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Awesome Digital History of South Asia Awesome

Welcome to the South Asian Digital History repository! Our project is dedicated to indexing the libraries and historical records of South Asia - with a particular focus on Digital History. Digital History as in two things

  • "the history of the digital" - Technology and the Internet and their interplay with socio-cultural phenomenon
  • Digitized History - As archives across the South Asian move to digitization, many of the cultural and historical artifacts locked away in buildings also become accessible

We've curated a collection of links and resources that offer insights into digital history as a discipline in the particular context of South Asia. There are also courses on digital humanities, data visualization, and other relevant topics that provide an excellent foundation for exploring the history of the region.

We welcome contributions from anyone who shares our passion for finding narratives of South Asian digital history. Formalising archives top-down often results in the perpetuation of colonial ideas around what constitutes knowledge and who gets to claim it and profit from it. So the archives curated here cover a large spectrum in terms of what might be "traditionally" considered an archive.

Forked from Awesome Digital History

Contents

Contribute

Contributions welcome! Read the Guide to Contributing first.

South Asian Digital Archives

Sources:

The Subcontinent

  • Museum of Art and Photography - MAP is custodian to a growing collection of over 18,000 works of art, predominantly from South Asia and dating from the 10th century to the present.
  • The Polis Project - Our work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world.
  • 1947partitionarchive - Partition Archive.
  • Tasveer Ghar: Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture - Tasveer Ghar is a trans-national virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia's exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.
  • South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) - South Asia Open Archives is a free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia.
  • South Asian American Digital Archive - This archive principally offers material on South Asian migrants who have made their homes in the United States.
  • South Asian Newspapers - This is a digitized, partial archive of nine newspapers from the subcontinent, freely accessible. Most cover the 1960s and 1970s period, but there is one from the mid-19th century and another from the early 20th century.
  • The South Asian Literary Recordings Project - Launched in April 2000, to record the voices of South Asian authors for the Library of Congress' Archive of Recorded World Literature, the project has captured the readings of prominent South Asian poets, novelists, and playwrights. The authors recorded so far represent more than fifteen of the languages of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
  • E-Books: Full-Text Online Books on South Asia - (SARAI).
  • LUMS Digital Archive - 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.
  • People's Archive of Rural India (PARI) - A multimedia digital journalism platform and living archive founded by P. Sainath documenting everyday lives across rural India, including the Grindmill Songs Project with over 100,000 folk songs from Maharashtra and a Creative Commons-licensed library on climate, health, gender, and agriculture.
  • SAMHiTA - South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive - An initiative of the India International Centre creating a relational database and open digital archive of South Asian manuscripts housed in repositories outside India, tracking the historical dispersal of Indic texts across Asia and Europe from the 2nd-3rd centuries CE onward.
  • Schwartzberg Historical Atlas of South Asia - The digitized version of Joseph Schwartzberg's monumental atlas containing over 650 maps covering the subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern era, hosted by the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library.
  • South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories - A digital resource documenting the long history of South Asian presence in Britain, covering indentured labor, post-WWII migration, "twice migrants" expelled from Uganda in 1972, and an archives directory pointing to collections across UK institutions.
  • South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA) - A UK-based national arts heritage resource celebrating the work of first-generation British South Asian artists who arrived post-Partition, now a permanent addition to Birmingham Museums' collection.
  • Striking Women - An interactive digital resource documenting the history of South Asian women's migration and labor struggles from indentured labor (1834-1917) through post-WWII UK migration, built from oral history interviews and archival materials on industrial disputes like the Grunwick strike.

Bangladesh

  • Bangladesh Film Archive - Government archive preserving Bangladesh's cinematic heritage through digital restoration, holding digitized copies of Bangabandhu's historic 7th March Speech (UNESCO World Documentary Heritage), East Bengal's first film "Mukh O Mukhosh" (1956), and the country's Film Museum.
  • Bangladesh Genocide Archive - An online archive of chronology of events, documentations, audio, video, images, media reports and eyewitness accounts of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh in the hands of Pakistan army.
  • Banglapedia - The first and most comprehensive encyclopedia of Bangladesh, freely available online in English and Bengali with over 5,700 entries covering arts, history, heritage, governance, and society, produced by over 1,450 scholars under the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
  • Bengali Photo Archive - A UK-based community crowdsource archive collecting photographs and oral histories of the Bangladeshi diaspora in London's East End, documenting 50+ years of settlement, activism against racism, and working-class Bengali life.
  • Collections from Bangladesh - EAP - Multiple British Library-funded digitization projects preserving endangered Bangladeshi materials including 9,000+ Sanskrit and Bengali manuscripts from the Ramamala Library in Comilla, colonial-era mouza maps, and indigenous Santali print cultures.
  • Digital Archive of Bengali Songs (EAP274) - A British Library Endangered Archives project that digitized approximately 4,000 Bengali songs from rare 78rpm shellac disc records (1902-1937), preserving folk, devotional, romantic, comic, and theatrical songs from a period when these traditions were primarily oral.
  • Drik Picture Library - Founded in 1989 by photographer-activist Shahidul Alam, Drik is a photography agency and archive in Dhaka documenting Bangladesh's social history, human rights, garment worker struggles, and democratic movements, and parent organization of the Chobi Mela International Photography Festival.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Bangladesh - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • Muktijuddho e-Archive - The largest digital library dedicated to the 1971 Liberation War and Genocide of Bangladesh, containing over 5,000 photographs, ebooks, newspaper clippings, documentaries, video footage, and audio recordings from local and international sources.
  • National Archives of Bangladesh - An online archive of chronology of events, documentations, audio, video, images, media reports and eyewitness accounts of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh in the hands of Pakistan army.
  • The Daily Star - Newspaper from 2003.
  • The Travelling Archive - A grassroots field-recording project documenting folk songs, stories, and oral traditions across Bangladesh, eastern India, and the Bengali diaspora, run by singer-researcher Moushumi Bhowmik since 2003.
  • Bangladesh Feminist Archives - A Dhaka-based digital platform preserving documents, images, videos, and a visual timeline of Bangladesh's intersectional feminist movements across generations, documenting women's activism from the liberation era to the present.
  • Liberation War Museum Digital Collection - The Liberation War Museum's digitized holdings include the A.M.A Muhith Collection of 2,907 international news items and US Congressional Records documenting the 1971 war, alongside photographs, personal effects, and wartime artifacts.
  • USA Library of Congress - Bangladesh

