Resources
South Asia Collections
UW South Asia Collections
UW South Asia Library Collection: UW has one of the most extensive collections of books from and about South Asia in North America, including many in the languages of South Asia. This page also includes research guides and links to other important collections and archives.
South Asian Textile & Costume Collections at the Henry Art Gallery: The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington houses 1,800 costumes and textiles from the Indian subcontinent. This forms an important resource for the study of the rich variety of woven, printed, dyed, and embroidered textile traditions in cotton and silk and the linguistic, ethnic, and caste relationships. Use the ‘Search the Collection’ feature on the Gallery website to explore South Asian items. Searching by country name such as India or Pakistan is a good way to start.
South Asian Oral Histories: The project represents one of the first attempts in the U.S. to record pan-South Asian immigrant experiences in the Pacific Northwest using the medium of oral history. These interviews reflect religious, linguistic, occupational and gender diversity and provide rich insight into changing experiences of South Asians in the Pacific Northwest.
Gairola Indian Art & Architecture Image Collection: Professor Gairola was an avid traveler who often led study tours to key art history/archaeological sites on the Indian subcontinent. It is believed that he made this slide collection for the classes he taught, during various trips to India and South Asia from 1950s to 2000.
R. Nath Mughal Architecture Image Collection: Professor R. Nath’s collection of Mughal architecture. Mughal architecture was a far reaching and highly influential style of Indian architecture throughout the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, with roots in Islamic and Persian monuments.
Private Papers of Elizabeth Bayley Willis: Correspondence, biographical material, reference files, reports, reminiscences, writings, exhibition catalogs, notes, clippings, and ephemera, relating to Willis’s career as a museum professional; her work as consultant in the production and marketing of decorative arts for the Technical Assistance Administration of the United Nations and the governments of India, Morocco, Taiwan, and Vietnam; her activities as textile historian and collector.
Digital Collections
The South Asia Microform Project (SAMP)
A cooperative program that seeks to acquire and maintain a readily accessible collection of unique materials in microform related to the study of South Asia. Materials are collected both through the filming efforts of the project and through the purchase of positive copies of materials filmed by other groups, institutions and companies.
Online information about contemporary and historical South Asia including: full-text documents; statistical data; electronic images; cartographic representations; pedagogical resources for language instruction; delivery on demand of page images from South Asia, scanned from both paper and microform sources; and internet-based indexes to highly select journals in the regional languages of South Asia.
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
A subsection of the Digital South Asia Library, this collection of online dictionaries covers both the most widely spoken South Asian languages such as Bengali, Hindi, and Tamil, as well as regional languages such as Assamese, Sindhi, and Pashto.
Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project
The British Library / University of Washington Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was founded in September 1996 in order to promote the study, editing, and publication of a unique collection of fifty-seven fragments of Buddhist manuscripts on birch bark scrolls, written in the Kharosthi script and the Gandhari (Prakrit) language that were acquired by the British Library in 1994. The manuscripts date from, most likely, the first century A.D., and as such are the oldest surviving Buddhist texts, which promise to provide unprecedented insights into the early history of Buddhism in north India and in central and east Asia.
The mission of the Panjab Digital Library (PDL) is to locate, digitize, preserve, collect and make accessible the accumulated wisdom of the Panjab region, without distinction as to script, language, religion, nationality, or other physical condition. Manuscripts, books, official records, newspapers, miniatures, murals, periodicals, paintings, pictures, architecture etc are all are being digitized at PDL.