The Project

Literature as a way
of knowing the ocean

This project seeks to integrate blue humanities with digital humanities to build an open-access, crowdsourced digital repository for fictional writings that depict waterscapes and water bodies in India and beyond. In doing so, the project endeavours to address the necessity of developing ontological and epistemological frameworks in reading literary fiction and history from an aquatic perspective. In congruence with the idea of ‘thinking with the ocean,’ the project seeks to develop an open-access searchable database for literary works from India that pertain to the Indian Ocean, encompassing themes of seas, rivers, islands, coastal belts, littoral, deltas, and marine and riverine ecologies and cultures.

Each entry represents a novel, novella, or play that centres a named ocean or sea as a structuring element.