Nepal

  • Archive Nepal - A platform hosting around 3,000 digitized materials from 18 national and international sources including The British Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Digital Himalaya joining the family in 2024.
  • Collections from Nepal - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
  • Documenta Nepalica - A scholarly project by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences publishing historical documents from pre-modern Nepal with a digital catalogue and scholarly editions platform.
  • E-Pustakalaya - A free and open digital library by Open Learning Exchange Nepal containing full-text documents, images, videos, and audio in Nepali, Newari, Tharu, Tibetan, and English, serving as a multilingual cultural and educational repository.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Nepal - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • HIMALAYA Journal 1980-2020 - HIMALAYA, published by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, publishes original research articles, short field reports, book and film reviews, reports on meetings and conferences, alongside literature and photo essays from the region.
  • HIMALAYA Journal 2018-2022 - Continuation of HIMALAYA journal under the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.
  • HMML Reading Room - Asa Archives, Nepal - The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library is digitizing over 7,000 manuscripts (15th-19th century) from the Asa Archives in Kathmandu, including palm-leaf and paper manuscripts in Sanskrit, Newari, and Nepali.
  • Huntington Photographic Archive - The world's largest photographic archive of Nepali art and architecture with 39,806 images of Nepal, part of a 210,000+ image collection of Buddhist and Asian art across the Himalayas, hosted at the University of Chicago.
  • Nepal Journals Online (NepJOL) - An open-access platform hosting 169 Nepalese academic journals with over 24,000 articles, including literary journals covering Nepali literature, language, and folktales.
  • Nepal Music Archive - Nepal's first digital music archive documenting the country's music scene from the 1950s onward, including audio, video, album covers, and research papers, with a campaign to repatriate 40 years of folk recordings from Germany.
  • Nepal Picture Library - A digital photo archive collecting over 160,000 photographs from private and organizational sources to create an inclusive visual archive of Nepali social and cultural history, including the Feminist Memory Project.
  • Nepalbhasa Manuscripts in the UK - An online archive of digitized Newar (Nepal Bhasa) manuscripts with transcription and translation, enabling the public to adopt manuscripts for digitization to help preserve this endangered script.
  • Pahar - Nepal Topo Maps - A digital archive of historical Himalayan cartography including 57 Nepal-Tibet border maps, Sino-Nepalese Frontier Commission maps, Survey of India reports, and records from the Great Trigonometrical Survey.
  • The Himalayan Database - A comprehensive digital archive of expedition records for all peaks in the Nepal Himalaya, compiled from Elizabeth Hawley's journalism spanning over 50 years, documenting thousands of expeditions with detailed climbing histories, routes, and outcomes.
  • ANUBhasha - Maithili Manuscripts of Nepal - A digital collection of early modern Maithili song-poems by Vidyapati from palm-leaf manuscripts, including the oldest known Nepal Manuscript in Tirhuta script, preserving an underrepresented literary tradition of the Terai region.
  • Bajracharya Document Archive - A curated digital collection of materials documenting Bajracharya culture, Newar Buddhism, and the priestly caste's historical role in the Kathmandu Valley, preserving unique religious and cultural heritage of Nepal's indigenous Newar community.
  • USA Library of Congress - Nepal

