Digital Collections

This section of the guide features digital primary source materials from the Asian Division along with digital items and collections from the Library's other reading rooms and research centers. Links to digital items and collections are provided for further exploration.

South Asian Digital Collection

The South Asian Digital Collection features selected books, serials, and manuscripts related to the present-day countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. All items in this digital collection are freely accessible online. This digital collection includes items in South Asian languages (e.g., Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu) as well as items relevant to South Asia in English, French, German, and other languages. Researchers will find materials about colonialism in South Asia; vernacular literature; religion and philosophy; grammar and linguistics; the rebellion of 1857; American and European accounts of travel in colonial India; and many other subjects in the broad field of South Asian studies.

BROWSE - Items in the South Asian Digital Collection
This link will enable you to browse all items in the South Asian Digital Collection. Additional items will appear in this collection as more digitization projects are completed. When browsing, use filters, such as original format (e.g., books, manuscripts) and language, for more precise results.

Paper manuscript folio with Sanskrit text in Devanagari script and illustrations of one white-colored deity and one blue-colored deity.

[Baidha saphu]. [1722]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with Hindi text in Devanagari script and illustrated coat of arms in center.

Śyāmaladāsa. Vīravinoda. [Udayapura : Rājayantrālaya, 1890]. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with illustrations of Hindu deity Krishna captioned with Braj text in Devanagari script.

Vihārīdāsa. Brajacaritra. 1953 [1896]. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with comic illustration of figure in costume flanked by two winged figures and Urdu text in Perso-Arabic script.

A selection from the illustrations which have appeared in the Oudh Punch from 1877 to 1881. Lucknow, Oudh Punch Office, 1881. Library of Congress General Collections.

Palm leaf manuscript folio with illustrations of soldiers marching with weapons, flowers, peacocks, and a kneeling figure.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa. [India]: [producer not identified], [not after 1800?]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with illustration of seven figures standing around a fire and captioned with Tamil text.

Bible dictionary. Vēta uriccol. Madras. Christian Vernacular Education Society, 1862. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Paper manuscript folio with English text in roman script and signature of Mahatma Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi. A common platform. [India?]: M.K. Gandhi, [1933?]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with Sinhala text in different fonts and sizes.

The Maháwansa. From first to thirty-sixth chapter. Colombo, F. Luker, acting government printer, Ceylon, 1883. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Book page with English text in roman script in different fonts and sizes.

George Crawshay. The immediate cause of the Indian mutiny, as set forth in the official correspondence. London, E. Wilson [1857?]. Library of Congress General Collections.

Large fragments of birch bark manuscript scroll with text in Gandhari language in Kharoshthi script.

Gandhara scroll. [Gandhara]: [producer not identified], [approximately 1st century B.C.-approximately 1st century A.D.] South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Green-colored book cover with text in English and Marathi in Devanagari script in different fonts and sizes.

Slavery, in the civilised British Government under the cloak of Brahmanism. 1873. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Poster print with illustration of cow containing Hindu religious figures opposite a sword-holding demon captioned with Hindi text in Devanagari script.

Om he āryajanaho! Gorakshaṇa karo, yā peṭakā rakshaṇa karo, kyoṅki ... Mumbaī: Khemarāja Śrīkr̥shṇadāsa, Śrīveṅkaṭeśvarachāpākhānā, 1947 [1890]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asia Division

South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche: Indexes

This set of nearly 2,000 PDF indexes provides itemized information on South Asian ephemeral materials on microfiche (e.g., pamphlets, booklets, selected issues of serials) that comprise collections on various subjects (e.g., government and politics, arts and society, forest conservation, library science). Each PDF index contains a list of a collection’s ephemeral materials arranged by publisher and title, or by alphabetical theme or form of publication.

For additional information, please see the thematic research guides that will assist in browsing this digital collection of PDF indexes.

BROWSE - PDF Indexes to the South Asia Ephemera Collection
This link will enable you to browse all PDF indexes to thematic parts of the South Asia Ephemera Collection, which is available on microfiche in the Asian Reading Room.
GUIDE - South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche: Politics and government
This is a research guide for materials in the South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche related to politics and government. This collection includes materials such as pamphlets, newsletters, and memos.
GUIDE - South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche: Religion
This is a research guide for materials in the South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche related to religion. This collection includes materials such as pamphlets, newsletters, and memos.

