South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA)SADAA conserves, digitises, shares, and celebrates the work of first generation British South Asian artists post-partition. SADAA contains art, music, literature, dance, and theater collections.
Dalit Art Archive (from Dalit Archives)Dalit Art Archive is a project within the framework of Five Million Incidents 2019-20, conceived by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective. In its current form, the Archive is interested in building permanent (conducting interviews, featuring articles and research) as well as ephemeral (festivals and exhibitions) registers that center the histories of Caste and Art.
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (India)Scroll down the the resources section to access a variety of projects, portals, and archives provided by the Indian Ministry of Culture. Please note that some of the resources listed may be curated to push a specific political perspective. Be critical of your sources and consider the potential bias.
Online Museum Resources on Asian Art (OMuRAA)An initiative of the Asia for Educators Program at Columbia University. Identifies online visual resources and indexes them in ways that are familiar to teachers and students in world history, world literature, and general art courses.
International Collections DatabaseIn this digital collection from the University of Washington, there are selected photographs and postcards from Asia and South America including scenes from China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Japan, 1870s-1930s. Represented are historical events, typical street scenes and native people in traditional dress.
Discover over 10,000 years of art history in South Asia here.
Kamat Reference DatabaseKamat has partnered with leading scholars and publishers to create a reference and full text database specifically focusing on the art, history and culture of India.
PARI (People's Archive of Rural India)PARI is both a living journal and an archive. It will generate and host reporting on the countryside that is current and contemporary, while also creating a database of already published stories, reports, videos and audios from as many sources as we can. The videos generated specifically for PARI record the lives and livelihoods of poor and everyday Indians.
Ethnomusicology: Global Field RecordingsThe audio recordings, videos, field notebooks and journals in this resource document musical traditions and how music interacts with different societies and cultures all over the globe. This resource provides a wealth of materials for the interdisciplinary study of ethnomusicology; whether the focus is on music, anthropology, dance, religion or spirituality.
The Travelling ArchiveThe Travelling Archive is a shared space of listening to field recordings of songs, stories and other sounds from Bengal. Bengal is both a physical space and a space of the mind and imagination here, geographically covering Bangladesh, the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and some adjoining areas of Assam in the east of South Asia; even the diaspora in distant locations such as the Bengali/Bangladeshi neighbourhoods of London or migrant labourers’ quarters in Gurgaon.
Ancient India and Iran Trust (Cambridge Digital Library)This site contains the Allchin Archive which is a photographic archive of the collections of the Kabul Museum. It also contains the Howard Wilson Archive which contains the art of Sri Lanka.
Adavi Myah (Where Art Belongs Showcase)Adavi Myah showcased the first Art Exhibition in the U.S. that exclusively features art rom Dalit and Bahujan artists. This site contains the livestream link for the exhibition, as well as a gallery of art that was at this exhibition.
Tasveer GharTasveer Ghar is a trans-national virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia’s exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.
Beyond the Taj: Architectural Traditions and Landscape Experience in South AsiaThis collection from the Cornell University Library consists of approximately 7000 photographs of works of architecture, pilgrimage locales and domestic life taken in India and Sri Lanka by Professor Robert D. “Scotty” MacDougall (1940-1987), an anthropologist and an architect.
AGSL Digital Photo Archive – Asia and Middle EastAGSL Digital Photo Archive – Asia and Middle East presents over 28,000 images from the holdings of the American Geographical Society (AGS) Library. The selection focuses on the countries of Asia and the Middle East.
Culture UnpluggedAn online film archive to watch films (documentaries, short films, talks & more). Cultureunplugged.com presents short length + feature length documentary / film content from independent film-makers and grassroot productions to a global audience, to not only promote the art of film-making, but above all to spread awareness and promote the collective contemplation over global/local challenges.
University of Cambridge's South Asia Film ArchivesMost of the material here is 16mm or 8mm home movies, taken between 1911 and 1956, which give a unique perspective of life in South Asia towards the end of the British Empire and in the first years of independence. The collection covers a broad range of topics – the rescue of civilians and soldiers trapped inside Burma by swollen rivers after the country’s fall to the Japanese in World War II, repairs on the railway line from Quetta to the Khyber Pass after the Quetta earthquake of 1935, relief work and disturbing scenes of the removal of bodies during the Partition period, the social lives of the Raj, children playing and going to school, royal weddings, Indian festivals and rites – the list is very long.
Films Division: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of IndiaThe Films Division of India was established in 1948 to articulate the energy of a newly independent nation and holds, in its archives, more than 8000 titles on documentaries, short films and animation films. Includes links to a films database (requires free registration) and videos (under "archives").
Indiancine.maIndiancine.ma is an annotated online archive of Indian film. It also includes full streaming video of out of copyright Indian films. It is intended to serve as a shared resource for film scholars and enthusiasts in India and beyond.
Bangladesh Film ArchivePublished by the Bangladesh Government, information on the history of film in Bangladesh with articles exploring films and themes. English website version available.
Dalit CinemaIn this article, Suraj Yengde, a Dalit academic, activist, and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, offers introductory remarks on the position of the Dalit in Indian cinema.
Journal of Arts and IdeasJournal of Arts and Ideas is indexed in the Bibliography of Asian Studies. The Digital South Asia Library contains issues from 1983 to 1999.