Tibet

  • 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha - A nonprofit translating all 231,000 pages of the Tibetan Buddhist Canon into English, endorsed by all four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, with over 30% of the Kangyur completed and published freely in an interactive online Reading Room.
  • Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP) - Free downloadable Tibetan text datasets covering the complete Kangyur, Tengyur, and approximately 5,000 Sungbum texts, all double-entered with three accuracy checks and released without copyright restrictions.
  • Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) - The world's largest online archive of Tibetan Buddhist texts with over 30 million scanned pages, founded as the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center in 1999, offering free access to canonical works, rare manuscripts, and a Tibetan OCR tool.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Tibet - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • Himalayan Art Resources - The world's largest virtual museum of Himalayan and Tibetan art with over 100,000 images and 10,000 expert essays cataloging thangka paintings, sculptures, textiles, and ritual objects from 1,000+ collections worldwide, founded in 1997.
  • Library of Tibetan Works and Archives - Founded in 1970 by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, with an Oral History Department recording hundreds of hours of interviews with Tibetan elders, craftsmen, doctors, astrologers, and storytellers, and ongoing manuscript digitization with BDRC.
  • Tibet Oral History Project - Videotaped interviews with over 300 elderly Tibetan refugees, the last generation born in a free Tibet, documenting memories of pre-1950s life and eyewitness accounts of the Chinese occupation, created at the advice of the Dalai Lama.
  • Tibet Watch - An independent human rights monitoring organization publishing reports on digital surveillance, cultural destruction, torture, and resistance in Tibet, led by Tibetan-born researchers using encrypted databases designed for human rights documentation.
  • Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) - A University of Virginia multimedia digital library with Tibetan-English dictionaries, canonical text reproductions, 1930s photographs by Frederick Williamson, monastery documentation, GIS maps, and the Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies.
  • Tibetan Oral History Archive Project (TOHAP) - The world's largest Tibetan oral history archive at the Library of Congress, with nearly 700 interviews documenting Tibetan social and political history, including Common Folk, Political, and Drepung Monastery collections.
  • Tibet Museum Interactive - A digital museum platform with over 29,000 images organized across six categories, featuring virtual tours of Tibetan cultural sites, traveling exhibitions, and interactive galleries documenting Tibetan history, religious practices, and contemporary life under the Central Tibetan Administration.
  • Old Tibet Photographic Archive (THUS) - The Tibet Heritage Fund's digitized collection of rare historical photographs of Tibet from the early 20th century, documenting architecture, daily life, religious ceremonies, and landscapes before the dramatic transformations of the mid-century.
  • Latse Library Oral History Archive - An oral history archive initiated in 2006 documenting life stories of elderly Tibetans in exile in India and the Himalayan region, covering pre- and post-1959 Tibet, folk traditions, personal narratives, and refugee settlement experiences.
  • USA Library of Congress - Tibet

Pakistan

  • The Citizen Archive of Pakistan - Citizens Archive of Pakistan.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Pakistan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • National Archives of Pakistan - An effort is being made to publish catalogs and lists of whatever source material in National Archives of Pakistan. An endeavor is being made to collect and preserve source material wherever available through purchases/donations with a view to place it eventually in its permanent house in Islamabad i.e. National Archives of Pakistan.
  • USA Library of Congress - Pakistan
  • Folkloristan - Pakistan's first and only multi-lingual digital storytelling platform, founded by Komal Salman, dedicated to collecting, translating, and illustrating Pakistani folktales, oral traditions, and shrine heritage across Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Urdu traditions.
  • Lok Virsa Digital Library - The digital arm of Pakistan's National Institute of Folk and Traditional Heritage, housing over 32,000 books and field reports on folklore and ethnology alongside 3,000 hours of audio recordings of folk songs, oral histories, and musical performances collected through fieldwork across the country.
  • Endangered Archives from Sufi Shrines of the Afghan-Pakistan Frontier - A UCLA-UNC project digitizing manuscripts, letters, poetry, healing texts, and polemical posters from Sufi monasteries in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and North Waziristan, preserving the intellectual legacy of Sufi master Abdullah Jan Farooqi in Persian, Pashto, Arabic, and Urdu.
  • Punjab Archives, Lahore - One of the subcontinent's largest repositories of historical documents, holding over seven million files dating back to 1629 including pre-colonial, colonial-era gazettes, commission reports, and census records, with an ongoing digitization of 500,000 documents.
  • Mushfiq Khwaja Library Collection (EAP) - Digitized images of 13 Urdu-language periodicals from the Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Centre in Karachi, covering 1805-1947 and spanning history, religion, poetry, travelogue, women's literature, and juvenile literature.
  • Smithsonian Folkways: Folk Music of Pakistan - A curated collection of Pakistani folk recordings documenting songs for marriage, harvest festivals, village fairs, and courtship from across the country's diverse regional traditions.
  • Pakistan Eats / Library of Congress Food Archive - Founded by Maryam Jillani, this award-winning platform documenting Pakistani cuisine across all regions was selected by the Library of Congress for its Food and Foodways Web Archive, preserving the country's diverse culinary heritage from street food to home kitchens.
  • Lybarger Collection of Pakistani Music (Harvard) - An ethnomusicological fieldwork collection at Harvard's Archive of World Music spanning 1965-2007, focusing on classical Hindustani tabla music from Punjab and including rare recordings of the last practitioners of the Talwandi Gharana's Dhrupad style.
  • Torwali Language and Culture Archive (IBT) - An archive by Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi documenting the endangered Torwali language and culture of Swat, Pakistan, including oral histories, folk songs, and ethnographic recordings preserving a minority community's heritage against cultural homogenization.
  • Sufinama - A digital platform dedicated to Sufi poetry and literature, offering a searchable collection of works by major Sufi poets in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Persian with translations, biographical information, and audio recitations — a sister project of Rekhta.
  • Sindh Culture e-Library - A digital library by the Government of Sindh's Culture, Tourism, Antiquities & Archives Department providing free online access to books in Sindhi, Urdu, and English covering Sindhi literature, folklore, history, and heritage.
  • Sindh Archives - The Government of Sindh's digital archive of historical records, manuscripts, and cultural documents from the Sindh region covering administrative, legal, and cultural heritage from the colonial era to the present.
  • Mohenjo-daro Digital Archive - Prof. Michael Jansen's comprehensive digital documentation of the Mohenjo-daro archaeological site, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Indus Valley Civilization, with research, photographs, architectural plans, and excavation records.
  • Harappa.com - A non-profit educational resource dedicated to the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, featuring essays, articles, videos, photographs, and a 3D virtual tour of the archaeological site at Harappa, Pakistan.
  • PG Sindhi Library - A digital archive of post-Partition Sindhi-language books published in India, with metadata in Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, and Roman scripts, preserving Sindhi literary heritage for the displaced diaspora community.
  • Balochi Oral Narration Collection (ELAR) - Approximately 80 hours of recorded Balochi folktales, fairy tales, legends, and Islamic tales from the Endangered Languages Archive, documenting the oral traditions of the Balochi-speaking communities of Pakistan and Iran.