South Asian Literary Recordings Project

In April 2000, the Library of Congress office in New Delhi launched the South Asian Literary Recordings Project (SALRP), a collection of freely accessible audio recordings of prominent South Asian poets, novelists, and playwrights from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Languages represented in this collection include Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Oriya, Panjabi, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. More than 800 mp3 recordings from 90 South Asian authors are accessible on the SALRP website.

Digitized Materials from the Library's Other Divisions

The African and Middle Eastern Division's Persian Language Rare Materials digital collection contains more than 300 manuscripts and lithographs. This collection contains many items originating from India, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the regions under Ottoman rule, in addition to the native Persian speaking lands of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan. Items in this digital collection comprise many disciplines, but historical and literary works are dominant. A number of these items are exquisitely illuminated anthologies of poetry by classic and lesser known poets, written in fine calligraphic styles, and illustrated with miniatures. Included in this collection are many Persian manuscripts created in India during the late Mughal and early British colonial periods. There are also many lithographs published in Lucknow, Kanpur, and Mumbai (Bombay), among other South Asian locales. Researchers with questions about Persian materials from South Asia are encouraged to contact the African & Middle Eastern Division through Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's Persian Language Rare Materials digital collection.

[Kitāb-i tashrīḥ al-aqvām] / History of the origin and distinguishing marks of the different Castes of India by Skinner, James, Lieut. Col., compiler
Call Number: Ms. no. 34
Published/Created: 1825
Illustrated Persian manuscript written in India in large nastaliq, illustrated wtih 120 miniatures, including portraits, in the style of the Company School. Son of a Scottish military adventurer and a woman of the Indian martial nobility, James Skinner (1778-1841) became a famous soldier with his private regiment Skinner's Horse, which still continues in the Indian Army.
Mīzān al-ṭibb by Shāh Arzānī, Muḥammad Akbar ibn Muḥammad, active 18th century, author; Muḥammad Badr al-Dīn ibn Jamāl al-Dīn
Call Number: R128.7 .S52 1883
Published/Created: [Lucknow] : Munshī Naval Kishūr, 1301 [1883 or 1884]
Lithograph in Persian on traditional Arab medicine.
Nafāyis al-funūn by Sakkākī, Yūsuf ibn Abī Bakr, 1160- author
Call Number: QD25 .S165 1881
Published/Created: Bombay : Muhammad Malik al-Kuttāb, 1299 [1881 or 1882]
Lithograph in Persian on talismans and alchemy. Other titles: Haz̲ā kitāb-i mustaṭāb-i Nafāyis al-funūn.Ṭilismāt va mujarrabāt-i Sakkākī.
Pādishāhnāmah by Muḥammad Amīn ibn Abī al-Ḥusayn Qazvīnī, active 17th century; Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Kambūh, -1674?
Call Number: DS461.6 .M75 1700z
Published/Created: [Late 17th or early 18th century?]
Illustrated Persian manuscript, most likely from northern India, containing a biography of Shāhjahān from his birth through the first 10 years of his reign by Qazvīnī. This work is followed by the second and third parts of Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Kambūh's ʻAmāl-i Ṣāliḥ's history, starting with the 11th year of Shāhjahān's reign and including the wars of succession and his death. Scribe is possibly Aqā Muḥammad Muqīm or one of his sons Sayyed Ali Khān ("Jewel Pen") or Muḥammad Jaʻfar (Kifāyat Khān). Contains 29 paintings, including some full page, some double page. Appendix includes poetry by Sayyed Ali Gilānī. Contemporary oriental leather binding.
Shāhnāmah by Firdawsī, author
Call Number: PK6455 .A1 1842
Published/Created: 1259 [1842]
Illustrated Persian manuscript produced in Kashmir. Includes 50 three-quarter-length miniatures to accompany the text. Folios 1a-582b. Contemporary Indian binding of blind-stamped red leather with bronze clasps, original leather headbands, discreetly re-backed retaining the original spine; flyleaves and pastedowns were renewed in the 19th century; front pastedown has a Persian inscription supplying a foliation; the rear pastedown contains an English cataloger's note (brown ink) supplying the title, author, and date of copying.
Tārīkh-i Quṭb-i Shāhīyah by Mirzā ʻAlī Bayg Riz̤ā Hādī, scribe
Call Number: DS485.H9 T34 1858
Published/Created: 14 Shaʻbān 1274 [30 March 1858]
Illustrated Persian manuscript on history of Sultan Muhammad Qutb Shah, Sultan of Golconda and the Qutb Shahi dynasty and includes the historical, political and social events prevalent in Hyderabadi during the Qutb Shahi period. Other title: Taʼrīkh-i Sulṭān Muḥammad Quṭbshāhī.

