Thursday, November 7, 2013

18th Century Route Map

I'm not sure how I missed Ursula Sims-Williams' post last March on the route from Delhi to Qandahar. The road book she describes is so much more elaborate (and beautiful) than the 4 versions of the Chahar Gulshan with which I've been working these past few years.* There must be some way to use all that rectilinearity in the representation of the route between Patiala and Ludhiana in my studies of imperial gardens...
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*Side note: I'm grateful to Ursula Sims-Williams for her help in procuring additional documentation about the Chahar Gulshan when I was at the British Library in 2008!

Friday, October 11, 2013

South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA)

Kuhldip Singh on the George Gobel Show, 1956. 
Photo courtesy: Time, Inc.

I found this photo of Kuhldip Singh via SAADA (South Asian American Digital Archive). SAADA "is an independent national non-profit organization working to create a more inclusive society by giving voice to South Asian Americans through documenting, preserving, and sharing stories that represent their unique and diverse experiences."

SAADA portal.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Endangered Archives Programme

The deadline for the latest round of funding from the Endangered Archives Programme is approaching quickly (November 1).

2013 projects in India included:
  • EAP643: Shantipur and its neighbourhood: Text and images of early modern Bengal in public and private collections 
  • EAP687: Digitisation of manuscripts held by the Tibetan Yungdrung Bön Library of Menri Monastery, Dolanji, India 
  • EAP689: Constituting a digital archive of Tamil agrarian history (1650-1950) - phase II
2013 projects in Bangladesh included:
  • EAP619: Pilot project to locate and digitise endangered single-copy pencil drawn Thakbast/mouza maps in selected Bangladeshi districts 
  • EAP683: Rāmamālā Library manuscript project 
HOW TO APPLY.

Endangered Archives Programme portal.

This link should take you to all the projects related to India.

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Balochistan Archives

I was very pleased to see the e-mail from my former colleague at Rutgers, Sumit Guha, sent to draw attention to the online portal to the Balochistan Archives. So many of us would love to go to Pakistan for research work, and so many of us will not be able to that any time soon. The availability of online records and files is still limited, but I hope the digital holdings grow quickly and soon.What is online already is fantastic--I just spent a large chunk of time reading about the 1935 Quetta Earthquake.

Balochistan Archives Entry Page
Balochistan Archives Facebook Page

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Historical Documents of Rajasthan

Mathias Metzger has made available a nice resource for scholars in Rajasthani studies. I stumbled across it while trying to track down a Vakil report. I've never been able to purchase personal copies of the A Descriptive List of the Vakil Reports Addressed to the Rulers of Jaipur books, and I've lost track of how many times I've checked the series out at my home library. Metzger's catalogue isn't complete, but it's a great start.

Historical Documents of Rajasthan

Friday, June 7, 2013

VERGE: Studies in Global Asias

Via the American Council for Southern Asian Art listserv:

JOURNAL ANNOUNCEMENT

VERGE: Studies in Global Asias
Senior Editors, Tina Chen and Eric Hayot

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is a new journal that includes scholarship from scholars in both Asian and Asian American Studies. These two fields have traditionally defined themselves in opposition to one another, with the former focused on an area-studies, nationally and politically oriented approach, and the latter emphasizing epistemological categories, including ethnicity and citizenship, that drew mainly on the history of the United States.  The past decade however has seen a series of rapprochements in which, for instance, categories “belonging”to Asian American Studies (ethnicity, race, diaspora) have been applied with increasing success to studies of Asia. For example Asian Studies has responded to the postnational turn in the humanities and social sciences by becoming increasingly open to rethinking its national and regional insularities, and to work that pushes, often literally, on the boundaries of Asia as both a place and a concept. At the same time, Asian American Studies has become increasingly aware of the ongoing importance of Asia to the Asian American experience, and thus more open to work that is transnational or multilingual, as well as to forms of scholarship that challenge the US-centrism of concepts governing the Asian diaspora.

Verge showcases scholarship on “Asian” topics from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that the changing scope of “Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of vital critical concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist (national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global) modes  Responding to the ways in which large-scale social, cultural, and economic concepts like the world, the globe, or the universal (not to mention East Asian cousins like tianxia or datong) are reshaping the ways we think about the present, the past and the future, the journal publishes scholarship that occupies and enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and historical fields, from the ancient to the modern periods. The journal emphasizes multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the disciplines that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make possible new conversations and new models of critical thought.