India

  • QAMRA - The Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism is a multimedia archival project which aims to chronicle and preserve the stories of communities marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality in India.
  • Kosh - A searchable archive of multi-media content relevant to misinformation and social media in India, surfacing data collected by Tattle as well as that opened by other researchers.
  • Things We Make - Handicrafts from different parts of India and their stories.
  • Pad.ma - Short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films.
  • Netaji Papers - The declassified files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
  • Abhilekh Patal - A full-featured web-portal to access the National Archives of India's reference media and its digitized collections through the internet.
  • Economic and Political Weekly - 1966 - Present
  • Economic Weekly - now epw - 1949-1965 - Publication of economics, politics, sociology, culture, the environment, and other disciplines.
  • Archives at NCBS - The Archives at NCBS is a public collecting center for the history of science in contemporary India. The Archives are free and open to the public.
  • Godrej Archives - A repository of records from 100+ years of Godrej's history.
  • Sarmaya - A digital museum of Indian art and heritage with curated collections spanning textiles, maps, photographs, coins, and manuscripts.
  • Living Lightly - The first curated exhibition on pastoralism in India, covering the land, lives and livelihoods of Indian pastoralists. It captures their remarkable history of mobility, the ecosystems that nurture their life-worlds, their culture, science, art, politics, spiritual moorings, the economics and challenges of herding.
  • INDIAN MEMORY PROJECT - The Indian Memory Project provides materials on individuals and families to offer a micro-perspective on macrohistorical change.
  • Rare Book Society of India - Rare Books Society of India.
  • Archive of Indian Music - This is a digital repository of gramophone recordings, many of which feature pieces of music from India's best-known artists. The collection is particularly strong for Carnatic and Hindustani classical music.
  • Digital Library of India - Under this project of the Ministry of Human Resources Development of the Government of India, scans of out-of-copyright books from libraries across India are generated and converted into text-searchable PDF form.
  • Indiancine.ma - This initiative of the Indian Cinema Foundation functions both as a comprehensive index and archive for Indian cinema.
  • Periodicals and Pamphlets of Indian Anticommunists and Free Market Advocates - This collection covers magazines and pamphlets from the Cold War-era India, including pamphlets of the Forum of Free Enterprise in Mumbai, The Indian Libertarian magazine, and the CIA-funded Freedom First.
  • Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta, 1870-1949) - English-language newspaper hosted by Endangered Archives Project.
  • Jugantar Patrika (Calcutta, 1937-1980) - Bengali-language newspaper hosted by Endangered Archives Project.
  • Collections from India - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
  • https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books - Collection of cookery books, almanacs, erotica.
  • community cookbooks from across India - Community Cookbooks.
  • https://oralhistorynarmada.in/ - On Narmada Bachao Andolan.
  • Prasar Bharati Central Archives
  • Explore India's Constitutional Origins
  • USA Library of Congress - India
  • SPARROW - Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women - Founded in 1988 by Tamil feminist writer C.S. Lakshmi, SPARROW is India's largest archive of women's history, collecting oral histories, personal papers, photographs, diaries, and documentary films documenting women as agents of change across diverse fields and backgrounds.
  • Archives of Indian Labour - India's first fully digital labour archive at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, preserving trade union records, workers' oral histories, and documents on bidi workers, leather artisans, textile labourers, and the unorganised sector from the colonial era to the present.
  • Muktabodha Digital Library - An open-access digital library of over 3,000 Hindu philosophical and scriptural manuscripts including Vedic texts from Gokarna temple collections, Shaiva Siddhanta literature from the French Institute of Pondicherry, and rare palm-leaf manuscripts at risk of disintegration.
  • Rekhta - The world's largest Urdu digital library with over 200,000 digitized books, 7,000 poet biographies, and 70,000 ghazals available in Nastaliq, Devanagari, and Roman scripts, alongside its sister platforms Sufinama for Sufi poetry and Hindwi for Hindi literature.
  • Dalit Camera - A grassroots video archive and citizen journalism platform founded in 2011 that documents Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan life from their own perspectives, preserving footage of anti-caste resistance and archiving the subculture of food, music, literature, and cultural expression otherwise invisible in mainstream media.
  • Zoological Survey of India Digital Publications - Digital archive of over a century of zoological publications including the Records of the Indian Museum (from 1907), Fauna of India series, and status surveys of endangered species, documenting India's 92,873 recorded fauna species across the subcontinent.
  • MAHSA Historic Survey of India Maps - Over 1,200 colonial-era Survey of India maps digitized in collaboration between Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and the MAHSA project, openly accessible via IIIF, revealing infrastructure, wells, trade routes, settlements, and places of worship as mapped from 1767 onward.
  • Biodiversity Heritage Library: Indian Forest Records - Digitized publications of the Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun, covering over a century of forestry science in India including botany, entomology, silviculture, and forest pathology from the colonial era onward.
  • The Northeast India AV Archive - Northeast India's public audiovisual archive based in Shillong, partnering with institutions across Sikkim, Nagaland, and Manipur, curating video and audio documentation of indigenous music, dance, and cultural heritage including the Tirot Sing Museum of Indigenous Knowledge at Nongkhlaw.
  • Visual Histories of Northeast India (UCLA MEAP) - A UCLA Modern Endangered Archives project inventorying visual materials from Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura, including photographer Ahmed Hossain's 1960s-2000s documentation of tribal communities and anthropologist Verrier Elwin's 1950s-60s 16mm films.
  • The North-East Archive (Indian Culture Portal) - A digital portal covering Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim with rare photographs, videos, books, and cultural materials as part of the National Virtual Library of India.
  • Bhasha Research Archives - Founded in 1996 by Ganesh Devy, Bhasha documents and preserves the cultural traditions of Adivasi (indigenous) communities across India through an extensive archive of audio, video, photographs, and written materials covering tribal languages, oral histories, and endangered art forms.
  • Dr. Ambedkar's Writings and Speeches - The official Government of India digital archive of the complete writings and speeches of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, architect of India's Constitution and leader of the Dalit rights movement, freely accessible in English and Hindi.
  • Institut Français de Pondichéry Digital Collections - The French Institute of Pondicherry's open-access digital repository of South Indian cultural heritage including Shaiva Siddhanta manuscripts, herbarium specimens, historical photographs, maps, and ethnographic documentation spanning ecology, Indology, and social sciences.
  • DHARMA Project - Digital Epigraphy - An ERC-funded international project creating a digital corpus of South and Southeast Asian inscriptions, providing open-access editions, translations, and metadata for Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain epigraphic records from the 5th century onward.
  • Sarai - CSDS New Media Initiative - South Asia's most prominent platform for critical reflection on urban space and digital culture, a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, with an extensive online archive of research publications, media projects, and readers on cities, technology, and public culture.
  • Project Madurai - A volunteer-driven digital library of over 660 ancient Tamil literary classics, freely distributing e-texts of Sangam-era poetry, Thirukkural, Silappadikaram, and other canonical Tamil works since 1998, making classical Tamil literature universally accessible.
  • Sangam Tamil - An interactive digital platform for exploring 2,658 verses of ancient Sangam-era Tamil poetry (c. 300 BCE-300 CE), with original Tamil text, English translations, landscape-based filters, and poet connections mapping the earliest Tamil literary canon.
  • Dalit Social Reform Movements in Kerala (EAP292) - A British Library Endangered Archives project surveying and digitizing documentary materials related to Dalit and lower-caste social reform movements in 20th-century Kerala, preserving pamphlets, photographs, and organizational records of anti-caste activism.