The Geography and Map Division's digitized cartographic collections include a number of maps of South Asia as a geographic region as well as maps of individual countries. Researchers with questions about maps pertaining to South Asia or South Asian countries are encouraged to contact specialists using Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's map collections.

Atlas of India by Great Britain India Office, John Walker, James Horsburgh, and J. & C. Walker (Firm)
Call Number: G2280 .G7 1862
Published/Created: [London] : J. Walker, [1862]
Atlas of South India, from cape Comorin to the river Kistnah by Aaron Arrowsmith and East India Company
Call Number: G2280 .A76 1822
Published/Created: London : Published by A. Arrowsmith, no. 10 Soho Square, July 2, 1822
Imperii magni Mogolis sive Indici Padschach, juxta recentissimas navigationes by Seutter, Matthaeus, 1678-1756
Call Number: G7650 1735 .S4
Published/Created: [Augsburg] : [Matthaeus Seutter], [1735?]
L'Inde de ç̧à et de là le Gange ou est l'Empire du Grand Mogol et pays circonvoisins tirée de purchas et de diverses relations les plus nouvelles by Sanson, Nicolas, 1600-1667; Mariette, Pierre, 1634-1716; and Somer, J., engraver.
Call Number: G7650 1654 .S2
Published/Created: A Paris : Chez Pierre Mariette, rue St. Iacques a l'Esperance, 1654
[Manuṣyaloka, map of the world of man, according to Jain cosomological traditions]
Call Number: G9930 189- .M2 Vault Oversize
Published/Created: [189-?]
1 map : col. ; 95 x 91 cm.
Gift; Nasli M. Heeramaneck.
From western Rajasthan.
Gouache on cotton, sewn on to modern cloth backing. Originally folded in accompanying silk brocade covered wooden boards (each 14 x 27 cm.).
Map of the native town of Bombay, completed to 1855
Call Number: G7654.M73 1855 .M3
Published/Created: London : Vacher & Sons, Stationers, [1855]
A new general map of the East Indies : exhibiting in the Peninsula on this side of the Ganges, or Hindoostan, the several partitions of the Mogul's Empire ; and the dominions of the English East India Company... by Thomas Jefferys, James Rennell and Robert Laurie and James Whittle
Call Number: G8000 1794 .J4
Published/Created: London : Laurie & Whittle, 1794
Peninsula Indiæ citra Gangem hoc est Orae celeberrimae Malabar & Coromandel cum adjacente insula non minus celebratissima Ceylon by Homann Erben (Firm)
Call Number: G7625 1733 .H6 TIL
Published/Created: [S.l., 1733]

The Library's Open Access Books is a growing online collection of contemporary open access e-books. All of these books have been made available for download on the Library's website in keeping with the intent of their creators and publishers, who chose to publish these works under open access licenses to allow the broadest possible access and reuse.

Below is a representative sample of e-books in this online collection.

