first offers an overview of policies and initiatives relevant to the concerns of minor languages in digital libraries in India. Based on the policy analysis, it then goes on to suggest starting points for policy designers and custodians of libraries to help them work toward better representation of languages in their resources. Findings: The existing frameworks analyzed here for the greater or representation of minor Indian languages reveal a culture of silence toward the issue of language. With some advocacy, these frameworks can be mined to craft different ways that are critical not just for enriching libraries but also for preservation of cultural heritage of the communities concerned, thus adding a larger social dimension to the question of access. Originality/value: While a lot of socio-political discourse on minority languages in India exists, this study pushes for their bearing on digital libraries, educational frameworks and cultural heritage.

There is much to learn about how some locales come to be deemed as more cosmopolitan than others. Mumbai is hailed as a cosmopolitan city and even a model for India. With an increasing sense of disappointment about the decline of cosmopolitanism in such metropolitan cities, there is a need to look at what other locales can offer as alternative models of cosmopolitanism. This article addresses Kochi as a locale that is nuanced with precolonial practices of cosmopolitanism. This move towards provincialising cosmopolitanism – in the sense of moving away from metropolitan locales to highlight deeper, more historical and local ways of being cosmopolitan – is informed by the growing emphasis on the need to explore subaltern or vernacular cosmopolitanism.

When Sindhi Hindus came to India after the 1947 Partition, they had little to help them survive as a community. Given the linguistic organization of states in independent India, the community has been striving to forge an identity comparable to other communities that have a state/territory they can flourish in. First, Sindhis struggled to gain recognition for their language as an official language listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India. Second, they demanded that entertainment content be broadcast in Sindhi in official national media spaces. The case of Sindhi stands as a fascinating case study at the intersection of ideas such as nationalism, citizenship, and minority identity. The case of Sindhi is also a narrative of self-transformation, one of which is its struggle for survival that has also led to the revival of the question of its script. In the 1960s, a faction among the Sindhi intelligentsia proposed that in order to stay relevant and alive in India, it must adopt the Devanagari script and give up its Perso-Arabic script associated with the language since the nineteenth century. In this essay, I revisit this debate to uncover postcolonial grammatology as an approach to deal with South Asian sites of language and writing.

Studies of Partition frequently turn to literature to understand how displacement processes, among other things, impact aesthetics and representation. This article takes a broader view of aesthetics as representation: it demonstrates how turning to the literary archive of a moment and a community gives rise to questions about the politics of individual texts and literary historiography. Centered on Sindhi literature produced in India after Partition, it shows that examining the literary productivity of the community needs to involve questions of literature as political survival. It focuses on the earliest essays from the Sindhi literary scene in India (published in the Sahitya Akademi journal Indian Literature). The article argues that these essays register anxiety about the survival of a language trying to come into being in an already existing and complicated language-nation relationship. It unpacks three registers of anxiety visible in the literary archive to broaden the scope of the conversations around the Sindhi language and its literature.

Indian fiction and critical engagements with it have a metropolitan bias. The preference for representations of big cities such as Mumbai in fiction means that non-metropolitan (“provincial”) spaces in India face neglect, literary and otherwise. This article argues for provincializing Indian fiction by exploring non-metropolitan locations as imagined in works of fiction to unpack alternative spatialities. The example offered is Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. In most readings of the novel, Bombay (along with Moorish Spain) is highlighted as a metropolitan model for India. Cochin does not figure in these readings, passed over as if just a random background or setting for the characters to be launched into Mumbai. This article addresses Cochin’s marginalization through investigating the way the island city offers a provincial, alternative, non-metropolitan theorization of spatialities in Indian fiction. The larger objective is to make space for similarly marginalized non-European locales in the discourse of cosmopolitanism.

The narrative approach to city writing in the postcolonial world gravitates towards metropolitan spaces. The discourse around how these cities are imagined and theorized uses reference points from modernity. With the emergence of the spatial turn in literary theory and criticism, this discourse borrows from Western, postmodern sensibilities to define cities and their narrative possibilities. In contrast to these sensibilities, regional variations of practising narrative geography that are non-Western and pre-modern reveal a heightened sense of territorial consciousness and a claim towards mythological origins posing as history. One of these genres is that of the pre-modern genre of the sthala purana from India. This article seeks to foreground it as a geographical narrative of individual locales within India. We argue that it is a genre that opens up fascinating possibilities for the exploration of cities outside postcolonial metropolises so that such spaces can be understood on their own terms rather than being compared to the big city as if it were a paradigm. We focus on one Kochi (a city in Kerala) novel by Sethu, The Saga of Muziris to explicate the knowledge-making about cities at work in such narrative geography in the way it invokes Kochi’s ancestor of the ancient port city of Muziris.

Exercises in feminist theology outside Western contexts and outside of discourses of theorisation can prove to be enriching to address the disconnection between secular and religious feminisms. One way to address this disconnection is to locate the intersection between secular and religious feminisms in the space of fiction. While mytho-fiction about the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, has been around for quite some time and has been extensively analysed for its critique of religion and diversity of representation of heroines, the feminist hermeneutic of reconstruction is only now witnessing a resurgence in Buddhism. This article focuses on Buddhist Studies scholar Vanessa R Sasson’s debut novel Yasodhara and the Buddha for its blending of feminist consciousness with the Buddhist ethos of love. It is hoped that this exercise will be found meaningful in understanding women’s experiences of and attitudes towards religion.

Being and Time, in the light of contemporary thought—literary, philosophical, anthropological, scientific, and historical—have been drastically transformed by debates trying to reframe the crisis of climate change. It is crucial to factor the challenges into everyday conversations about how to live and what to do with (one’s or its general representation of) time. Amitav Ghosh, Radhika Govindrajan, Karine Gagné, Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Timothy Lenton, Shubhangi Swarup and Marilyn Nelson provide instances to think differently about the visibility of any change to the human eye and life. What emerges in this process of contemplation is a set of radical ideas and practices to bring about inter-species harmony.

Website selection is pivotal to virtual shopping. Consumers evaluate online retailers websites on the basis of identified criteria and sub-criteria before undergoing shopping. Among all product categories, the lifestyle segment occupies a sumptuous pie of online retail. The present study attempts to rank shopping websites for fashion and lifestyle segments in the fuzzy environment using an assessment for the analytic hierarchy process model and fuzzy TOPSIS. A case analysis has been performed to exhibit the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model. Marketers may arrive at strategic insights and use them to augment their existing policies to cater to the customers requirements as discussed in this study.

Feminist re-visioning has led to heterogenous retellings of mythological heroines in fiction. Sita and Draupadi, two of the well-known Indian mythological characters, have been explored in various capacities in mythological fiction. Yashodhara, Buddha’s wife, is a recent addition to this re-visioning project. This article seeks to engage with three retellings of Yashodhara’s story—each of which is radically different from the others. The result is the rise of hagiographical fiction around the character—responsive to the Buddhist ethos of love and spirituality. This article argues that the most intriguing representations of Yashodhara found in this fiction are rooted in the nonoppositional agency given to her character.