Bhutan

  • Buddhist Digital Resource Center - The largest online archive of Tibetan and Buddhist texts in the world, with over 17 million digitized pages including Dzongkha-language materials from the Drukpa Kagyu tradition.
  • Collections from Bhutan - EAP - Multiple British Library digitization projects preserving Bhutanese monastery and temple manuscript collections, including the Gangtey Monastery's 100-volume bKa' 'gyur and manuscripts from over 60 documented archives.
  • Digital Himalaya - A multi-university project hosting over 200,000 pages of scanned Himalayan texts, hundreds of hours of video and audio, over 1,000 maps, and rare publications including The Bhutan Review and the Journal of Bhutan Studies.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Bhutan - The National Library of Bhutan has the goal that all Bhutanese, wherever they are, will have access to both Bhutan's documentary heritage and to the information resources of the world.
  • Music of Bhutan Research Centre - The only professional organization dedicated to researching and archiving traditional Bhutanese music and dance, with recordings and interviews from over 170 musical elders and field documentation of village music traditions across the country.
  • Oral Cultures of Bhutan - An open-access archive of 2,324 audio-visual recordings documenting imperiled oral traditions of Bhutanese cultural heritage, including folk stories, songs, and recitations, created by the University of Virginia and the Loden Foundation.
  • Pahar - Bhutan Historical Maps - A digital archive of historical maps of Bhutan including early 19th-century British survey maps such as Turner's 1800 survey and Pemberton's 1839 maps of the Bhutan-Tibet boundary and the Dooars region.
  • Smithsonian Folkways: Music from the Mountains of Bhutan - Recordings of endangered Bhutanese musical traditions on drangyen and vocals, alongside the 1978 field recordings by anthropologist Johann S. Szuszkiewicz capturing zhungdra, boedra, dances, and spoken word.
  • The National Library of Bhutan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • Bhutan Oral Literature Project - A field-based research project recording, transcribing, and translating oral narratives, folk songs, and ritual texts from across Bhutan's diverse linguistic communities, preserving endangered oral traditions in multiple Bhutanese languages.
  • Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan - The national repository under Royal Patronage dedicated to collecting, documenting, preserving, and exhibiting Bhutan's textile heritage, including rare weaving traditions, ceremonial fabrics, and the art of Thagzo across Bhutan's diverse cultural regions.
  • Bhutan Cultural Library (UVA Mandala Texts) - An Arcadia-funded digital collection of essays on Bhutanese oral traditions and cultural subjects, linked to places and topics via the University of Virginia's Mandala platform.
  • Rubin Museum - Bhutan Collection - The Rubin Museum's digital collection of Bhutanese art, textiles, and religious objects including thangka paintings, ritual implements, and contemporary Bhutanese art, with scholarly descriptions and high-resolution imagery.
  • USA Library of Congress - Bhutan

