Awesome Digital History of South Asia

Welcome to the South Asian Digital History repository! Our project is dedicated to indexing the libraries and historical records of South Asia - with a particular focus on Digital History. Digital History as in two things

“the history of the digital” - Technology and the Internet and their interplay with socio-cultural phenomenon
Digitized History - As archives across the South Asian move to digitization, many of the cultural and historical artifacts locked away in buildings also become accessible

We’ve curated a collection of links and resources that offer insights into digital history as a discipline in the particular context of South Asia. There are also courses on digital humanities, data visualization, and other relevant topics that provide an excellent foundation for exploring the history of the region.

We welcome contributions from anyone who shares our passion for finding narratives of South Asian digital history. Formalising archives top-down often results in the perpetuation of colonial ideas around what constitutes knowledge and who gets to claim it and profit from it. So the archives curated here cover a large spectrum in terms of what might be “traditionally” considered an archive.

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South Asian Digital Archives
- The Subcontinent
- Bangladesh
- Nepal - Needs more contributions
- Tibet
- Pakistan
- India - Needs more contributions from the NE, Andaman and Nicobar, Lakshwadeep
- Bhutan - Needs more contributions
- Afghanistan - Needs more contributions
- Maldives - Needs more contributions
- Sri Lanka - Needs more contributions
- Myanmar- Needs more contributions
History of the Digital in South Asia
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South Asian Digital Archives

Sources:

The Subcontinent

Museum of Art and Photography - MAP is custodian to a growing collection of over 18,000 works of art, predominantly from South Asia and dating from the 10th century to the present.
The Polis Project - Our work sheds light on the rise of authoritarianism especially in democracies and focuses on issues of racial, class and caste injustice, Islamophobia and State oppression around the world.
1947partitionarchive - Partition Archive.
Tasveer Ghar: Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture - Tasveer Ghar is a trans-national virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia’s exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art.
South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) - 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.
South Asian American Digital Archive - This archive principally offers material on South Asian migrants who have made their homes in the United States.
South Asian Newspapers - This is a digitized, partial archive of nine newspapers from the subcontinent, freely accessible. Most cover the 1960s and 1970s period, but there is one from the mid-19th century and another from the early 20th century.
The South Asian Literary Recordings Project - Launched in April 2000, to record the voices of South Asian authors for the Library of Congress’ Archive of Recorded World Literature, the project has captured the readings of prominent South Asian poets, novelists, and playwrights. The authors recorded so far represent more than fifteen of the languages of India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
E-Books: Full-Text Online Books on South Asia - (SARAI).
LUMS Digital Archive - The LUMS Digital Archive is a research repository that aims at collecting, cataloging and preserving rare material (books, pamphlets, newspapers and other items) of historical significance and making them available to researchers.
People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) - A multimedia digital journalism platform and living archive founded by P. Sainath documenting everyday lives across rural India, including the Grindmill Songs Project with over 100,000 folk songs from Maharashtra and a Creative Commons-licensed library on climate, health, gender, and agriculture.
Schwartzberg Historical Atlas of South Asia - The digitized version of Joseph Schwartzberg’s monumental atlas containing over 650 maps covering the subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern era, hosted by the University of Chicago’s Digital South Asia Library.
South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories - A searchable database of South Asians in Britain from the 1830s to the present, covering people, organizations, events and oral histories.
South Asian Diaspora Arts Archive (SADAA) - A UK-based national arts heritage resource celebrating the work of first-generation British South Asian artists who arrived post-Partition, now a permanent addition to Birmingham Museums’ collection.
Digital South Asia Library - University of Chicago portal of digitized South Asian dictionaries, books, maps, images, statistics and bibliographies.

Bangladesh

Bangladesh Genocide Archive - An online archive of chronology of events, documentations, audio, video, images, media reports and eyewitness accounts of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh in the hands of Pakistan army.
Bengali Photo Archive - Photographs of and by east London’s Bengali community, past and present, collected with local residents by Four Corners and the Swadhinata Trust.
Collections from Bangladesh - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
Digital Archive of Bengali Songs (EAP274) - A British Library Endangered Archives project at Jadavpur University digitizing early Bengali popular songs (1902-1936) from 78rpm records, along with rare North Indian classical recordings.
FID4SA-Repository - Bangladesh - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
Muktijuddho e-Archive - A volunteer-run digital library of books, documents, newspapers, photos and audio-video on the 1971 Liberation War and genocide.
National Archives of Bangladesh - National Archives of Bangladesh.
The Daily Star - Newspaper from 2003.
The Travelling Archive - A grassroots field-recording project documenting folk songs, stories, and oral traditions across Bangladesh, eastern India, and the Bengali diaspora, run by singer-researcher Moushumi Bhowmik since 2003.
Bangladesh Feminist Archives - A Dhaka-based digital platform preserving documents, images, videos, and a visual timeline of Bangladesh’s intersectional feminist movements across generations, documenting women’s activism from the liberation era to the present.
USA Library of Congress - Bangladesh

Nepal

Archive Nepal - A platform hosting around 3,000 digitized materials from 18 national and international sources including The British Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Digital Himalaya joining the family in 2024.
Collections from Nepal - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
Documenta Nepalica - Searchable catalogue and digital editions of historical documents from pre-modern Nepal, by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
FID4SA-Repository - Nepal - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
HIMALAYA Journal 1980-2020 - HIMALAYA, published by the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, publishes original research articles, short field reports, book and film reviews, reports on meetings and conferences, alongside literature and photo essays from the region.
HIMALAYA Journal 2018-2022 - Continuation of HIMALAYA journal under the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies.
HMML Reading Room - Asa Archives, Nepal - Digitized Sanskrit, Newari and Nepali manuscripts from the Asa Archives in Kathmandu, free to view in the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s online reading room.
Huntington Photographic Archive - Photographic archive of Buddhist and Asian art with extensive documentation of Nepal and India, plus field video of Nepali ritual practice.
Nepal Music Archive - A not-for-profit Kathmandu archive that digitizes and shares Nepali music: audio recordings, magazines, photographs and research papers.
Nepal Picture Library - A digital photo archive of Nepali social history built from family and personal collections, including the Feminist Memory Project.
Pahar - Nepal Topo Maps - Free scans of historical topographic maps of Nepal, including Nepal-Tibet border sheets and Sino-Nepalese boundary commission maps.
ANUBhasha - Maithili Manuscripts of Nepal - A digital collection of early modern Maithili song-poems by Vidyapati from palm-leaf manuscripts, including the oldest known Nepal Manuscript in Tirhuta script, preserving an underrepresented literary tradition of the Terai region.
2015 Nepal Earthquake Web Archive - Websites, social media and blog posts about the April 2015 earthquake, collected by Columbia, Yale and the Bodleian libraries.
USA Library of Congress - Nepal

Tibet

Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) - Free online library of scanned Tibetan and other Buddhist texts and manuscripts, many from Himalayan South Asia.
FID4SA-Repository - Tibet - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
Himalayan Art Resources - A free online database of Himalayan and Tibetan paintings, sculpture and ritual objects drawn from collections worldwide.
Tibet Oral History Project - Videotaped interviews with over 300 elderly Tibetan refugees, the last generation born in a free Tibet, documenting memories of pre-1950s life and eyewitness accounts of the Chinese occupation, created at the advice of the Dalai Lama.
Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL) - University of Virginia’s multimedia library of Tibetan and Himalayan texts, dictionaries, images, maps and place data.
Tibetan Oral History Archive Project (TOHAP) - Melvyn Goldstein’s audio interviews from the 1980s-2000s, with English transcripts, on modern Tibetan social and political history, hosted by the Library of Congress.
Old Tibet Photographic Archive (Tibet House US) - Historical photographs of Tibet from roughly the 1920s-1950s, including the Griebenow and Tokan Tada collections.
USA Library of Congress - Tibet

