Theorising Prompt Humanities: Human–AI Interpretation and Postcolonial Knowledge in Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome
Ramyabrata Chakraborty *
Department of English, Srikishan Sarda College, Hailakandi, Assam, India.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Generative artificial intelligence has made prompting a prominent mode of interaction between users and large language models, but prompting is not exhausted by its technical role in eliciting model outputs. This article proposes Prompt Humanities as an interdisciplinary interpretive framework for examining prompts as rhetorical, hermeneutic, and culturally situated acts. Drawing on philosophical hermeneutics, reader-response criticism, speech-act theory, poststructuralism, Digital Humanities, and postcolonial studies, the framework asks how prompt-mediated interaction reframes questions of interpretation, authorship, dialogue, and knowledge production.
The framework is developed through a qualitative close reading of Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome. Rather than claiming that Ghosh predicted contemporary generative AI, the article treats the novel retrospectively as a literary site in which recursive questioning, fragmented archives, distributed forms of knowledge, and computer-mediated inquiry can be compared with prompt-mediated interpretation. The analysis focuses on Murugan's revisionary hypotheses, Mangala's counter-scientific network, Antar's interactions with the digital system Ava, and the novel's persistent resistance to epistemological closure.
The article argues that Prompt Humanities can complement existing Digital Humanities and postcolonial approaches by making the prompt itself an object of literary and cultural analysis. Its contribution is therefore not the claim that prompting has been absent from humanities scholarship, but the development of a specific integrative vocabulary for analysing how questions, responses, archives, and interpretive agents are organised in human–AI and literary contexts. The framework is presented as provisional and transferable, requiring further testing across texts, languages, genres, and forms of human–AI interaction.
Keywords: Prompt Humanities, generative artificial intelligence, digital humanities, Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome, hermeneutics, postcolonial studies, human–AI interaction