Afghanistan

  • Afghan Media Resource Center Collection - The largest audiovisual collection on Afghanistan (1987-2012) on the Internet Archive, containing 94,652 photographs and slides, 1,175 hours of video, and 356 hours of audio produced by Afghan "fighter-reporters" trained to document the Soviet-Afghan War.
  • Afghanistan Digital Library - The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan's published cultural heritage.
  • Afghanistan Music Research Centre - A partnership between Kabul University and the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar working to digitize the Hoerburger Collection of Afghan folk songs and the Radio Television Afghanistan music archive from the "golden age" of Afghan music.
  • Archnet - Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme - An open-access digital archive from the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and MIT containing documentation of 145+ restored heritage sites in Afghanistan including the 9th-century Noh Gumbad Mosque, Bagh-e-Babur in Kabul, and Timurid monuments in Herat.
  • Archives for the Study of Afghanistan - This is a list of physical and digital archives or scholars of Afghanistan.
  • Dari and Pashto Books - Arthur Paul Collection - Selected digitized literary materials in Dari and Pashto from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection at the University of Nebraska Omaha, including publications from the Literary Society of Kabul containing scientific, literary, and historical articles.
  • Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection - The UNO Criss Library holds the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, one of the largest collections of Afghan primary and secondary materials outside of the country. It contains over 20,000 titles in more than 20 languages, including Dari, Pashto, and English.
  • FID4SA-Repository - Afghanistan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • Library of Congress - Digitized Maps of Afghanistan - A curated gallery of digitized historical maps from Abraham Ortelius's 1570 map of Persia to 19th-century British survey maps from the Anglo-Afghan Wars and modern ethnographic maps.
  • Preserving and Creating Access to Unique Afghan Records - The collection contains information related to history, social, economic, and cultural heritage of Afghanistan in Pashto and Dari. Content is continuously updated with over 2,300 titles (about 236,000 pages) currently available (April 2012).
  • Afghanistan Memory Home - A digital platform documenting human rights abuses and preserving victim testimonies related to the Afghan conflict through an interactive archive of personal accounts, historical records, and detailed incident documentation.
  • Hoover Institution Afghanistan Collections - Stanford University's Hoover Institution archival collections on Afghanistan including political documents, photographs, propaganda materials, and personal papers from key figures in Afghan history spanning the Cold War through the post-2001 era.
  • French Archaeological Mission in Afghanistan - The Delegation Archeologique Française en Afghanistan's digital archive documenting over a century of archaeological excavations at sites including Ai Khanoum, Bamiyan, and Balkh, with photographs, plans, and artifacts from the region's Greco-Buddhist and Islamic heritage.
  • At-Risk Afghanistan Web Archive (ARAWA) - A UC Berkeley project launched in August 2021 preserving Afghan websites at risk of Taliban erasure, including government sites, media outlets, educational institutions, and social activist content in Dari, Pashto, and English.
  • National Museum of Afghanistan - The official website of the Kabul museum housing collections spanning 50,000 years of Afghan heritage, with an electronic bilingual Dari-English database developed in partnership with the University of Chicago.
  • Library of Congress Afghanistan Web Archive - A Library of Congress web archive of Afghan government websites, NGOs, universities, and banking institutions captured from 2009-2010, preserving a snapshot of Afghanistan's digital institutional presence.
  • USA Library of Congress - Afghanistan