Dividing Texts by Bidur Bhattarai
ISBN: 9783110543087
Published/Created: 2018
The number of manuscripts produced in the Indian sub-continent is astounding and is the result of a massive enterprise that was carried out over a vast geographical area and over a vast stretch of time. Focusing mainly on areas of Northern India and Nepal between 800 to 1300 CE and on manuscripts containing Sanskrit texts, the present study investigates a fundamental and so far rarely studied aspect of manuscript production: visual organisation. Scribes adopted a variety of visual strategies to distinguish one text from another and to differentiate the various sections within a single text (chapters, sub-chapters, etc.). Their repertoire includes the use of space(s) on the folio, the adoption of different writing styles, the inclusion of symbols of various kind, the application of colours ('rubrication'), or a combination of all these. This study includes a description of these various strategies and an analysis of their different implementations across the selected geographical areas. It sheds light on how manuscripts were produced, as well as on some aspects of their employment in ritual contexts, in different areas of India and Nepal.
Downwardly Global by Lalaie Ameeriar
ISBN: 9780822373407
Published/Created: 2017
In Downwardly Global Lalaie Ameeriar examines the transnational labor migration of Pakistani women to Toronto. Despite being trained professionals in fields including engineering, law, medicine, and education, they experience high levels of unemployment and poverty. Rather than addressing this downward mobility as the result of bureaucratic failures, in practice their unemployment is treated as a problem of culture and racialized bodily difference. In Toronto, a city that prides itself on multicultural inclusion, women are subjected to two distinct cultural contexts revealing that integration in Canada represents not the erasure of all differences, but the celebration of some differences and the eradication of others. Downwardly Global juxtaposes the experiences of these women in state-funded unemployment workshops, where they are instructed not to smell like Indian food or wear ethnic clothing, with their experiences at cultural festivals in which they are encouraged to promote these same differences. This form of multiculturalism, Ameeriar reveals, privileges whiteness while using race, gender, and cultural difference as a scapegoat for the failures of Canadian neoliberal policies.
Empire's Garden by Jayeeta Sharma
ISBN: 9780822350491
Published/Created: 2011
In the mid-nineteenth century the British created a landscape of tea plantations in the northeastern Indian region of Assam. The tea industry filled imperial coffers and gave the colonial state a chance to transform a jungle-laden frontier into a cultivated system of plantations. Claiming that local peasants were indolent, the British soon began importing indentured labor from central India. In the twentieth century these migrants were joined by others who came voluntarily to seek their livelihoods. In Empire's Garden, Jayeeta Sharma explains how the settlement of more than one million migrants in Assam irrevocably changed the region's social landscape. She argues that the racialized construction of the tea laborer catalyzed a process by which Assam's gentry sought to insert their homeland into an imagined Indo-Aryan community and a modern Indian political space. Various linguistic and racial claims allowed these elites to defend their own modernity while pushing the burden of primitiveness onto "non-Aryan" indigenous tribals and migrant laborers. As vernacular print arenas emerged in Assam, so did competing claims to history, nationalism, and progress that continue to reverberate in the present.
Global Digital Cultures by Aswin Punathambekar; Sriram Mohan
ISBN: 9780472125319
Published/Created: 2019
Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.
Imperial Technology and 'Native' Agency by Aparajita Mukhopadhyay
ISBN: 9781315397085
Published/Created: 2018
This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades of the twentieth century. The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India's colonial railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims that the colonised 'natives' were not bystanders in this process of imposition of an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of an oft-celebrated 'tool of Empire'. The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining railway spaces as social spaces - a methodological index influenced by Henri Lefebvre's idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.
Impersonations by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath
ISBN: 9780520972230
Published/Created: 2019
Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman's guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries--village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative--to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.
Language of the Snakes by Andrew Ollett
ISBN: 9780520968813
Published/Created: 2017
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Language of the Snakes traces the history of the Prakrit language as a literary phenomenon, starting from its cultivation in courts of the Deccan in the first centuries of the common era. Although little studied today, Prakrit was an important vector of the kavya movement and once joined Sanskrit at the apex of classical Indian literary culture. The opposition between Prakrit and Sanskrit was at the center of an enduring "language order" in India, a set of ways of thinking about, naming, classifying, representing, and ultimately using languages. As a language of classical literature that nevertheless retained its associations with more demotic language practices, Prakrit both embodies major cultural tensions--between high and low, transregional and regional, cosmopolitan and vernacular--and provides a unique perspective onto the history of literature and culture in South Asia.
Modernizing Composition by Garrett Field
ISBN: 9780520967755
Published/Created: 2017
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. The study of South Asian music falls under the purview of ethnomusicology, whereas that of South Asian literature falls under South Asian studies. As a consequence of this academic separation, scholars rarely take notice of connections between South Asian song and poetry. Modernizing Composition overcomes this disciplinary fragmentation by examining the history of Sinhala-language song and poetry in twentieth-century Sri Lanka. Garrett Field describes how songwriters and poets modernized song and poetry in response to colonial and postcolonial formations. The story of this modernization is significant in that it shifts focus from India's relationship to the West to little-studied connections between Sri Lanka and North India.
State Formation and Radical Democracy in India by Manali Desai
ISBN: 9781134133314
Published/Created: 2006
State Formation and Radical Democracy in India analyzes one of the most important cases of developmental change in the twentieth century, namely, Kerala in southern India and begs the question of whether insurgency among the marginalized poor can use formal representative democracy to create better life chances. Going back to pre-independence, colonial India, Manali Desai takes a long historical view of Kerala and compares it with the state of West Bengal, which like Kerala has been ruled by leftists but has not had the same degree of success in raising equal access to welfare, literacy, and basic subsistence. This comparison brings the role of left party formation and its mode of insertion in civil society to the fore, raising the question of what kinds of parties can effect the most substantive anti-poverty reforms within a vibrant democracy. This book offers a new, historically based explanation for Kerala's post-independence political and economic direction.
Studies in Jaina History and Culture by Peter Flügel (Editor)
ISBN: 9781134235520
Published/Created: 2006
The last ten years have seen interest in Jainism increasing, with this previously little-known Indian religion assuming a significant place in religious studies. Studies in Jaina History and Culture breaks new ground by investigating the doctrinal differences and debates amongst the Jains rather than presenting Jainism as a seamless whole whose doctrinal core has remained virtually unchanged throughout its long history. The focus of the book is the discourse concerning orthodoxy and heresy in the Jaina tradition, the question of omniscience and Jaina logic, role models for women and female identity, Jaina schools and sects, religious property, law and ethics. The internal diversity of the Jaina tradition and Jain techniques of living with diversity are explored from an interdisciplinary point of view by fifteen leading scholars in Jaina studies. The contributors focus on the principal social units of the tradition: the schools, movements, sectsnbsp;and orders, rather than Jain religious culture in abstract. Peter Flügel provides a representative snapshot of the current state of Jaina studies that will interest students and academics involved in the study of religion or South Asian cultures.
Witness to Marvels by Tony K. Stewart
ISBN: 9780520973688
Published/Created: 2019
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more atwww.luminosoa.org. There is a vast body of imaginal literature in Bengali that introduces fictional Sufi saints into the complex mythological world of Hindu gods and goddesses. Dating to the sixteenth century, the stories--pir katha--are still widely read and performed today. The events that play out rival the fabulations of the Arabian Nights, which has led them to be dismissed as simplistic folktales, yet the work of these stories is profound: they provide fascinating insight into how Islam habituated itself into the cultural life of the Bangla-speaking world. In Witness to Marvels, Tony K. Stewart unearths the dazzling tales of Sufi saints to signal a bold new perspective on the subtle ways Islam assumed its distinctive form in Bengal.
Yoga in Transformation by Karl Baier; Philipp Andre Maas; Karin Preisendanz
ISBN: 9783847108627
Published/Created: 2018
This volume explores aspects of yoga over a period of about 2500 years. In its first part, it investigates facets of the South Asian and Tibetan traditions of yoga, such as the evolution of posture practice, the relationship between yoga and sex, yoga in the theistic context, the influence of Buddhism on early yoga, and the encounter of Islam with classical yoga. The second part addresses aspects of modern globalised yoga and its historical formation, as for example the emergence of yoga in Viennese occultism, the integration of yoga and nature cure in modern India, the eventisation of yoga in a global setting, and the development of Patañjalis iconography. In keeping with the current trend in yoga studies, the emphasis of the volume is on the practice of yoga and its theoretical underpinnings.

