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Showcasing the diversity of South Asia’s cultural heritage
From Sufi shrines and film sets to archaeological sites and recording studios, MEAP grantees in South Asia are united by their desire to catalog and capture cultural objects that are facing the tests of time. Threatened by changing political and meteorological climates, these collections reveal the richness and diversity of South Asia’s cultural heritage. With hundreds of South Asian studies scholars and students headed to Madison, WI this week to share their work and discuss the state of the field, MEAP is showcasing projects that capture the breadth and richness of the print, archival, and audio-visual heritage in the region.
Rare Negatives and Slides at the Center for Art and Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies
In Delhi, Vandana Sinha is leading a project at the Center for Art and Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies(opens in a new tab) to digitize photographic slides and negatives that were created by field experts and professional photographers in the second-half of the twentieth century. These slides and photographic negatives capture buildings, sculptures, and archaeological excavations from across several Indian states, including Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Bihar, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and Karnataka and capture remnants of important cultural heritage sites that are now decayed, damaged, and inaccessible. The team has also digitized nearly three-thousand items, which are available for viewing in the UCLA Digital Library.
And don’t forget to check out the CAA’s digital publication of the Sundarkand(opens in a new tab) from a manuscript copy of the Ramcaritmanas commissioned by the Maharaja of Banaras in the early 1800s.
Conserving the Archives of Progressive Pakistan
From Islamabad, Mahvish Ahmad, Muhammad Salim Khawaja, and the South Asian Research and Resource Center used MEAP funds to create an inventory of the volunteer-run archive’s collections of print, audio, and video materials related to Pakistan’s progressive movements. These materials include journals, pamphlets, oral history interviews, and court cases from attacks on democratic activists. The archive also includes folk literature in languages like Punjabi and Sindhi that challenge Urdu’s cultural dominance.
Survey and Digital Preservation of Upcountry Tamil Archival Records
Thamilini Jothilingam and Kandiah Thanabalasingam led a project in Sri Lanka to document over two hundred private and institutional collections relating to the Upcountry Tamil community. Upcountry Tamils are descendants of Indian laborers who were brought to Sri Lanka to work on British-owned tea, coffee, and rubber plantations in the nineteenth century. The team’s collection-level survey captures the community’s dynamic culture filled with music, songs, dance, and performance that counteract the hardships and exploitation of plantation labor.
Other projects from South Asia focus on preserving endangered film collections, documenting struggles of human rights, digitizing recordings of hereditary musicians, cataloging the private archives of social justice activists, surveying photograph collections of tribal communities, preserving rare print collections, documenting minority religious experiences, and surveying Sufi shrines and manuscripts in border regions.
Together, these collections capture the literary, cultural, and religious diversity of the region, highlight common struggles and shared ambitions, and draw attention to the voices and experiences captured in private and community collections. We invite conference attendees to explore these projects, as you make your way to and from Madison this week!
Additional Resources and Collections
Visit the MEAP website to explore the surveys and inventories created by MEAP planning grant recipients:
Visit the UCLA Digital Library(opens in a new tab) to browse the digital collections created by MEAP project grant recipients:
- Archives of Minority Pasts: Mapping Religion and Politics in Modern Bengal
- Digitization and Preservation of Music and Oral Traditions in the Collections of Rupayan Sansthan, India(opens in a new tab)
- Rare Negatives and Slides at the Center for Art and Archaeology of the American Institute of Indian Studies(opens in a new tab)
- Preserving and Creating Access to a Unique Photo Collection on Afghanistan
Read more about MEAP projects that are currently underway in South Asia: