Digital Collection

South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia. The member-driven collection includes historical and contemporary sources from and about the region in arts, humanities, social sciences, history of science, and other fields in English and other South Asian languages.

Digital Collection

South Asia Commons is a digital archive which houses endangered materials — grey literature, primary sources, new media, voices from the Global South.

New Delhi, India

The National Archives of India was established in 1891 as the Imperial Records Department, and remains the biggest archival repository in South Asia. It contains an expansive corpus of public records, private papers, cartographic records, microfilms, among others.

Washington D.C. | Digital Collections

The Library of Congress’ South Asia Collection comprises thousands of titles in over a hundred languages. Their helpful research guide gives an overview of the materials they house, and offer help in accessing digital collections, e-resources and other web archives.

Cambridge, England | Digitized Collection

The Cambridge South Asian Archive holds materials covering a period of over 200 years, including written collections, maps, photographs, and collections of cinéfilms. The materials paint a rich picture of the Raj and the early decades of post-colonial South Asia. The majority of the collection is digitized, with the photograph collection’s digitization in progress.

The DSAL provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, and others. The program is supported by a number of institutions in the U.S. and across the world.

Digital Collection

The AITUC is the oldest trade union federation in India. The archival collection consists of documents of the AITUC from 1928-1970 that were included in one of the major digitization projects of trade union documents of "The Archives of Indian Labour", set up in 1998 as a collaborative initiative of the V.V.Giri National Labour Institute (VVGNLI) and the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH).

Digital Collection

Archive Nepal aims to develop a digital archive of Nepal and serve as a platform to publish and discover historic materials related to Nepal’s history and culture. The collection consists of 30,000 digitized materials which are free to use and share.

Digital Collection

This collection surveys Islamic monuments in India and is the result of a collaboration between the Aga Khan Documentation Center, MIT libraries, the Research and Information Center for Asian Studies, and Five Cross Architects in Mumbai, India.

Digital Collection

This collection documents the activity of a generation of Sri Lankan radical activists who, in their different ways, attempted to escape the claims of rival ethno-nationalisms and build alternative political and development projects, drawing on Marxism, Christian socialism, and feminism, among other inspirations.

Digital Collection

Local periodicals came to be established in the 19th century, including Bengal Magazine, Haris Chandra’s Magazine, Mookerjee’s Magazine, The Indian Magazine, Allahabad Review, The Madras Review and others. This digitized collection offers access to a number of these periodicals.

Digital Archive

Granthappura or the Kerala Digital Archive is flagship project of the Indic Digital Archive Foundation. It consists of cultural artifacts related to Kerala and Malayalam, culminating in over 2,000 digitized books and publications.

Digital Collection

The Long Emergency Collection was primarily conceived as a series of oral history interviews documenting journalistic praxis around the time of the Indian Emergency (1975-1977).

Digital Collection

The LUMS Digital Archive is a research repository that aims at collecting, cataloging and preserving rare material (books, pamphlets, newspapers and other items) of historical significance and making them available to researchers. In particular, the archive focuses on events, groups, movements and personalities relating to broader historical, political and cultural trends in South Asia, with an emphasis on preserving the accounts of marginalized and subaltern groups.

MAP academy is an open access online platform dedicated to building equitable resources for the study of art histories and transregional connections in South Asia and beyond. They also offer online courses and lecture series.

Digital Collection

This collection holds more than 4,000 video-based oral history interviews. The interviews have been recorded in over 300 cities from 12 counties and in 22 languages. They attempt to highlight the story of Partition, pre-Partition life and culture, and post-Partition transitions.

Digital Collection

As the personal and working archive of an author, activist and family member, the Sajjad Zaheer Digital Archive is a rich collection of materials from letters to manuscripts to photographs. Containing over 4000 items, the collection documents the life and career of Sajjad Zaheer and highlights contemporaneous writers, politics and the Zaheer family from Lucknow, India.

Digital Collection

The South Asian Gender and Sexuality Web Archive documents and preserves the work of activists, grassroots organizations, and social justice movements committed to promoting the visibility and experiences of LGBTQAI+ people and women in South Asia and its diasporas.

Digital Collection

SAADA includes storytelling projects, exhibits, artistic partnerships, walking tours, lesson plans, and books. It is the largest publicly accessible archive of South Asian American stories.

Digital Collection

The South Asian Oral History Project represents one of the first attempts in the U.S. to record pan-South Asian immigrant experiences in the Pacific Northwest using the medium of oral history. This project is housed in the University of Washington Libraries. The project has been conducted in four phases. Each phase is marked by key historical events that drew South Asians to the United States.

Digital Collection

This collection contains photographs, videos, film, writing, and audio content relating to the Tibetan plateau and southern Himalaya regions. All their content is open access and built collaboratively.

Digital Collection

The University of Texas at Austin Libraries is developing a collection of popular and pulp fiction in the regional languages of South Asia. These novels, novellas and serialized stories help challenge what qualifies “worthy” both in terms of style and substance while also providing a unique lens through which themes of gender, sexuality, caste & religion, authority can be explored. 

The South Asian Ephemera Collection is an openly accessible repository of items that spans a variety of subjects and languages and supports research, teaching, and private study. Newly acquired materials are digitized and added on an ongoing basis.

Digital Collection

A strength of the South Asian collection at the Library of Congress is the historical acquisition of smaller and shorter monographs, including booklets, pamphlets, and other ephemera. There are about 150 pamphlet collections of print materials organized by topic, each with its own number of items.

Digital Collection

The Government of India’s enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and promotion of the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) sparked tensions and fears among its people. The Indian CAA Protest Movements Web Archive documents the widespread social justice movements and anti-CAA organizations to support them, as well as the allied movements mobilizing women and students with them, including groups of freedom fighters, oppressed castes, transgender people, and other marginalized communities.

Digital Collection

The South Asian Governmental Publications Web Archive aims to collect and preserve open access online formats of government serials from South Asia. From demographic data to legislative proceedings, the serials that form the focus of the Archive include publications on all subjects and from all countries of the region (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka).

Digital Collection

This collection is designed to be a repository of sociological and anthropological studies of education in India. By ‘sociological and anthropological studies of education’ they refer to scientific enquiries into pedagogic sites and relationships in society which include, yet are not confined within, formal education institutions and the interaction therein.

University of Copenhagen, Denmark | Digitized Collection

The collection consists of about 3,000 Indic manuscripts collected from the Varanasi area, the majority of which are from the 18th-19th centuries, with some dating back to the 15th-16th centuries. The collection is especially strong within the genres of ritual, law, and astral science.