The University of Virginia Library holds one of the largest collections of South Asia-related works in the United States. It has been building its South Asia collections for over four decades, supporting research and teaching in South Asian languages and cultures, history, politics, anthropology, art, cinema, and religious studies. It collects fiction, drama, poetry, and cinematic videos in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Persian, Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan, in support of the South Asian language programs. The Sadeq Chubak Collection, acquired in 2000, includes over 1,000 Persian books and journals on the literature and culture of Iran. Collections for modern and pre-modern history concentrate on Gandhi, Partition, women, and Mughal rulers, and research materials on north Indian regions, kingdoms (Hyderabad, Oudh, Bhopal, Bahawalpur), and Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and the Punjab.
The library holds an extensive collection of India state and district gazetteers of the 19th and 20th centuries; a full set of the India decennial census from 1872 through 1941, as well as other census materials from the 1960’s to the present; and India land revenue settlement reports of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Political collections emphasize development in India, and its non-governmental and economic agencies, with special focus on the states of West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra. There are also significant holdings on South Asia marriage and kinship structure, the caste system, and strong anthropological holdings about food and its place in society. The library has a large video collection, now over 1,600 titles, of Indian and Pakistani feature and documentary films. It includes a comprehensive collection of films that are considered classics of Indian film making.
The Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library focuses on collecting materials on pre-modern Indian architecture, sculpture, and decorative arts, and has enhanced its already substantial image collection with an additional 3,374 images of South Asian art. The Special Collections library holds the Henry Presler Papers, an extensive collection of manuscripts, reports, and photographs of central India religious institutions from 1949 through 1972.
Particularly strong holdings in religion include works on Hinduism, Islam, Indian philosophical systems, and Buddhism. The collection of Tibetan Buddhism is one of the premier collections in the world. Most of the materials are in the Tibetan language and script and cover religion, the Tibetan language, and principles of Buddhist art and iconography. The library has been purchasing annual installments of materials digitized by the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center since 2002. The project is digitizing all known Tibetan language works and making them available to scholars online. The library’s reputation for its South Asia collection led to its being given the entire library of the Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions in 2006. This major gift consisted of over 70,000 volumes of books, over 1,200 current and non-current periodical titles, and almost 66,000 works on microform. The collection is focused on resources for the study of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, and is particularly strong in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, Sinhalese and Hindi works about Buddhism. We have identified approximately 1,400 titles that we believe are not held by any library in the world.
For various University database subscriptions relevant to South Asian Studies, see here.
For the Tibetan and Himalayan Library, housed at UVa, see here.
To access the Ravindra S. Khare papers, see here.
For the Henry Presler Papers, see here.
To contact the South Asia Librarian, Dimitri Kastritsis, please click here.
To contact the Tibetan, Buddhist Studies, and Contemplative Studies Librarian, Nawang Thokmey, please click here.