About
This guide is organized by region, with countries divided into subpages. Choose from the dropdown tab or click the links below:
Background
Information on the land, people, economy, administration and social conditions, cultural life, and history.
World Regional Geography - South Asia
This ebook offers information about geographic features, patterns of human settlement, cultural landscape, current population growth, and future prospects in South Asia.
Secondary Sources
Use these databases to find articles and/or essays in scholarly journals and books.
Statistics & Economy
News
Open Access
This online newspaper directory offers a directory to thousands of newspapers from around the globe. Organized by country & region, users can easily find media through direct links for each region in Asia.
Books - South Asia
eBooks
Primary Sources
These databases and websites provide access to digital archival materials such as manuscripts, letters, photographs, moving image and sound materials, artwork, books, diaries, and other artifacts. You can also visit our main home page for Asia to find additional databases covering broader regions.
- Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, 1947-1980
This collection of files from the Foreign Office (later the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and Dominions Office focuses on the political and social history of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980.
- India, Raj and EmpireManuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland on the history of South Asia between the foundation of the East India Company in 1615 and the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947.
The Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users. The site offers access to Reference Resources, Images, Maps, Statistics, Bibliographies, Indexes, Texts in original language, and Internet Resources
SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, and caste & social structure.
Approximately 50 individual collections totaling 80 hours of footage, mostly home movies.
Images of Colonialism - Harvard Library
This visual record of early European contacts with Africa and Asia is a primary visual resource for historical and socio-cultural studies.
This collection chronicles the historical and contemporary perspectives on independence movements, early statehood, and the extensive economic and social growth in South Asia. The collection covers several countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan), India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, and features multiple languages such as Bengali, Dari, English, Nepali, and more.
Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, Cambridge University
These comprise more than 1,600 works in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, Tamil and other ancient and medieval South Asian languages, produced over a time-span of more than 1,000 years, and written in over a dozen scripts and on different writing materials, such as paper, palm leaf and birch bark.
SARIT Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts
Here you will find electronic editions of texts in Sanskrit and other Indian languages. These are documented, dated and have embedded notes about their change history, so that they can be publicly cited and used with confidence as scholarly sources.
Granth South Asia is supported by the Sir Ratan Tata Trust, Mumbai, as part of the Collaborative Project on Digitization of South Asian Archival Resources between the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and the British Library, UK. The project has allowed us to undertake surveys and extend support to the digitizing and conservation of critically endangered records.
Harappa: Glimpses of South Asia before 1947
Illustrated pages on Ancient Indus civilization; photographs, postcards, lithographs, engravings, and film from before 1947.
This portal includes printed and lithographed books and pamphlets in Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit and other languages, Indian manuscripts including several palm-leaf manuscripts, copies of texts and notebooks in various languages by Hermann Gundert and his missionary colleagues. The portal hosts all 19th century works in South Indian languages that are in the holdings of the Tübingen University Library, even if they were not strictly speaking from the Gundert legacy. English and German material written by Gundert and his closest colleagues was also added.
Institute for Historical Research at the School of Advanced Study University of London
This page provides links to open-access resources, South Asian history to c.1526, South Asia c.1526 to mid-18th century, South Asia c.1757-1947, Contemporary South Asia since 1947, and South Asian Diaspora history resources.
A non-profit online platform consisting of an Encyclopedia, Courses and a Blog— which encourages knowledge building and engagement with the visual arts of South Asia.
South Asian Epics
