DH Open Office Hours: Nirmala Menon
We were delighted to host the Digital Scholarship Group’s DH Open Office Hours with Nirmala Menon, Professor of Literature and Digital Humanities IIT Indore and our visiting Fulbright scholar, on March 12, 2026! Nirmala discussed her project SINDHU: An Audio Archive of Rare Sindhi Narratives which aims to build an audio-based repository of rare Sindhi literary texts written in the Perso-Arabic script before 1947, with the vision of archiving and revitalizing the undivided traditions of Sindhi literary culture.
She began by providing some background to the project, which began as an idea from one of her PhD students who works on the Sindhi language. Nirmala explained that there are twenty-two official languages in India, with Sindhi being one of them. India is divided linguistically by state, but because the Sindhi community came from what is now Pakistan during Partition, the community is spread across different states and does not have one state with the official language as Sindhi. Post partition generations of the community have adopted the Devnagari script for the written language as opposed to the Perso-Arabic script that is still in use in today’s Sindh, Pakistan.
Her PhD student Ms Vandana Govindani looks at Partition narratives written by women immediately pre- and post-Partition. A Sindhi speaker herself, she found that she was unable to read many of these narratives because they were written in the Perso-Arabic script. Many of the manuscripts from this period are housed by the Indian Institute of Sindhology (IIS) who are equal partners in this community driven project. The project team then decided to digitize these manuscripts and to provide audio files of them, so Sindhi speakers who cannot read the Perso-Arabic script could still access them.
Nirmala described how they selected 100 books from the IIS collection from this period. Not all of these works were written by women, and the selection was an iterative process with the Sindhi community. This literature tells the story of the migration of the Sindhi community. She then discusses the process of creating audio companions to these archival materials. The team needed to find individuals who were able to read Sindhi in the Perso-Arabic script. The individuals who volunteered for these readings and training often were older people in the community, many of who had memories of the immediate pre- and post-Parition time period. She explained that the Sindhi community was very invested in the work, and the project is very community-oriented.
The goal of this project is documenting the social, historical, and cultural fabric of the Sindhi community. It also aims to create a resource for other scholars to work on these manuscripts and be able to use text mining and audio transcription software for extended and deeper analysis of these narratives. In other words, the project aims to open avenues for further research. She highlights how the archival corpus contains archaic language and script that requires expert meditation. A committee of first generation Sindhi migrants and language specialists supervises the narration. The technical sound editing is then done in the IIT Indore lab. Nirmala revealed that the project decided to prepare all of the metadata in English, to increase discoverability. The metadata is a Dublin Core-informed model that is manually customized by the project team.
Nirmala explained how their initial proposal was only focused on building the audio archive, and they have recorded seventy of the one hundred texts so far. The team is currently exploring avenues for more funding to create digital editions of the manuscripts. The current focus of the archive is on literary texts, including narratives, poetry, and plays. She described the project as a “bottom-up digital model that aligns technological development with community linguistic practices.” The project is scheduled to launch in mid-2026! If you are interested in learning more about DH works in progress, the CDS and DSG hosts regular DH Open Office Hours which can be found on the CDS Events page.