Maldives

  • Archive.mv - An online platform dedicated to preserving the historical record of all news publications in the Maldives, with searchable access and an "On This Day" browsing feature.
  • FID4SA-Repository - The full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA, provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • Historic Maps of Male - High-resolution digital images of six historical maps of Male from the Maldives National Museum collection, including Commander Moresby's 1904 hydrographic chart, presented through an IIIF deep-zoom viewer.
  • Maldives Heritage Survey - An open-access database by the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies documenting endangered tangible cultural heritage across the Maldives, including 292 sites, 1,171 structures, 5,761 objects, and 410 digitized manuscripts in Dhivehi and Arabic.
  • Maritime Asia Heritage Survey - A Kyoto University-led project digitally documenting endangered heritage across coastal Southern Asia with 3D models, deep-zoom images of Dhivehi and Arabic texts, oral history interviews, and LiDAR spatial data, archived at Kyoto University and the Oxford Bodleian Library.
  • National Archives of Maldives - The official national archives with over 7,000,000 digital records in its Government Electronic Management System and an active public records digitalization project.
  • Coral Stone Mosques of Maldives - A digital documentation project on the distinctive coral stone mosques found across the Maldivian archipelago, recording the endangered architectural heritage of historic mosques built from coral stone, lacquerwork, and carved wood.
  • Columbia University Maldives Research Guide - A curated academic guide to Maldives research resources including digital collections, historical documents, and scholarly databases maintained by Columbia University Libraries.
  • DSAL Dhivehi Dictionary - Hassan Ahmed Maniku's "A Concise Etymological Vocabulary of Dhivehi Language" (2000), freely searchable online through the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia Library, preserving the etymological roots of the Maldivian national language.
  • The Lacquer Crafts of the Maldives (Google Arts & Culture) - An online exhibition documenting Maldivian lacquer work (liyelaa jehun) by the Department of Heritage and UNESCO's ICHCAP, with photographs, video, and documentation of this endangered traditional craft.
  • Library of Congress Maldives Government Web Archive - An ongoing web archive (since 2021) preserving Maldives government websites in Dhivehi and English, motivated by the climate change threat to the island nation's physical and digital records.
  • USA Library of Congress - Maldives

Sri Lanka

  • AISLS Guide to Digital Libraries on Sri Lanka - A comprehensive directory maintained by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies listing digital libraries where texts, images, and other materials related to Sri Lanka can be viewed online with open access.
  • Chelvanayakam Papers - The digitized papers of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the "Gandhi of Sri Lankan Tamils," made available bilingually in Tamil and English by the University of Toronto Scarborough for researchers and the global Tamil diaspora.
  • Collections from Sri Lanka - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme hosts multiple digitized Sri Lankan collections including Malay manuscripts, Jaffna Protestant church records (1796-1948), and Tamil palm-leaf manuscripts spanning the 18th-20th centuries.
  • Digital Museum of Memory and Coexistence - A digital museum by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies archiving art projects and narratives documenting Sri Lanka's recovery from decades of civil conflict, including post-war experiences of women in northern Sri Lanka.
  • Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka - An open-access digital collection by AISLS, Princeton, and University of Edinburgh documenting Sri Lankan radical activists, covering trade union struggles, plantation worker rights, statelessness of Malaiyaha Tamils, and left-wing perspectives on the ethnic conflict.
  • FID4SA-Repository - The full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA, provided by Heidelberg University Library.
  • John Rylands Pali Manuscripts - Digitized 17th-19th century Sri Lankan palm-leaf manuscripts in Pali and Sinhalese script, covering Buddhist scripture, indigenous medicine, agriculture, and astrology, including texts rare even within Sri Lanka.
  • National Digital Library of Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka's national digital repository hosting over 66,000 digitized items spanning from the 11th century to the present, including government publications, rare books, newspapers, and intangible cultural heritage documentation.
  • Noolaham Digital Library - The largest Tamil digital library on the internet, containing over 100,000 items related to Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking communities, including a special Oral History Project with approximately 500 recorded interviews.
  • Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) - An open-access database of 169 Sri Lankan academic journals with over 24,000 articles across all disciplines, managed by the National Science Foundation of Sri Lanka.
  • Aavanaham Multimedia Archive - The multimedia arm of the Noolaham Foundation archiving photographs, ephemera, audio, and video materials related to Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking communities, complementing the print collections with over 5,000 multimedia items including images of war-affected areas and cultural events.
  • Digital Museum of Upcountry Tamil Heritage (UCLA MEAP) - A UCLA-funded project documenting over two hundred private and institutional collections of the Upcountry Tamil community, descendants of Indian laborers brought to British-owned plantations in the nineteenth century, preserving materials at risk of loss.
  • Memory Map Sri Lanka - An archive of 320 village histories and life stories from three Sri Lankan districts, memorializing experiences of violence and conflict through community-collected narratives across ethnic lines during and after the civil war.
  • Sri Lankan Tamil Palm-Leaf Manuscripts (EAP1260) - A British Library Endangered Archives project cataloguing and digitizing 300-500 Tamil and Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka's Northern and Eastern provinces, endangered by displacement and decades of armed conflict.
  • Digitising Malay Writing in Sri Lanka (EAP609) - A British Library project surveying and digitizing Malay-language manuscripts and printed books in Sri Lanka, documenting the little-known Sri Lankan Malay Muslim community's literary heritage in a critically endangered language.
  • Ilankai Tamil Sangam - A US-based Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora platform hosting literary criticism, cultural essays, news analysis, and historical documentation of Tamil heritage in Sri Lanka, including coverage of events like the destruction of the Jaffna Library.
  • USA Library of Congress - Sri Lanka

