Decolonising AI in Contemporary India: Pluriversal Feminist Critiques of Language Technologies and Women’s Safety in the Majority World Postdigital Age

Abstract In contemporary scholarly discourse, India’s rapidly expanding Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem is portrayed as a catalyst for development, aligning with global narratives of technological optimism. In this paper, the discourse will be critically assessed through a feminist-decolonial lens, hypothesising that, without critical engagement, AI initiatives can reinforce historical power asymmetries and social biases. This paper further examines if AI-driven solutions in India have inadvertently marginalised the very communities they aim to empower by drawing from postcolonial theory, including Spivak’s concept of the subaltern, and feminist epistemology from Harding’s standpoint theory, with three case studies, namely, biometric welfare systems, AI applications for women’s safety, and language translation from rural and semi-urban contexts focusing on the challenges faced by marginalised women in navigating AI systems in India. The analysis of this research is informed by the Majority World perspective. It will synthesise insights to review the entanglement of technology with social context in the postdigital era, offering recommendations towards a more pluralistic and gender-just AI praxis for marginalised women. Ultimately, this paper advocates reimagining India’s AI future beyond dominant ‘development’ paradigms, with a focus on epistemic justice and inclusivity for underprivileged women. Across the three cases, I treat the postdigital not as a stage ‘after’ the digital but as an entangled condition in which systems attempt to code embodied markers of identity, i.e. fingerprints, faces/behaviour, and language, into computable gatekeeping devices, and where exclusions appear as everyday friction rather than isolated technical glitches.