Pakistan

The Citizen Archive of Pakistan - Citizens Archive of Pakistan.
FID4SA-Repository - Pakistan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
National Archives of Pakistan - An effort is being made to publish catalogs and lists of whatever source material in National Archives of Pakistan. An endeavor is being made to collect and preserve source material wherever available through purchases/donations with a view to place it eventually in its permanent house in Islamabad i.e. National Archives of Pakistan.
Endangered Archives from Sufi Shrines of the Afghan-Pakistan Frontier - A UCLA-UNC project digitizing manuscripts, letters, poetry, healing texts, and polemical posters from Sufi monasteries in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and North Waziristan, preserving the intellectual legacy of Sufi master Abdullah Jan Farooqi in Persian, Pashto, Arabic, and Urdu.
Mushfiq Khwaja Library Collection (EAP) - Digitized Urdu literary and social periodicals such as Makhzan, Khatun and Urdu from the Mushfiq Khwaja Library in Karachi.
Harappa.com - A non-profit educational resource dedicated to the ancient Indus Valley Civilization, featuring essays, articles, videos, photographs, and a 3D virtual tour of the archaeological site at Harappa, Pakistan.
PG Sindhi Library - A digital archive of post-Partition Sindhi-language books published in India, with metadata in Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, and Roman scripts, preserving Sindhi literary heritage for the displaced diaspora community.
PAK Magazine - An individually run Urdu website, online since 1999, compiling Pakistani political history, elections, languages, scripts and film history.
USA Library of Congress - Pakistan

