Reading Silence with Machines: AI, Digital Humanities, and Global South Knowledge in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

Abstract

This paper studies Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in relation to Global South knowledge systems through Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things. The Global South includes societies where knowledge is shaped by daily life, memory, caste, language, and silence. Such knowledge is often difficult for AI systems to understand because AI mainly works with clear data and repeated words.
The study uses an interdisciplinary approach by combining literature, social science, and digital technology. Simple Digital Humanities tools such as word counts, theme grouping, and basic emotion analysis are used to study the novel. The digital results are then compared with close reading to understand what the AI tools notice and what they miss.
The results show that AI tools mainly highlight themes like love, family, and childhood because these appear clearly in the text. However, important ideas such as caste discrimination, social rules, trauma, and silence receive less attention in digital analysis. These ideas are central to the novel and represent important forms of knowledge in Global South societies. The study also finds that AI tools struggle to understand the novel’s non-linear storytelling and culturally meaningful silences.
The discussion explains that these limits are not mistakes but reveal how AI systems are shaped by Western ways of understanding knowledge. Digital Humanities helps us see these limits clearly and question how knowledge is organized and interpreted by technology. The paper concludes that Global South literary texts need culturally sensitive digital methods. It also stresses the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue to develop fair and inclusive AI systems that can better engage with diverse knowledge traditions.