For more information, please see our website:

Queries and Submissions should be sent to: verge@psu.edu

Issue 1: OPEN ISSUE
The history of scholarship on Asian America, when juxtaposed with the fields of Asian Studies, reminds us how much nations, national movements, and other forms of national development continue to exert powerful effects on the world in which we live. Such movements also remind us of the importance of inter-nationalism, of the kinds of networks that can spring up between states and which can work to disrupt the smooth passage of the planet into a utopian post-national future. The growing interest in the global and the transnational across disciplines thus brings the various Asia-oriented fields and disciplines—history and literature, Asia and Asian America, East and South, modern and premodern—closer together. This inaugural issue seeks to feature work that illustrates the diverse engagements across disciplines (literature, history, sociology, art history, political science, geography) and fields (Asian Studies and Asian American Studies) that are possible once we begin thinking about the possible convergences and divergences such divisions have traditionally represented.  We welcome a range of perspectives; featured contributors include Ien Ang, Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Catherine Ceniza Choy, Magnus Fiskejo, Pika Ghosh, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Yunte Huang, Suk-young Kim, Joachim Kurtz, Meera Lee, Wei Li, Colleen Lye, Sucheta Mazumdar, Tak-wing Ngo, Haun Saussy, David Palumbo-Liu, Sheldon Pollack, Shuh-mei Shih, Eleanor Ty, and Jeffrey Wasserstrom.

Submission deadline: December 1, 2013

Issue 2: ASIAN EMPIRES & IMPERIALISM (edited by On-cho Ng and Erica Brindley)
The nature of Asian empires in the past, as well as the definition of imperialism in contemporary times, is a topic of ongoing discussion among scholars from a wide range of fields. In this special issue of Verge, we will explore a cluster of issues concerning the mechanics and influence of empires, imperial authority, and imperial types of influence over indigenous cultures and frontiers in Asia, as well as their diasporas abroad and in the USA. We invite submissions that address one or some of the following questions: How did various imperial efforts interact with local concerns to shape the history of cross-cultural interactions in this region? How did imperial regimes propose to solve the issue of a multi-ethnic empire? What were the roles of specific geographic and economic spheres in Asia (such as those of nomadic, agricultural, maritime, high altitude or lowland, and far-flung/diasporic cultures) in contributing to the distinctive quality of certain empires? How do certain characteristics of imperial administration and control in Asia compare to those of imperial states in other regions of the world? In addition to questions concerning the long history of Asian imperialism and comparisons with other empires, we also solicit submissions that speak to questions concerning contemporary Asian diasporas and their reactions to various forms of imperialism in the modern age. Questions might address such topics as “Yellow Peril” fears about Asian cultural imperialism; Japanese internment camps as a US response to Japanese imperial expansion in the Pacific; the Tibetan diaspora in South Asia and the Americas as a reaction to contemporary Chinese imperialism; Vietnamese responses to French, Chinese, or American imperialisms, and the treatment of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor.
Submission deadline: April 1, 2014


Issue 3: COLLECTING (edited by Jonathan Abel and Charlotte Eubanks)
As a construct and product of powerful institutions from empires, to nation-states, museums, to universities, Asia has long been formulated at the level of the collection.  Whether through royal court poetry compilations, colonial treasure hunters, art historians, bric a brac shop keepers, or librarians of rare archives, the role of collecting and classification has been deeply connected not only to definitions of what counts as Asia and who can be considered Asian, but also to how Asia continues to be configured and re-configured today.  

With this in mind, this special issue of Verge seeks to collect papers on the history, finance, psychology, politics and aesthetics of collecting Asia in Asia and beyond.  This collection hopes not only to bring into relief how “Asia” has been created but also to promote new definitions of Asia. What, for instance, are the historical implications of government-sponsored poetry anthologies in Mughal India, Heian-era Japan, or 20th century North Korea? What do the contents of treasure-houses -- at Angkor Wat, Yasukuni Shrine, or Vishwanath -- tell us about evolving concepts of art and of the elasticity of cultural and national contours? When did Japan become a geographical base for the collection of Asia?  Who collects Chinese books? How has Indian art been defined by curatorial practices?  Why did South Korea begin to collect oral histories in the 1990s?  What politics lie behind the exhibition of mainland Chinese posters in Taiwan?  How much money do cultural foundations spend on maintaining collections? Where are the limits of Asian collections in geographical and diasporic terms?  How do constructions of these collections impact our views of the collective, whether of Tibetan exiles in Dharamsala, Japanese internment camps in Indonesia, global Chinatowns, or adherents of new Asian religions in the Americas and former Soviet Republics?

