Digital Dimensions

Historical Postcards

The Regenstein Library has digitized nearly 12,000 postcards of colonial India from the private collection of Graham Shaw, former Head of Asia, Pacific, and Africa Collections at the British Library, London. Most of the postcards date from the 1880s to the 1930s. They depict a variety of scenes from everyday life in colonial South Asia, in addition to topics that would have been of interest to tourists and British residents alike. The collection is a unique visual record of colonial culture. As material objects, the postcards with their stamps and traces of correspondence offer fascinating glimpses of life in British India.

Maps

The Digital South Asia Library (DSAL) contains an important collection of digitized maps. The atlases of the Imperial Gazetteer of India (1909 and 1931 editions) capture multifaceted information on the geographical, historical, ethnic, linguistic, economic, and administrative aspects of British India. Joseph Schwartzberg's pioneering Historical Atlas of South Asia (1978) covers geographic, historical, and topical changes in South Asia from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. These exceptional resources document South Asia from a variety of cartographic perspectives.

Cinema Songbooks

The Regenstein Library is currently digitizing a superb collection of cinema songbooks from South Asia as part of a special collecting initiative aimed at preserving the sound culture of South Asia. The collection contains lyric books of Hindi and Tamil films from the 1930s to 1960s, some of which have been transliterated into other scripts such as Urdu, Gujarati, and Sindhi. The songbooks are a rich record of the immensely popular and innovative musical traditions of South Asian cinema.

Gujarati Periodicals

The digitization of two rare Gujarati women's journals, Stribodh (1857-1944) and Sundari Subodh (1904-1921), is part of the South Asia Materials Project (SAMP), a collaboration between the Library, the Center for Research Libraries, and the B.J. Institute in Ahmedabad. The journals contain articles and stories about and by women. They are particularly important for their documentation of social reform and nationalist politics, in addition to giving a public voice to the concerns of Gujarati women and female writers.

Urdu Periodicals

The exceptional private collections of Pakistani intellectuals Niaz Fatehpuri and Farman Fatehpuri contain literary journals, college magazines, conference proceedings, travelogues, and a variety of political documents from several cities in Pakistan. The remarkable materials capture the social, cultural, and political life of Pakistan in the first part of the twentieth century. The collections have been digitized by the Library in collaboration with the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme and with the Mushfiq Khwaja Library and Research Center in Karachi, Pakistan.