South Asian Studies: Free online resources

Web portal for the National Archives of India

The Archives at NCBS is a public centre for the history of science in contemporary India. Over 350,000 processed objects across 50+ collections are in various forms, ranging from paper-based manuscripts to negatives to photographs, books, fine art, audio recordings, scientific equipment, letters, and field and lab notes. The holdings include the papers of the ornithologist, Ravi Sankaran, and the molecular biologist and co-founder of NCBS, Obaid Siddiqi. They include papers of TSG Sastry, a physicist who worked on the Thumba rocket programme, Leslie Coleman, an early 20th century agricultural scientist in Mysore state, and the renowned agricultural scientist, MS Swaminathan.

A guide created by the Joint Centre for History and Economics at Magdalene College and King's College, Cambridge, offering an overview of archival materials on South and Southeast Asia available freely online and also useful information about physical archives in the region.

Search engine especially for academic web resources. BASE provides more than 240 million documents from more than 8,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed documents for free (Open Access)

Website of the census of India, excellent source of statistics

Information about the Centre, and its library and archival holdings

New home for - among other resources - SAVIFA, the virtual South Asian library created by Heidelberg University

Digitised items from the Dhananjayrao Gadgil Library at the GIPE, particularly useful for historic South Asian government publications

Dictionaries, maps, statistical information and more

Site developed by the National Informatics Centre to provide district-level information and links to official district websites

Website of the Endangered Archives Programme, hosted by the British Library; click on the "Explore the archives" tab to search holdings

District Level Database (DLD) for Indian agriculture and allied sectors, maintained by ICRISAT

The India Data Portal (IDP) developed by the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP), Indian School of Business (ISB), provides a one-stop, open-access to data and information, curated from across government departments.

Government of India platform that hosts data of cultural relevance from various repositories and institutions all over India, including digitised books

District-level data from census and agricultural sources between 1961 and 1991

Digital repository of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies

A collection of digitized resources hosted by the Lahore School of Economics, including Pakistan census publications.

Digitised government publications from the National Library of Scotland's collections, relating to disease, public health and medical research in South Asia, between around 1850 and 1950

The National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003, by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India. A unique project in its programme and mandate, the Mission seeks to unearth and preserve the vast manuscript wealth of India.

Bibliographic database for books and journals published or distributed by the Naval Kishore Press

Open Data Pakistan is a collaborative effort of the National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC), Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUSM) and Higher Education Commission (HEC)

Data portal of the Government of India

Digitised resources on Panjab

PARI is a living archive of the world’s most complex countryside. Rural India is the most diverse part of the planet. Its 833 million people include distinct communities speaking close to 800 languages. This diversity is also seen in the occupations and livelihoods, arts and crafts, culture, literature, legend, transportation, and innumerable other fields that PARI covers. PARI hosts and combines video, photo, audio and text archives. And a contemporary journalism website.

Perso-Indica is a research and publishing project that will produce a comprehensive analytical survey of Persian works on Indian learned traditions, encompassing the treatises and translations produced in India between the 13th and the 19th century.

Organisation's website with links to digitised books

South Asia research journal - as well as the online journal has interesting "review of archives" section

The South Asian Ephemera Collection complements Princeton's already robust Digital Archive of Latin American and Caribbean Ephemera. The goal of the collection is to provide a diverse selection of resources that span a variety of subjects and languages and support interdisciplinary scholarship in South Asian Studies.

Online map resource giving information about the built heritage in West Bengal associated with the Great Trigonometrical Survey

Digital network of South Asian popular visual culture

An ongoing project that seeks to foreground some of the stories in LSE's archives and special collections that speak about South Asia.

Online platform for histories, heritage and memory of WW2 in Asia, website of the international and interdisciplinary network, the "War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership" (WARMAP), led by the University of Essex and funded by the UK's Leverhulme Trust

Digitised items from the WB Secretariat Library, including many government titles