This issue is interested in the various cultures of collecting Asia and collecting Asians, in the many politics of collecting, in the odd financial restrictions on collectors, in the psychology of collecting, in the anthropology of how communities form around collected objects, and in the sociology around collective histories.

Submission deadline:  November 15, 2014


Issue 4: ASIAN URBANISMS AND URBANIZATIONS
(edited by Madhuri Desai and Shuang Shen)
In the contemporary age of globalization, the city has gained new importance and attention as a center of information industry, a node of transnational and translocal networks, and a significant site of capital, labor migration and culture (Saskia Sassen, Manuel Castells and David Harvey). While this renewed interest in the city both perpetuates and revises theories of the city as a metaphor of modernity (Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel), it also opens up questions regarding the uniqueness and relevance of earlier cities and their experience of urbanization. When we move us away from Eurocentric understandings of modernity and time, it becomes increasingly possible to study non-European urbanisms in the past and at present with theoretical rigor and historical specificity. For this special issue, we invite submissions (around 8000 words) that explore urbanism as a site of comparison and connection among various Asian locales and beyond. We are interested in not just studies of Asian cities and their urban experience but also how “Asia” has been imagined both historically and contemporaneously, through urbanism and urbanization, and how “Asia” as a term of travel is registered in the urban space. This special issue will draw attention to the following questions: As cities become increasingly connected and similar to each other, how do they express their distinct identities as well as articulate their unique histories? Besides circulation, movement, and networks that have been much emphasized in contemporary studies of the city, how do borders, checkpoints, and passwords function in urban contexts? How does the city articulate connections between the local, the national, and the transnational? How does the Asian experience of urbanization and ideas surrounding Asian urbanism revise, rethink, and in some cases revive Asia’s colonial past? What does the Western perspective on some Asian cities as unprecedented and futuristic tells us about the imagination of Asia in the global context? How do migrant and ethnic communities negotiate with and redefine the public space of the city? How is the urban public shared or fragmented by co-existing ethnic and religious communities? How is the rising cosmopolitanism of these cities challenged through migration and sharply defined ethnic and religious identities? We invite submissions that address these questions within the context of Early modern, colonial and contemporary urbanisms and urbanizations.

Deadline: June 1, 2015

Monday, April 29, 2013

The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal

Now on exhibit (through Janaury 12, 2014) at the Royal Ontario Museum: Between Princely India and the British Raj: The Photography of Raja Deen Dayal. From the Deepali Dewan, the museum's Senior Curator, South Asian Visual Culture:

"During his lifetime, the path-breaking and prolific lensman Raja Deen Dayal (1884-1905) was one of the most widely recognised photographers from the Indian subcontinent. Today he remains among the most celebrated figures from this earlier era. This book brings together for the first time extensive archival research with close analyses of the significant body of Dayal's work preserved in the Alkazi Collection of Photography. Over the course of his remarkable career, Dayal opened studios in Indore, Secunderabad, and Bombay, employing over fifty staff photographers and assistants. Together, they produced more than 30,000 images of architecture, landscape, and people that have played a central role in how India's past has been visualized. This volume explores varied topics, from Dayal's public works, state visit, and hunting photographs to his images chronicling India's elite and growing middle classes. In this way, lays the groundwork to rethink the history and practice of photography in India: as a commercial business, as an engagement with new technology, and as an aesthetic enterprise. It also demonstrates photography's unique trajectory in India and its inseparability from a larger world history of photography. This publication includes several appendices, including a Key to Dating the photographs produced by the Dayal Studio."

