Digital Collections

Literature on South Asia – University Library Heidelberg

Among its 265.000 books the Library of the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg also holds some rare and valuable literature from the 18th to the early 20th century. The Library offers access to digital full text versions of selected works of these historical publications and makes them available on the internet. The digitized works are recorded in Heidi, the University Library's online catalogue as well as inter-regional online catalogues..

Digitized Slide Collection Sontheimer

In 1977 Günther-Dietz Sontheimer (1934-1992) became professor for Religious History of South Asia at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, where he also taught traditional law, Marathi language and Marathi literature. During his thirty years of research he made more than 22,000 slides showing the everyday life and rituals of the common people, the peasants, the pastoral communities and ethnic minorities. This slide collection is now digitized and accessible throught the image database HeidICON. The digitization was funded by the Cluster of Excellence ”Asia and Europe in a Global Context – Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows“.

Bengali Periodicals and Newspapers

The Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive is a huge collection of textual and visual materials mainly focused on colonial Bengal. Starting in 1993, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) has undertaken the task of microfilming and digitising a huge amount of textual sources, including all the major journals of colonial Bengal. This unique collection also extends to rare Bengali books, Assamese journals and books, as well as visual art and popular culture (such as specimens of historical Bengali advertising).

In the course of a Memorandum of Understanding between the CSSSC and the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, the textual part of this collection is from now on going to be made available Savifa, the virtual library South Asia. This is hoped to be a significant step towards facilitating access to these materials and thereby stimulating further research.

GRETIL e-Library – State and University Library Göttingen

The GRETIL e-Library is a project of the Lower Saxonian State and University Library Göttingen, which provides free access to digital full texts. The main focus lies on older indological standard works as well as publications that are of interest to the history of Indology.

Digital Himalaya

The Digital Himalaya project was designed as a strategy for archiving and making available ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based at the University of Cambridge, the project was established in December 2000. From August 2011, Digital Himalaya is colocated at Cambridge and Yale Universities.

The website contains a wide range of digital material like journals, monographs, films and music documents.

Digital South Asia Library – University of Chicago

The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia. Participants in the Digital South Asia Library include leading U.S. universities and libraries as well as libraries form UK and South Asia.

Sanskrit Manuscripts – University of Pennsylvania Library

The University of Pennsylvania possesses a collection of almost 3,000 Indic manuscripts, the one of the largest in the Western hemisphere. The material is almost all from India, but a few items are from Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. The language of most of the manuscripts is Sanskrit, and the works are almost entirely connected with Hinduism (including the Vedas). There are a few manuscripts in Pali, Burmese, Sinhalese, Tibetan, Jaina Maharashtri and Prakrit. The age of the manuscript is from the middle of the 15th century, although most of the material date from the 17th and 18 centuries.