The postdigital postcolonial: A study of the Anglo-Indian community through the Augmented Reality app MemoryBytes

Abstract

This article examines the Augmented Reality app MemoryBytes, which documents and presents the history and lived experience of the 500-year-old Anglo-Indian community in India, as a site for studying cultural preservation and intergenerational identity-iterations through an intersection of memory studies and digital humanities. Using Johny Miranda’s novella Requiem for the Living (2004) as entry point, this article seeks to trace the diachronic movement of this community and study its slow social changes through historical trajectories, inherited practices, and kinship networks. Such an entry point is necessitated due to the absences and silences in historiography, which arguably may be redressed only through an examination of the community’s experiences of integration and alienation through an entanglement of private and public markers of memory. We argue that the Anglo-Indian situation in postcolonial India facilitates an experiential as well as a strategic projection of changing identities and memories, which entail an enquiry into the politics and processes of producing and preserving hyphenated historical narratives. From its selected historical and textual readings, the article will move on to examine how the memories of this changing Anglo-Indian community may be mapped via postdigital networks through a study of MemoryBytes, an Augmented Reality-based application developed at the Centre for Memory Studies, IIT Madras in 2022, which captures and calibrates the 500-year-old histories and lived experiences of the Anglo-Indians in India, illustrating the iterations of such hyphenated and hybrid identities through a memory-ecology of interactive information and images. We aim to foreground how the fluidity, connectivity, and mobility of the postdigital ecology offer inclusive, interactive, and interaffective frameworks for engaging with complex identities by breaking the binaries of public and private spheres through a digital reconstruction of cultural markers, cuisines, public events, and family documents. Through this entanglement, we hope to highlight how the postdigital productions and preservations of postcolonial identities illustrate slow changes in alienated communities through historical, material, and affective processes.