Also available via Mapin Publishing:

Raja Deen Dayal: Artist-Photographer in 19th-century India
Deepali Dewan and Deborah Hutton
2013, Mapin and The Alkazi Collection of Photography
240 x 275 mm (9.45 x 10.8 in)
Hardcover, 232 pages, 161 colour photographs
ISBN 978-81-89995-76-8 (Mapin)
Rs.3,950.00 | $75.00 | ?48.00 | ?59.00
http://www.mapinpub.in/bookinfo.php?id=219

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Fulbright-Nehru Fellowships, 2014-15

A slightly-edited e-mail from Adam Grotsky, Executive Director, USEIF:

Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship opportunities for U.S. citizens in India for Academic Year 2014-15

India has the largest U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program in the world. You may not know that more than 80 U.S. scholarships are awarded each year.

These are a few things that may also be news to you:
  • USIEF has introduced Postdoctoral Fellowships, for candidates who have earned a doctorate degree in the last five years.
  • Grants for teaching, teaching/research, and research have been combined under Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence award category, which is open to faculty and professionals in all disciplines.
  • “Serial grants” will allow faculty the opportunity to conduct research in India, during shorter in-country stays, over the course of two years. The Distinguished Chair award, designed for eminent scholars with substantial teaching experience, offers the opportunity to travel to prominent institutions in India to deliver guest lectures and participate in conferences and workshop.
  • USIEF provides a dependent education allowance up to $10,000.
For more information on these grant options and benefits, visit CIESwebsite. The application deadline is August 1, 2013.

For details regarding benefits and application procedures for student grants, visit the FulbrightU.S. Student Program page.

Recently, many U.S. institutions have sent delegations to India on fact finding missions to engage strategically with their counterparts in India. A Fulbright-Nehru grant is an excellent way to seed potential long-standing partnerships with Indian institutions. In fact, each year we have grantees whose research collaborations and other joint efforts lead to active engagement at an institutional level. Help us identify worthy recipients! Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about our fellowship opportunities. We hope to welcome you and your colleagues to India someday soon.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

South Asia by the Bay (Grad Student Conference)

Heads up, graduate students--the CFP deadline has been extended to APRIL 2 for the South Asian conference at Stanford University:

Call for Papers: South Asia by the Bay at Stanford University
Graduate Student Conference at Stanford University 
May 17 & 18, 2013 (Exact program and venue TBA)
Tense Times: Intimacies, Enemies, and Strangers in South Asia
As South Asia experiences rapid and unprecedented transformation, both scholarly and public interest in the region has grown dramatically in recent years. A large new generation of graduate students working on South Asia in the humanities and social sciences is in the process of rethinking approaches to the study of South Asian culture, society, politics, economics, law, history, literature, and the arts. South Asia by the Bay’s first graduate-student conference held at Stanford University last year was a resounding success yielding many important conversations and discussions.
This year we focus on the theme of Tense Times: Intimacies, Enemies, and Strangers in South Asia.
The past decade has been a time of profound transformation across South Asia. Popular democracy has deepened in Nepal and Bangladesh; the end of civil war in Sri Lanka has ushered in a period of rapid development and triumphant majoritarianism; Pakistan is living through its deepest political crisis ever. In India a long economic boom generated talk of a new era where the weight of the colonial past, the heavy presence of the postcolonial state, and entrenched conflicts of the past would give way to a new, more global and perhaps more liberal present. Yet, under such breezy talk of a new epoch, it is clear that the tacit social contract of the postcolonial era - between individuals, families and communities, between communities and the state, and so on - no longer provides a self-evident ground for social life.New momentous rifts, tensions and enmities are emerging as social aspirations have spread to every village and town across South Asia. Prompted by rapid economic growth, by displacements by civil war and insurgencies, and by agricultural and ecological crisis, more people than ever are on the move: to burgeoning cities, to seek a life, and to reinvent and redefine themselves. These multiple shifts affect everybody and everything: friendships, family dynamics, sexual identities, domesticities, notions of dignity, of labor, of danger and propriety, and of the very limits of what a possible life may look like. At stake are the most basic and complex relationships that define social life: who are my intimates? Who can I trust? Who can I love, and who must I loathe? How do I deal with, classify, or fear, the strangers that I encounter? 
These seismic shifts in the ‘mentality of the governed’ shatter social hierarchies and established truths. They produce tense times. Every rapid transformation casts doubts on the weight, and the virtues, of the past. The past becomes tense, often transformed into a burden of ‘backwardness’ and bigotry. This is evident how many contemporary problems - corruption, violence or misogyny – routinely are framed as modern perversions of older practices and habits. 
 Similar disavowals took place during earlier moments of rapid change in the region –when emergent anti-colonial nationalism redefined the moral universe in South Asia and invented a new popular politics at the eve of the 20thcentury; or during the time of independence and utopian dreams across the colonial world in the 1940s. 
This time, the emergence of a ‘new epoch’ appears to challenge the conventional spatial limits of South Asia. Concerns that are intensely lodged in South Asian cultural and historical spaces immediately generate a global debate, virtual communities and repercussions: a brutal rape in Delhi, anti-corruption protests led by a latter-day Gandhi, war-crimes committed by the Sri Lankan army during the final weeks of the civil war in 2009, to mention a few recent examples. 
The second South Asia at the Bay Graduate Conference wishes to explore how large-scale transformations in South Asia touch and condition the individual and intimate lives of ordinary people – both in the present and in a longer historical perspective. We invite submissions from graduate students working in the humanities and social sciences that address the moral, political and epistemological quandaries of current and historical transformations in the region. We encourage submissions that fall within one or more of the subthemes outlined below: 
Political Love South Asia has the richest and most diverse and contradictory political scene in the world. Millions of people throw themselves into passionate attachments to both abstract principles and more concrete causes. This rich political world has conventionally been understood through well known cultural and social tropes: asceticism, caste loyalties, honor, fear of pollution, and so on. But what does ‘political love’ do to other, more intimate, attachments and obligations? Can one’s sacrifice for the ‘the people’ still allow for a productive and full life? How can we understand the love of politics, the people, or the community, as forces in their own right beyond mere self-interest? 
Caste, Disgust, AttractionContrary to the expectations of the first post independence generations, rising levels of education and economic development did not make caste and community loyalties less of a factor in social life across South Asia. Instead, caste is today arguably more salient than ever before: in politics, in associational life, in education, in patterns of habitation. Despite unprecedented social heterogeneity in workplaces and institutions there are few signs that caste is ‘melting into air’. Movements promoting inter-caste marriages in the 1960s and 70s seem to have given way to substantialized caste identities and declining numbers of inter-caste unions. Matching agencies and internet dating sites today promise a more precise matching of individuals according to caste and class than ever before. Are patterns of love and intimate attachment less socially emancipated today than they used to be? If so, why? 
The "State" of SexualityThe past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in feminist and/or LGBT/queer movements that seek to seize or transform the language of the “state” for liberatory ends.  Such an attachment to a reparative or divisive logic of the “state” is most evident in India, especially after the repeal of statutes such as Section 377.  In the face of contemporary challenges to scholarship and activism promoting a globalizing queer and feminist agenda, one must ask how sexuality, and sexual identities in the broadest sense, relate to the “state”, and to the law of different states? Are key assumptions about freedom, rights and the subject that have driven scholarship and activism in this field being curtailed or enabled by such a focus on the power of states to recognize and authorize certain identities and identity labels?
Friendship at LargeWith unprecedented scales and numbers of migrants across the length and breadth of South Asia, the questions of alignments, of loyalties, of the paramount importance of community boundaries and morality seem in new flux. In the vast labor pools working in plantations, mines, in the urban slums and peripheries, but also in the mushrooming educational institutions and white-collar work places, the questions of trust and friendship are being renegotiated and expanded on a daily basis. The result does not appear to be the spontaneous growth of proletarian solidarities, as earlier generations of activists and labor historians hoped. Instead we witness flexible segmentation of alliances and civilities, and new enmities and competitions, each of them bound up around specific timeframes and conditions. Are such civilities and enmities still intelligible through our well-known categories of kinship, biraderi, caste and community? Or do we need a new conceptualization of work, of friendship and alliances? 
Beauty and Modern Bodies in South AsiaThe very idea of being ‘modern’ and of living a modern life is historically connected with certain aesthetic forms and regimes: smoothness of appearance, style and character; sartorial individuality; authentic self expression indicating interior depth; uncluttered surroundings that foreground autonomous and self-contained beings and objects; clean, controlled and continent bodies.In South Asia, modernity is indeed strongly articulated around ideals of beauty and appearance – beauty pageants, new public aesthetics in films and advertising, extensive use of beauty products but also a new emphasis on self-presentation in domestic spaces: home décor, consumer goods, brand awareness and so on. How do the modern bodies and public aesthetics in South Asia articulate global and commercially mediated notions of the modern individuality with older cultural frames in the region? 
Strangers and Neighbors in South Asian CitiesAs urban areas grow rapidly across South Asia, the very structure and feel of the urban are also transforming.  New technologies redefine social relationships and make crowds, gatherings and public interactions more selective and structured, enabling more precise and comprehensive forms of social segregation than before. Most fast growing cities in South Asia are new, displaying seemingly chaotic patterns of urban growth that deepen the segmentations along class, community and caste that was the hallmark of the colonial city, while hollowing out the meanings of ‘public space’ and a ‘public sphere’. These developments may ultimately challenge most of the established paradigms in urban theory. It may be timely to ask if the very idea of the modern city is being redefined in South Asia at this time? 
South Asia by the Bay inaugurates an unprecedented collaboration among several universities within California: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Davis, and University of California, Santa Cruz.We aim to establish an annual forum where graduate students from across disciplines and institutions in North America, who work on South Asia, can meet to discuss their work with each other, and with South Asia affiliated faculty from the organizing institutions and beyond. Besides keynotes by important scholars in the field, we will hold interactive sessions with faculty on the international job market in South Asian studies, film screenings, and social events.
Deadline for Submissions:
Panels: APRIL 2 , 2013
Individual Papers: APRIL 2, 2013
For panel submissions, please submit the particiapants abstracts, CVs, and travel grant note, along with an overall description of the panel.
Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length.
Please note that a limited number of travel grants are available for graduate students travelling to Stanford. In order to be considered for such a grant, please submit a letter outlining how much you are applying for and indicate why such funding is necessary.All communications should be sent to southasiabythebay@gmail.com and copied to Kashika Singh kashika@stanford.edu

