LibGuides: South Asian History: Primary Sources

Digital Collections

East India Company
East India Company offers a collection of India Office Records from the British Library, London. Containing royal charters, correspondence, trading diaries, minutes of council meetings and reports of expeditions, among other document types, this resource charts the history of British trade and rule in the Indian subcontinent and beyond from 1600 to 1947.
Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan
Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 consists of the complete run of documents in the series DO 133, DO 134 and FCO 37, as well as all documents covering the Indian subcontinent in the FO 371 series. Events covered include independence and partition, the Indian annexation of Hyderabad and Goa, war between India and Pakistan, tensions and war between India and China, the consolidation of power of the Congress Party in India, military rule in Pakistan, the turbulent independence of Bangladesh and the development of nuclear weapons in the region.
Hindu Conspiracy Cases: Activities of the Indian Independence Movement in the U.S., 1908-1933
During World War I, Indian nationalists took advantage of Great Britain’s preoccupation with the European war by attempting to foment revolution in India to overthrow British rule. Their activities were aided politically and financially by the German Government. Indian nationalists in the United States were active in the independence movement effort through fundraising, arms buying, and propagandizing through the Hindustan Ghadar newspaper published in San Francisco.
Indian Army and Colonial Warfare on the Frontiers of India
For generations of British and Indian Officers and men, the North-West Frontier was the scene of repeated skirmishes and major campaigns against the trans-border Pathan tribes who inhabited the mountainous no-man’s land between India and Afghanistan. This collection contains Army Lists; Orders; Instructions; Regulations; Acts; Manuals; Strength Returns; Orders of Battle; Administration Summaries; organization, commissions, committees, reports, maneuvers; departments of the Indian Army; and regimental narratives. This collection is a welcome addition to the new-flourishing literature on the military history of South Asia and the growing field of serious study of the British military experience in India.
India from Crown Rule to Republic, 1945-1949: Records of the U.S. State Department
Independent India’s first years were marked with turbulent events - partition, a massive exchange of population with Pakistan, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 and the integration of over 500 princely states to form a united nation. This collection identifies the key issues, individuals, and events in the history of the Subcontinent between 1945 and 1949, and places them in the context of the complex and dynamic regional strategic, political, and economic processes that have fashioned India in the postwar period.
India-Pakistan Conflict: Records of the U.S. State Department, February 1963-1966
Over 16,000 pages of State Department Central Files on India and Pakistan from 1963 through 1966 make this collection a standard documentary resource for the study of the political relations between India and Pakistan during a crucial period in the Cold War and the shifting alliances and alignments in South Asia.
India, Raj and Empire
Drawing upon the manuscript collections of the National Library of Scotland, this searchable online resource provides access to digital facsimiles of diaries and journals, official and private papers, letters, sketches, paintings and original Indian documents containing histories and literary works. The collection documents the relationship between Britain and India in an empire where the Scots played a central role as traders, generals, missionaries, viceroys, governor-generals and East India Company officials. The dates of the documents range from 1710 to 1937.
Research Source: Area Studies: India
This module contains primary sources, including personal papers, literature, travel writing, and newspapers, from 1712 to 1943 focused on the British Indian Empire and the history, culture and literature of the Indian subcontinent during this period.
South Asia Commons: History and Culture
South Asian History and Culture is a project to build the largest full text repository of quality South Asian books, magazines, reports, historical journals, video, audio, zines, newspapers, magazines, letters, diaries, and other primary source materials. The database provides in-depth, advanced searching, with centralized access to over 500 organizations, 350,000 documents, and millions of pages scattered across the internet.

South Asia Open Archives
South Asia Open Archives is a free open-access resource for research and teaching - a rich and growing curated collection of key historical and contemporary sources in arts, humanities and social sciences, from and about South Asia, in English and other languages of the region. SAOA's collection currently contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, magazines, and documents, with particular focus on social & economic history, literature, women & gender, caste & social structure, history of science, and art history & music. SAOA is the product of a collaborative initiative of a broad consortium of 26 current member research libraries in South Asia and around the world.

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO)
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century; comprised of numerous collections to be released over many years. Includes a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more--in one cross-searchable location.
Empire Online
This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.

Newspapers

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Times of India (1838-2010)
ProQuest Historical Newspapers is the definitive newspaper digital archive offering full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the 18th century. Every issue of each title includes the complete paper, cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images in easily downloadable PDF format. The full collection of ProQuest Historical Newspapers contains over 30 million digitized pages.
World Newspaper Archive
World Newspaper Archive chronicles the history and politics of diverse peoples and cultures during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This expanding online resource was created in partnership between Readex, a division of NewsBank, and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)-one of the world's largest and most important newspaper repositories-and includes historical newspapers published in Africa, Latin America, Slavic and East Europe, South Asia and other regions.
British Library Newspapers

Sourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library, British Library Newspapers delivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These newspapers, emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial channel of information in towns and major cities, provide researchers with a unique, first-hand perspective on history. With more than 240 newspaper titles, the series is comprised of approximately 6.4 million pages of historic content, from articles to advertisements. This collection illuminates diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures, and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press over a period of more than 200 years. The University of Illinois has access to parts I-V of the collection, encompassing select newspapers from 1800-1950.
Times Digital Archive, The
Full-text and full-image articles from the Times of London for the years 1785-2006. It is a digital reproduction, cover to cover, of the paper in PDF files.

University of Illinois Library Newspaper Database
A catalog of newspapers at the University of Illinois Library. Lists newspapers in all formats--print, microfilm, and digitized. You can search for newspapers by title, or identify newspapers by place of publication, date of publication, or by the newspaper's subject or intended audience. Only includes newspapers that are either the original print publication, or else facsimile reproductions of the original print publication.

Other Primary Source Collections

Abhilekh Patal - National Archives of India
The Abhilekh Patal, derived from the Sanskrit word 'Abhilekh' signifying records of ancient times, and 'Patal' representing a platform or a surface, is a digital repository thoughtfully curated by the National Archives of India (NAI). This platform serves as a gateway to India's historical legacy, offering a treasure trove of meticulously preserved documents and records. Significantly, the acronym 'PATAL' is also an embodiment of its purpose 'Portal for Access to Archives & Learning'.

Abhilekh Patal contains the reference media of more than 3.7 million files held by the National Archives of India.
Center for Research Libraries South Asia Materials Project Holdings
SAMP's microform and digital collections form a large pool of historical, political, linguistic, economic, and geographical data and primary source materials not available elsewhere. Many of the sets contain archival material or large collections of material that do not lend themselves to traditional analytic cataloging.

Political pamphlets from the Indian subcontinent
Call Number: MFICHE 324.254 P7593

ISBN: 9781556552069

Publication Date: 1990

This collection is the result of a project undertaken in the late 1980s by University Publications of America (UPA) to film on microfiche the Library’s Indian Pamphlet Collection. Most materials in this collection are English-language pamphlets from throughout the 20th century, with a concentration of materials from 1946 to 1980. In Parts 1-4, one will find materials related to political parties such as: Congress Party, Communist Party of India, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Praja Socialist Party and other socialist parties, Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Janata Party, Bharatiya Janata Party, and many others. In addition, one will find pamphlets related to trade unions, Indian internal politics, state and regional politics, and materials related to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indian foreign affairs. Part 5 continues with more pamphlets related to political parties, special interest groups, research institutes and universities, Indian internal politics, and miscellaneous material.

More info available here with also links to the finding aids for the collection: https://guides.loc.gov/south-asia-ephemera-collection-microfiche-politics-and-government/political-pamphlets