The University of Pennsylvania Libraries has one of the most important and largest collections of research material pertaining to the study of South Asia in the United States of America. Starting with the nineteenth century, when Sanskrit was first taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the Libraries have collected material for the study of South Asia.
Bibliographers The first bibliographer dedicated to South Asia Studies in the library was Kanta Bhatia.Bhatia, Kanta. A Journey Alone Raleigh, N.C. : Lulu Books, 2012. She retired in 1994, and was replaced by Dr. David Nelson. From 2011, Dr. Pushkar Sohoni served as the bibliographer and librarian, while teaching in the Department of South Asia Studies. In 2016, he left to teach at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. Since 2018, Dr. James (Jef) Pierce has served as the South Asian Studies Librarian.
History of the South Asia Collection at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Prof. Morton W. Easton, Professor of Comparative Philology (1883–1912), taught Sanskrit courses at the University of Pennsylvania. He had studied Sanskrit at Yale under W.D. Whitney (1827–1894). Upon completing his dissertation on the evolution of language, Easton was awarded the first American doctorate in Sanskrit in 1872. The University of Pennsylvania was one of the first American academic institutions to offer courses in Sanskrit; already during the 1880s, the university offered a major and a minor in Sanskrit. Easton retired in 1912 and was replaced the following year by Franklin Edgerton. After Edgerton left in 1926, W. Norman Brown was appointed in his place. Brown was responsible for the creation of the Department of South Asia Studies and expanded well beyond his own Indological interests. From 1916 to 1919, Brown had held the position of the Harrison Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He organized the American Oriental Society in 1926. By the summer of 1947 Brown's summer program, "India: A Program of Regional Studies" was being offered at Penn. In 1948, he established the Department of South Asia Regional Studies, the first area studies department in North America. Offerings continued to be expanded until a full program was available in the 1949-1950 academic year. He brought together a number of eminent scholars such as Holden Furber, Stella Kramrisch, and Ernest Bender, ensuring that the Department of South Asia Studies at Penn became, and continues as, one of the most important places in the world for serious research on South Asia in general and Sanskrit in particular. Scholars such as George Cardona, Ludo Rocher, Rosane Rocher, and Richard D. Lambert worked at Penn throughout their careers, and ensured a rich collection was developed for the libraries.
W. Norman Brown was also responsible for helping to establish the well known PL 480 program which in its various permutations over the decades supplied us (and many other institutions) with literally hundreds of thousands of volumes from South Asia. During the course of the PL 480 program from 1954 to 1998, the library acquired material actively through the Library of Congress field offices (New Delhi and Islamabad), and also through various vendors in South Asia, Europe and North America. From 2013 to 2016, the South Asia Librarian also managed acquisitions from the Library of Congress Field Office in Jakarta. The Library of Congress still continues as a major vendor to supplement the activities of collecting all material including monographs, serials, film, and digital formats. Because of the history of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in the field of archaeology, the Penn Libraries also have one of the largest collection of material for archaeology in South Asia. The American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) was founded by W. Norman Brown, and it operated out of the Van Pelt Library till it moved to its present location in Chicago.
Since 1958, the University of Pennsylvania has had a Title VI National Resource Center for South Asia (South Asia Center). In 1992, the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI) was launched. The two centers and the Department of South Asia Studies are supplemented by faculty with interests in South Asia, in various departments and schools across campus such as Anthropology, Architecture, Comparative Literature, Economics, Education, English, History, History of Art, Political Science, Religious Studies, and Sociology.
Scope of Collection
Geographical coverage The primary geographical coverage is South Asia which includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka with some coverage of Tibet. Materials are also acquired which cover the diasporic community of South Asians in the U.S., UK, and elsewhere in the world outside of South Asia proper. Countries in South-East Asia and Inner Asia, such as Burma and Thailand, or Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, are covered selectively, only as they relate to inter-regional research interests.
Subject coverage The primary focus is on the humanities and the social sciences with particular strength in the areas of anthropology, archaeology, art history, classical Indology, linguistics, literature, religion, philosophy and political science. There are no chronological limits to the collection, which covers material from the prehistoric period to the present. The Libraries acquire current publications in the disciplines mentioned above as well as actively seek to collect retrospectively in areas of research interests.
Languages The languages covered by the South Asia Collections include Sanskrit (Vedic and Classical), Prakrit, Pali, Hindi and Urdu, and has large holdings, with an emphasis on belles-lettres, folklore, history, and linguistics, in Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Punjabi, Persian, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Telugu. The Penn Libraries also acquire publications in several of the lesser-known languages of the Subcontinent such as Baluchi, Brahui, Meitei, Newari, Pushto, and various tribal languages and dialects. The Libraries also acquire materials pertaining to the study of South Asia in English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, and Russian.