India

QAMRA - The Queer Archive for Memory Reflection and Activism is a multimedia archival project which aims to chronicle and preserve the stories of communities marginalized on the basis of gender and sexuality in India.
Kosh - A searchable archive of multi-media content relevant to misinformation and social media in India, surfacing data collected by Tattle as well as that opened by other researchers.
Things We Make - Handicrafts from different parts of India and their stories.
Pad.ma - Short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films.
Netaji Papers - The declassified files relating to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose.
Abhilekh Patal - A full-featured web-portal to access the National Archives of India’s reference media and its digitized collections through the internet.
Economic and Political Weekly - 1966 - Present
Economic Weekly - now epw - 1949-1965 - Publication of economics, politics, sociology, culture, the environment, and other disciplines.
Archives at NCBS - The Archives at NCBS is a public collecting center for the history of science in contemporary India. The Archives are free and open to the public.
Godrej Archives - A repository of records from 100+ years of Godrej’s history.
Sarmaya - A digital museum of Indian art and heritage with curated collections spanning textiles, maps, photographs, coins, and manuscripts.
Living Lightly - The first curated exhibition on pastoralism in India, covering the land, lives and livelihoods of Indian pastoralists. It captures their remarkable history of mobility, the ecosystems that nurture their life-worlds, their culture, science, art, politics, spiritual moorings, the economics and challenges of herding.
INDIAN MEMORY PROJECT - The Indian Memory Project provides materials on individuals and families to offer a micro-perspective on macrohistorical change.
Rare Book Society of India - Rare Books Society of India.
Archive of Indian Music - This is a digital repository of gramophone recordings, many of which feature pieces of music from India’s best-known artists. The collection is particularly strong for Carnatic and Hindustani classical music.
Digital Library of India - Under this project of the Ministry of Human Resources Development of the Government of India, scans of out-of-copyright books from libraries across India are generated and converted into text-searchable PDF form.
Indiancine.ma - This initiative of the Indian Cinema Foundation functions both as a comprehensive index and archive for Indian cinema.
Periodicals and Pamphlets of Indian Anticommunists and Free Market Advocates - This collection covers magazines and pamphlets from the Cold War-era India, including pamphlets of the Forum of Free Enterprise in Mumbai, The Indian Libertarian magazine, and the CIA-funded Freedom First.
Amrita Bazar Patrika (Calcutta, 1870-1949) - English-language newspaper hosted by Endangered Archives Project.
Jugantar Patrika (Calcutta, 1937-1980) - Bengali-language newspaper hosted by Endangered Archives Project.
Collections from India - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
https://www.bl.uk/early-indian-printed-books - Collection of cookery books, almanacs, erotica.
community cookbooks from across India - Community Cookbooks.
https://oralhistorynarmada.in/ - On Narmada Bachao Andolan.
Prasar Bharati Central Archives
Explore India’s Constitutional Origins
SPARROW - Sound & Picture Archives for Research on Women - A Mumbai women’s archive founded in 1988, collecting oral histories, photographs, print material and films on women’s lives, with online virtual archives.
Archives of Indian Labour - A digital labour archive at the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, with trade-union records, labour commission reports and workers’ oral histories.
Muktabodha Digital Library - Open-access digital library of Sanskrit manuscripts and e-texts, mainly from Shaiva and Tantric traditions.
Rekhta - A large free digital library of Urdu books and poetry, readable in Urdu, Devanagari and Roman scripts.
Dalit Camera - Grassroots video channel, founded in 2011, documenting Dalit, Adivasi and Bahujan life and anti-caste politics.
Survey of India Maps (Cambridge Digital Library) - Colonial Survey of India map sheets digitized by Cambridge University Library, openly viewable via IIIF.
The Northeast India AV Archive - A public audiovisual archive at St Anthony’s College, Shillong, preserving photographs, film and sound from Northeast India.
Visual Histories of Northeast India (UCLA MEAP) - Digitized photographs by Ahmed Hossain of communities across Northeast India, 1960s-2000s.
Dr. Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches - Free PDF volumes of the collected writings and speeches of B.R. Ambedkar.
Institut Français de Pondichéry Digital Collections - The French Institute of Pondicherry’s open-access digital repository of South Indian cultural heritage including Shaiva Siddhanta manuscripts, herbarium specimens, historical photographs, maps, and ethnographic documentation spanning ecology, Indology, and social sciences.
DHARMA Project - Digital Epigraphy - Open-access digital editions and translations of inscriptions from South and Southeast Asia.
Sarai - CSDS New Media Initiative - CSDS Delhi’s media and urban-culture programme (since 2001), with archived projects, the Sarai Readers and writing on digital culture and the city.
Project Madurai - A volunteer project, running since 1998, publishing free e-texts of classical and modern Tamil literature.
Panjab Digital Library - Digitizes manuscripts, books, newspapers and photographs on the Panjab region; founded in 2003 by the Nanakshahi Trust.
Granthappura - Community-run digitization of public-domain Malayalam and Kerala-related books, periodicals and manuscripts by the Indic Digital Archive Foundation.
Tamil Digital Library - Tamil Virtual Academy’s library of digitized Tamil books, periodicals, palm-leaf manuscripts, photographs and audio.
Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum - Jadavpur University’s archive of Rabindranath Tagore’s manuscripts and printed works, with a text-collation tool.
CSSSC Archive - Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta’s digitized Bengali periodicals, early printed books, popular prints and photographs of Calcutta.
Public Library of India (Internet Archive) - Public Resource’s collection of hundreds of thousands of scanned books from and about India, including much of the old Digital Library of India.
Library of Congress - Indian Elections Web Archive - Websites of parties, candidates and government bodies captured during Indian general elections.
USA Library of Congress - India