The Prints & Photographs Division's Online Catalog includes digitized and non-digitized materials in its collections. Please be advised that some digitized materials only display in full size onsite at the Library of Congress. Researchers with questions about prints and photographs pertaining to South Asia are encouraged to contact specialists using Ask a Librarian. Below are some relevant highlights from the Library's pictorial collections.

Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs by Kandell, Alice S., photographer
Published/Created: [between 1965 and 1979]
This selection of 300 images from the Dr. Alice S. Kandell Collection of Sikkim Photographs portrays the people and landscape of a kingdom high in the Himalaya Mountains. Sikkim, now part of India, borders on Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. Dr. Kandell captured these vivid scenes in order to document a vanishing culture. During visits between 1965 and 1979 (primarily 1965-1971), Dr. Kandell received special permission to photograph Buddhist monks and lamas, ceremonial dances, and monasteries; people working on farms, in canning factories, and at special crafts; and the royal palace chapel at Gangtok, including the last king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, his American wife Queen Hope Cooke (Dr. Kandell's college friend), and their family. Also depicted are the villages and people of Singhik and Lachung, the mountains of Kānchenjunga, the Ralang Hot Springs, and the Gangtok bazaar as well as different ethnic groups including the Kirati (Kiranti), Lepcha, Nepalese, and Bhutia people. Other photographs show the material culture, including religious paintings, ceremonial masks, jewelry and carpets. Special events feature the coronation in 1965 and the wedding of Princess Yanchen Dolma and Simon Abraham in 1979. The entire collection includes approximately 15,000 photographs available for research use at the Library. A video presentation of the lecture “A Tour of the Long Kingdom: Sikkim,” by Hope Cooke and Dr. Kandell is available online.
Photoglob Co. colorized photochrom prints
Published/Created: [Zürich] : [Photoglob Company], [ca. 1890-1910]
Approximately 60 colorized photochrom prints from the Photoglob Co. in Zurich, Switzerland showing various historical landmarks, monuments, and religious sites in colonial India. This photochrom depicts the Golden Temple in Amritsar.
Taj-Mahal, Agra by Bartlett, Charles W., 1860-1940, artist
Call Number: FP - XIX - Bartlett (C.), no. 3 (B size) [P&P]
Published/Created: 1916
Print shows walkways and reflecting leading to the Taj Mahal, Agra, India.
Taj-Mahal, twilight by Bartlett, Charles W., 1860-1940, artist
Call Number: FP - XIX - Bartlett (C.), no. 20 (B size) [P&P]
Published/Created: [ca. 1920]
Print shows full moon over the Yamuna River with Taj Mahal in the background, Agra, India.
World's Transportation Commission - India photos by Jackson, William Henry, 1843-1942, photographer
Published/Created: [1895]
The World’s Transportation Commission Photograph Collection contains nearly 900 images by American photographer William Henry Jackson. In addition to railroads, elephants, camels, horses, sleds and sleighs, sedan chairs, rickshaws, and other types of transportation, Jackson photographed city views, street and harbor scenes, landscapes, local inhabitants, and Commission members as they travelled through North Africa, Asian, Australia, and Oceania. This link retrieves images from India.

Chronicling America is the Library’s digital resource providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. Chronicling America enables you to search a selection of American historic newspapers published from 1763-1963. This resource may prove fruitful for researchers focusing on the history of American understandings of South Asia. For example, the research guide Yoga: Topics in Chronicling America highlights newspaper articles that portrayed yoga as a controversial practice in the United States in the early twentieth century. Researchers with questions about Chronicling America materials should contact specialists using Ask a Librarian.

*“Vedanta: The faith of the yogis which Washington is taking up.”* December 18, 1904. *The Washington Times* (Washington, D.C.), Image 30. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

South Asian Collection: Asian Collections at the Library of Congress

Asian Studies: Ask a Librarian

Digital Collections

South Asian Digital Collection

[Baidha saphu]. [1722]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Śyāmaladāsa. Vīravinoda. [Udayapura : Rājayantrālaya, 1890]. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Vihārīdāsa. Brajacaritra. 1953 [1896]. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

A selection from the illustrations which have appeared in the Oudh Punch from 1877 to 1881. Lucknow, Oudh Punch Office, 1881. Library of Congress General Collections.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa. [India]: [producer not identified], [not after 1800?]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Bible dictionary. Vēta uriccol. Madras. Christian Vernacular Education Society, 1862. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Mahatma Gandhi. A common platform. [India?]: M.K. Gandhi, [1933?]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

The Maháwansa. From first to thirty-sixth chapter. Colombo, F. Luker, acting government printer, Ceylon, 1883. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

George Crawshay. The immediate cause of the Indian mutiny, as set forth in the official correspondence. London, E. Wilson [1857?]. Library of Congress General Collections.

Gandhara scroll. [Gandhara]: [producer not identified], [approximately 1st century B.C.-approximately 1st century A.D.] South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Slavery, in the civilised British Government under the cloak of Brahmanism. 1873. South Asian collection, Library of Congress Asian Division.

Om he āryajanaho! Gorakshaṇa karo, yā peṭakā rakshaṇa karo, kyoṅki ... Mumbaī: Khemarāja Śrīkr̥shṇadāsa, Śrīveṅkaṭeśvarachāpākhānā, 1947 [1890]. South Asian Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress Asia Division

South Asia Ephemera Collection on Microfiche: Indexes

Index for Politics and government - India Part 1

Index for Women in Sri Lanka Part 2

Index for Kashmir question, post-1947 publications from Pakistan. Part 1

Index for Textbooks from Pakistan Part 1

Index for Patriotic literature from Bangladesh. Part 1

Index for Hindi novels, 1850-1950. Part 1

Index for Rural and village development in Bangladesh. Part 3

Index for Divehi language publications Part 1

Index for Buddhism in Nepal. Part 1

Index for Bengal famine of 1943

Index for Women in India. Part 8.

Index for Bharatiya Janata Party. Part 2

South Asian Literary Recordings Project

Digitized Materials from the Library's Other Divisions