Special Collections These are materials acquired by various departments of the Penn Libraries that are housed in the Kislak Special Collections Center because of their unique, rare, or fragile nature. The number of items from or about South Asia in the Kislak Special Collections Center is difficult to estimate, as it comprises ephemeral materials, manuscripts, and rare or special books; the varied formats and contents do not easily lead to quantification, and many of them do not have call numbers. Some of the significant South Asia-related collections within the purview of the Kislak Special Collections Center are mentioned.
Indic Manuscripts The Indic manuscripts collection (Ms. Coll. 390, and Ms. Indic 1 to 39) is the largest in North America, and one of the largest in the western hemisphere. Over 90% of these manuscripts are in Sanskrit. Scholarship about the collection itself has been substantial, not to mention the texts and illustrations within the actual manuscripts, which have been used by scholars. The history of the manuscripts has been narrated in many of these publications, and can be summarized thus: "Some of the manuscripts had been acquired in chance fashion by the Library and the University Museum before 1930, but in that year, at the request of Professor W. Norman Brown (1892-1975), Provost Josiah Penniman provided a sum of money to purchase Indic manuscripts. Shortly thereafter he obtained a donation from the late Mr. John Gribbel. Substantial contributions from Dr. Charles W. Burr, the Faculty Research Fund, and the Cotton Fund soon followed. The bulk of the manuscripts are the result of purchases made using these funds in India, between 1930 and 1935, under the direction of Professor W. Norman Brown." The manuscripts are regularly used in classes, and together with other manuscript and paper holdings of the University Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, constitute an important corpus of texts in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other languages of South and South-East Asia. Under an NEH grant, the entire collection was digitized and made openly available through the Penn in Hand portal; the collection also received enhanced cataloging by Dr. Benjamin Fleming at that time.
George Macartney Papers and colonial material The Penn Libraries possesses an important collection of manuscripts and documents relating to the British East India Company and governance in South Asia, most notably the Macartney Papers, comprising letters and documents that belonged to Lord George Macartney during his time as the Governor of Madras (1780-1786).Furber, Holden. "A Preliminary Report on the Macartney Manuscripts" in University of Pennsylvania Library Chronicle vol. 21 no. 2 (1955), pp. 43-50 The Libraries also holds a series of manuscripts on 18th- and 19th-century East India politics collected by the historian Holden Furber (Professor, South Asia Studies, 1948 -1973). The manuscript collections for South Asia are enriched by additional travel narratives, ships’ logs, letters, and material on the military history of the East India Company, including the sieges of Seringapatnam and Bharatpur. There are also several other colonial items such as a letter from Wajid Ali Shah's secretary to the East India Company, early diaries of English officials and their wives in British India, and a series of 19th- and 20th-century photograph albums of Indian landscapes and city life, as well as rare prints and drawings of Indian scenes, buildings, and everyday life, offering scholars from diverse disciplines a unique perspective into South Asia. The voluminous private papers of Kanji Dwarkadass, an important labor organizer and political leader, are also available. There are several dozen photographic albums from the years between the wars that have been cataloged and all of them now have finding aids.
Miscellaneous Material In addition to well-defined collections, the Kislak Special Collections Center also has eclectic material from South Asia, such as some of the early lithographed and printed books in various scripts, early bibles in multiple languages, and postcard sets published by the Archaeological Survey of India. Amar Chitra Katha comic books are also housed in Special Collections. There is also a valuable collection of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Judaica from India, some of which is housed in the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania. These materials include books in English, Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, and Marathi, and represent the Baghdadi, Bene-Israel and Cochin Jewish communities of India.
Electronic Resources
Databases In the past decade, the number of databases purchased by the Penn Libraries has increased as more archives and products become available. Journals are the other area where electronic formats are convenient and easy to use. Several journals which were offered online and in print are now purchased only in electronic form. The purchased or subscribed databases pertinent to South Asia alone are: Empire Online Foreign Office Files: India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan The Times of India (1838-2005) History of Afghanistan Online India from Crown Rule to Republic, 1945-1949: Records of the U.S. State Department CMIE States of India India Stat India Raj and Empire These are in addition to the common platforms such as JStor or EBSCOHost, which provide access to many of the common English-language journals and serials, such as South Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, or Economic and Political Weekly.