Grief has become a market. Across China, North America, and Europe, commercial services now offer to simulate deceased individuals through AI, pricing their products by the depth of the reconstruction: animated photographs for a few dollars, conversational chatbots for hundreds, full avatar services with voice and personality for thousands. The industry has attracted regulatory attention, stock market filings, and hundreds of thousands of users. What it has not confronted is the prior question on which all of it rests: what data can stand in for a person, and by whose authority that substitution is made.

This paper draws on a qualitative comparative case study of fifteen cases documented between 2016 and 2025, spanning commercial platforms, individual creators, and publicly documented interventions across North America, Europe, China, South Korea, and Mexico. The analysis identifies four ontological positions through which the dead are constituted as data, each encoding a distinct theory of where personhood resides and what material can carry it. Nevertheless, such divergences are not technical variations on a shared premise, but prior decisions about what a person essentially is, made before any algorithm runs, and they determine everything that follows: what the system can claim to contain, and what the bereaved are implicitly told they are encountering.

Among commercial operators, the selection between these positions follows market structure rather than epistemological judgement. The biometric approach is the only one compatible with serving clients who arrive after sudden loss with a photograph and a voice clip, and that population is where the volume is, yet the result is an unequal distribution of epistemic risk across the bereaved population. Those with resources and anticipatory time receive systems whose framing is consistent with what the architecture contains, while those in acute grief with minimal data receive the most expansive claims about what has been captured.

Cases from China, where products and pricing span the full range of data ontologies, operators discuss their market reasoning, and regulatory responses have been triggered, make the commercial logic behind most legible. The paper situates these cases as a more developed instance of structural forces operating across the field and asks whether governance frameworks that address only the social effects of these services, without engaging the data construction practices and incentive structures producing them, can reach what is actually at stake.

Digital Humanities (DH) has often been narrated through Euro-American genealogies, infrastructures, and epistemologies, even as its methods circulate globally and are applied to non-Western archives and traditions. This paper asks a deceptively simple question: “Can there be digital humanities from an Indic perspective?” Rather than treating “Indic” as a purely geographic or national label, the paper approaches it as a constellation of epistemic, aesthetic, and ethical commitments emerging from South Asian knowledge systems, including visual theory, oral and ritual pedagogies, and multilingual textual cultures. The question is not whether DH can be applied to Indic materials, but whether the very categories of “data,” “interface,” and “method” can be reconfigured by Indic concepts of knowledge, embodiment, and transmission.

Drawing on a case study of ongoing work to build a digital archive of Kerala mural paintings, the paper situates temple murals as a visual practice grounded in Sanskrit texts such as Chitrasūtra, and Citralakshaṇa, and in living paramparā (lineages) of painters and ritual experts. These murals are not simply images to be documented, but are understood as vehicles of darśan, rasa, and embodied learning, where seeing is entangled with devotion, cosmology, and pedagogy. When such a tradition is “translated” into a database, or metadata schema what is lost, what is reconfigured, and what becomes newly thinkable? The paper argues that the “untranslatable” here is not a remainder to be solved away, but a productive tension that reveals the limits of prevailing DH ontologies of the image, the object, and the user.

Methodologically, the paper combines three strands: (a) close reading of Indic aesthetic and technical treatises, (b) critical analysis of DH discourse on global and postcolonial digital humanities, and (c) reflective practice grounded in the design of an actual archive. Through this triangulation, it shows how key Indic categories, such as shilp (craft/technique), darshan (sacred seeing), and raas (aesthetic-emotive experience), pose challenges to default assumptions about representation, reproducibility, and access in DH platforms. For example, the expectation that all users should have identical, decontextualized access to high-resolution images may conflict with temple protocols or community-specific forms of stewardship, raising questions about who defines “openness” and “accessibility.”

This paper tries to establish that asking whether there can be digital humanities from an Indic perspective is ultimately a question about the politics of translation in contemporary DH. If translation is understood only as the movement of non-Western materials into existing computational and theoretical frames, then “Indic DH” risks becoming a content layer atop unchanged infrastructures and concepts. If, however, translation is acknowledged as asymmetrical, partial, and sometimes impossible, then the “untranslatable” can serve as a methodological prompt that pushes practitioners to build archives, interfaces, and terms that honor Indic ways of knowing and community needs.