Monday, February 18, 2013

History of Science in South Asia

S. R. Sarma recently sent me an announcement for a new journal, History of Science in South Asia, which he describes as a publication "for the history of all forms of scientific thought and action, ancient and modern, in all regions of South Asia." The editorial board is seeking submissions, read the focus and scope and information for authors sections for more details.

Writing and the Inscription of Power in South Asia


Poster with workshop schedule
Saturday, April 6
9:30am-5:30pm
229 Carr Bldg
Duke University
This workshop draws on a range of disciplines (history, anthropology and literature) to explore questions of how writing literally under-wrote projects of cultural dominance and resistance in this key region of the world.  Beyond the activity of mere inscription, our workshop focuses historically on the material and symbolic ways writing served to establish and maintain cultural forms of power.  We also seek to explore questions about how writing was a strategy for redefining and transforming the historical terrain on which people in South Asia constructed and organized their lives. Our various participants bring together a mixture of language varieties (classical and vernacular) in various scripts and genres to demonstrate how writing in different political and social constituencies impacted cultural life in South Asia, especially in regions beyond the Hindi heartland. The workshop thus has the overall goal of advancing a more general and comparative understanding of the relationship between language, culture and power in South Asia.
(Keynote by Nile Green — Friday, April 5)

Friday, February 15, 2013

Tamil Nadu State Archives

In a recent issue of Sagar: A South Asian Research Journal, Sundar Vadlamudi, Department of History, University of Texas at Austin, provides an informative overview of the Tamil Nadu State Archives.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Archive of Indian Music

Good news for musicologists and historians of sound comes to us via Abhijit Bhattacharya at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The Archive of Indian Music (AIM) is now online. Curated by Vikram Sampath and colleagues, the online collection includes 600+ samples (taken largely from 78 RPM gramaphone shellacs) representing the work of about 180 artists. As I type this, I am listening (again) to Gandhiji read aloud his article "On God." Judging by the number of hits for that particular page, I am not the only one who went directly to that file. I selected Bina Chaudury's "Ek jhalak dekha kidkhi se" and now I might have a new favorite song and artist.

A caveat: the list of artists is alphabetized by first name, so if you are looking for a clip based on the last name, you may have difficulty finding it by browsing only. The ctrl-F search is your friend.