Myanmar

  • Collections from Myanmar - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme hosts multiple digitized collections from Myanmar, including early 78rpm music recordings, post-independence photographic negatives, Pa'O minority manuscripts, and monastic palm-leaf manuscripts from the 1660s to the 1940s.
  • Library of Congress - Burma/Myanmar Elections Web Archive - A web archive preserving websites of political parties, pro-democracy groups, human rights organizations, and minority groups that documented Myanmar's 2010 and 2015 General Elections and 2012 by-elections.
  • Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library - An open-access digital library hosted by the University of Toronto containing digitized Pali and Pali-Burmese palm-leaf manuscripts from monastic libraries across Myanmar.
  • Myanmar Photo Archive - The largest archive of Myanmar's photographic history, holding over 30,000 images taken between 1889 and 1995 by local photographers, with public digitization stations where citizens bring family photos for scanning.
  • Online Burma/Myanmar Library - The largest organized source of Burma/Myanmar material on the internet, holding approximately 50,000 links to documents, archives, articles, periodicals, reports, books, and videos organized under 100 categories.
  • Public Memory of Myanmar - A digital collection documenting daily life in Burma/Myanmar through photographs and interviews, directed by Tun Myint, a political scientist and former student leader of the 1988 democracy movement.
  • Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre - A joint IOM and Rohingya community initiative providing an online interactive gallery and digital archive, with Rohingya cultural agents in Cox's Bazar camps collecting cultural objects, oral histories, and audiovisual storytelling.
  • Rohingya Genocide Archive - Established in 2018 by Rohingya Vision TV and WITNESS, preserving over 629 videos documenting atrocities against Rohingya in Rakhine State, including material from citizen journalists never previously made public.
  • The Irrawaddy - One of Myanmar's most important independent media outlets, founded in 1990 by exiled Burmese journalists in Thailand, providing continuous coverage of democracy movements, military rule, and ethnic conflicts with an extensive digital archive of reporting since 1993.
  • Anglo-Burmese Library - Dedicated to collecting, indexing, and preserving records and histories of families in colonial-era Burma, including historical evacuation and casualty documentation from 1942 and the Japanese occupation.
  • Bodleian Library Burmese Collection - Oxford University's digitized Burmese manuscripts collection including palm-leaf and folding-book (parabaik) manuscripts, Buddhist texts, and historical documents from Burma's literary heritage.
  • SOAS Digital Collections - Myanmar - The School of Oriental and African Studies digital repository of Myanmar-related materials including photographs, manuscripts, and audio recordings from one of the UK's leading South and Southeast Asian research collections.
  • Save Myanmar Film - A preservation initiative partnering with the Myanmar National Film Archive to rescue, digitize, and restore Myanmar's endangered cinematic heritage, including rare films at risk of deterioration.
  • AAPP Coup Database - The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners' comprehensive database tracking arrests, detentions, releases, and killings of civilians and pro-democracy activists since the February 1, 2021 military coup in Myanmar.
  • CyArk - Bagan Heritage - High-resolution 3D documentation and digital preservation of Bagan's ancient Buddhist temples and pagodas, one of Southeast Asia's most significant archaeological sites with over 3,000 monuments spanning the 9th-13th centuries.
  • Myanmar Law Library - A digital repository of Myanmar's legal heritage including historical legislation, constitutional documents, and legal texts documenting the country's governance from the colonial era to the present.
  • Southeast Asian Digital Library - Burma/Myanmar - Northern Illinois University's curated digital collection of Burma/Myanmar resources including historical photographs, maps, government documents, and ephemera from the colonial and post-independence periods.
  • DREAMSEA - Endangered Manuscripts of Southeast Asia - An open-access digital repository preserving endangered Buddhist and Islamic manuscripts from across Southeast Asia, including Myanmar palm-leaf manuscripts, hosted in partnership with the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML).
  • The Music of Burma on Record (EAP592) - A British Library Endangered Archives project that digitized approximately 6,000 rare 78rpm recordings from the 1920s-1950s of Burmese court, classical, dramatic, vocal, and folk music — the earliest aural documentation of pre-industrial Burmese musical traditions.
  • Inya Institute Digital Archive - A Yangon-based institute's digital archive of manuscripts, books, paintings, and photographs collected during research projects across Myanmar, including Shan State monastic manuscript surveys and ethnographic materials.

History of the Digital in South Asia

More Collections

Learning

  • Collaboration Adventures with Primary Sources: Exploring Creative and Digital Outputs - A series of case studies, the authors will share how they experimented with new ways to present research using primary sources through social media, zines, data sets, and visualizations: what we call "creative outputs".
  • AdFontes - An Introduction to Working with Sources in the Archive.
  • Clio Guide - A handbook on digital resources for the historical sciences.
  • Digital History Guide - Introduction to the web for historians—teachers and students, archivists and museum curators, professors as well as amateur enthusiasts—who wish to produce online historical work, or to build upon and improve the projects they have already started in this important new medium.
  • Geospatial Historian - Open HGIS Lessons and Resources.
  • HIST3814o - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Shawn Graham at Carleton University.
  • HIST 7370 - Methods and Readings in Digital History by Cameron Blevins at Northeastern University.
  • History Toolkit - You will learn how to critically analyze historical conditions, developments, patterns, and ruptures – or, alternatively, how to call these into question.
  • Local Linkages - How to frame questions about the past, identify sources to answer those questions, place them in context, and present that historical interpretation online in a digital form.
  • The CTP Book - A book for teaching Computational Thinking and Programming skills to people with a background in the Humanities.
  • The Programming Historian - Novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.
  • Python für Historiker:innen - The Jupyter Book (in German language) is aimed at historians who are looking for a first application-oriented and interactive introduction to the Python programming language.
  • UCI Digital History - Overview of the field of Digital History and Digital Humanities.
  • We think History - News about and innovations from digital history.

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