India: Literatures

A Mellon-funded digital archive of the video-taped readings, personal documents, letters, and manuscripts of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

Downloadable free ebooks, mostly in Marathi

The Mission seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India. The Books tab includes pdf links

Multimedia Study Environment, includes observations of 10 Columbia scholars from various disciplines, annotations providing historical and literary context, among other resources.

Copies of books under the custody of various libraries of West Bengal, India.

The full-text server of the Virtual Library CrossAsia; platform for publishing and archiving research literature in Asian Studies. Search or browse by country.

A comprehensive reference work cataloging all of the world’s known living languages, since 1951. 19th edition. Browse by languages or countries.

A cumulative register of the numerous download sites for electronic texts in Indian languages.

Hosted on the Internet Archive

The Library of the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg offers access to digital full text versions of selected works of literature from the 18th to the early 20th century.

A digital humanities project with a unique and ambitious task: to create a database for the vast world of South Asian letters. PANDiT seeks to store, curate, and share reliable data on works, people, places, institutions, and manuscripts from premodern South Asia, in addition to relevant secondary sources, and to do so across period, language, discipline and subject matter. It is designed as an interactive web-based repository that scholars of every South Asian specialty and interest can contribute to and as a basic tool on which they will routinely come to rely.

SAADA creates a more inclusive society by giving voice to South Asian Americans through documenting, preserving, and sharing stories that represent their unique and diverse experiences.

Information about rare manuscripts in various South Asian languages (e.g., Sanskrit, Urdu, Tamil, Sinhalese) available for research in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress.

The first digital resource to offer bibliographic information about plays published in sixteen Indian languages, from the 1840s to the present

Search engine for manuscripts. Seeks to be a digital archive containing all Avestan manuscripts spread all over the world.

Wellcome Library (London). Comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. For the first time this website enables a substantial proportion of this collection to be consulted online via high-quality digital images of entire manuscripts and associated rich metadata.

Editors: Jens Braarvi; Dag T. Haug; Frode Helland; Stephan Guth; University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology.
A multilingual corpus of historically important texts and a resource to access the global history of concepts as displayed in a number of languages. It demonstrates how concepts diffuse historically into new languages, and thus into new cultural contexts. Sub-libraries include: Arabic texts; Biblia; Bibliotheca Polyglotta Graeca et Latina; Cuneiform multilinguals; Library of Old Norse; Motif library of mythology; Norwegian place names - Norske stedsnavn; Pāli Tipiṭaka; Sanskrit-Persica; The Ashoka library; The Kanjur Buddhist Sūtras in Tibetan; The multilingual Ibsen; Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Encompassing the treatises and translations produced in India between the 13th and the 19th century.

A free website with the objective of promoting and disseminating Urdu literature, especially Urdu Poetry to an audience beyond those conversant with the Urdu script. The content is available in Devanagari and Roman scripts in addition to the Urdu script.

A rich collection of materials from letters to manuscripts to photographs. Containing over 4000 items, the collection documents the life and career of Sajjad Zaheer and highlights contemporaneous writers, politics and the Zaheer family from Lucknow, India.

[Abūllais̲ Ṣiddīqī, mudīr-i aʻlá ; Nasīm Amrohvī, mudīr-i avval], Karācī : Taraqqī-yi Urdū Borḍ, 1977-<1994>
Dictionary of Urdu (on historical principles)
Offsite: P-U 78-931245 (v. 1-21)

tartīb va tahz̲īb, Anvar Muʻaẓẓam, Ashhar Farḥān.
Offsite Z7161.A22 2008g (v. 1-4)

The Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Archive is a huge collection of textual and visual materials mainly focused on colonial Bengal. Starting in 1993, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) has undertaken the task of microfilming and digitising a huge amount of textual sources, including all the major journals of colonial Bengal. The textual part of this collection is from now on going to be made available on CrossAsia-Repository.

A collection of digitized artifacts related to Kerala, Malayalam, and its culture. The digitized documents include some of the earliest printed documents related to Kerala such as the first printed book in Malayalam; First Malayalam book printed in India; First Malayalam Dictionary; Many early Malayalam periodicals; First Malayalam book with colour images, and several others. The collection is constantly growing.

Books in pdf format in English and Nepali on Bhutan, India, Nepal and Tibet.

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.

Library of Congress collection. These rare Persian manuscripts, lithographs and books comprise works in 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. Many also have beautiful bindings. A number of the illuminated books are multilingual works, which include Arabic and Turkish passages in addition to Persian, focusing on scientific, religious - philosophical and literary topics, and others are holy books important to all confessional traditions within the Islamic world.

MICROFLM FN 3869 in Butler Microforms (401 Butler)

Partially full text online.

Editors: Jens Braarvi; Dag T. Haug; Frode Helland; Stephan Guth; University of Oslo, Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology.
A multilingual corpus of historically important texts and a resource to access the global history of concepts as displayed in a number of languages. It demonstrates how concepts diffuse historically into new languages, and thus into new cultural contexts. Sub-libraries include: Arabic texts; Biblia; Bibliotheca Polyglotta Graeca et Latina; Cuneiform multilinguals; Library of Old Norse; Motif library of mythology; Norwegian place names - Norske stedsnavn; Pāli Tipiṭaka; Sanskrit-Persica; The Ashoka library; The Kanjur Buddhist Sūtras in Tibetan; The multilingual Ibsen; Thesaurus Literaturae Buddhicae; Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Microfiche format Butler Microforms MICFICHE FX3 8388. Collection contains 21 catalogues of Indian manuscripts from Sanskrit colleges and libraries throughout India. Online guide.

A searchable collection of lemmatized Sanskrit texts, for research in Sanskrit linguistics and philology. Users can search for lexical units and their collocations in a corpus of about 3.250.000 manually tagged words in 430.000 sentences. It offers free internet access to a part of the database of the linguistic program SanskritTagger.

University of Madras. Sanskrit Department
Based on Theodor Aufrecht's Catalogus catalogorum.
South Asian Studies Reading Room (601 Butler) Z6605.S3 U54 1949

This searchable collection of Sanskrit electronic texts contains Kavya and Subhashita works, all transcribed and proofread by students of the Seminar of Indian Studies (Institute of South and Central Asia, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague), the work is still in progress.

A digital library dedicated to facilitating education and research in Sanskrit by providing access to digitized primary texts in Sanskrit and computerized research and study tools to analyze and maximize the utility of digitized Sanskrit text.

A collaboration between the University of Toronto Libraries and the French Institute of Pondicherry Tamil Studies Programme to providee global access to the Tamil collection of Professor Gros

A new digital edition of Tibetan Histories with detailed entries of over 1250 titles of Tibetan-language historical writings.