Bhutan

Collections from Bhutan - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) seeks to preserve cultural heritage and make it available to as wide an audience as possible.
Digital Himalaya - Cambridge/Cornell project (est. 2000), now part of Archive Nepal, digitizing Himalayan ethnographic films, photographs, journals, rare books and maps.
FID4SA-Repository - Bhutan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia - FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
Music of Bhutan Research Centre - A charity founded in 2008 by musician Kheng Sonam Dorji to research, record and archive traditional Bhutanese music and dance.
Oral Cultures of Bhutan - An open-access archive of 2,324 audio-visual recordings documenting imperiled oral traditions of Bhutanese cultural heritage, including folk stories, songs, and recitations, created by the University of Virginia and the Loden Foundation.
Pahar - Bhutan Historical Maps - A digital archive of historical maps of Bhutan including early 19th-century British survey maps such as Turner’s 1800 survey and Pemberton’s 1839 maps of the Bhutan-Tibet boundary and the Dooars region.
The National Library of Bhutan - The National Library of Bhutan has the goal that all Bhutanese, wherever they are, will have access to both Bhutan’s documentary heritage and to the information resources of the world.
USA Library of Congress - Bhutan

Afghanistan

Afghan Media Resource Center Collection - The largest audiovisual collection on Afghanistan (1987-2012) on the Internet Archive, containing 94,652 photographs and slides, 1,175 hours of video, and 356 hours of audio produced by Afghan “fighter-reporters” trained to document the Soviet-Afghan War.
Afghanistan Digital Library - The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage.
Archnet - Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme in Afghanistan - Images, videos and reports on the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s restoration work in Kabul and Herat, including Bagh-e Babur.
Archives for the Study of Afghanistan - This is a list of physical and digital archives or scholars of Afghanistan.
Dari and Pashto Books - Arthur Paul Collection - Selected digitized literary materials in Dari and Pashto from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection at the University of Nebraska Omaha, including publications from the Literary Society of Kabul containing scientific, literary, and historical articles.
Digitized Afghanistan Materials in English from the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection - The UNO Criss Library holds the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, one of the largest collections of Afghan primary and secondary materials outside of the country. It contains over 20,000 titles in more than 20 languages, including Dari, Pashto, and English.
FID4SA-Repository - Afghanistan - FID4SA-Repository is the full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA and is provided by Heidelberg University Library.
Preserving and Creating Access to Unique Afghan Records - The collection contains information related to history, social, economic, and cultural heritage of Afghanistan in Pashto and Dari. Content is continuously updated with over 2,300 titles (about 236,000 pages) currently available (April 2012).
Afghanistan Memory Home - A digital platform documenting human rights abuses and preserving victim testimonies related to the Afghan conflict through an interactive archive of personal accounts, historical records, and detailed incident documentation.
Afghanistan Heritage (French Ministry of Culture) - Bilingual online feature on French archaeological research in Afghanistan since 1922 (DAFA), with maps, a timeline and media on Bamiyan, Balkh, Hadda and Jam.
At-Risk Afghanistan Web Archive (ARAWA) - A UC Berkeley project launched in August 2021 preserving Afghan websites at risk of Taliban erasure, including government sites, media outlets, educational institutions, and social activist content in Dari, Pashto, and English.
Library of Congress Afghanistan Web Archive - A Library of Congress web archive of Afghan government websites, NGOs, universities, and banking institutions captured from 2009-2010, preserving a snapshot of Afghanistan’s digital institutional presence.
USA Library of Congress - Afghanistan

Maldives

Archive.mv - An online platform dedicated to preserving the historical record of all news publications in the Maldives, with searchable access and an “On This Day” browsing feature.
FID4SA-Repository - The full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA, provided by Heidelberg University Library.
Historic Maps of Male - High-resolution images of six historical maps of Malé from the Maldives National Museum, published by the Maritime Asia Heritage Survey.
Maritime Asia Heritage Survey - A Kyoto University-led project digitally documenting endangered heritage across coastal Southern Asia with 3D models, deep-zoom images of Dhivehi and Arabic texts, oral history interviews, and LiDAR spatial data, archived at Kyoto University and the Oxford Bodleian Library.
Coral Stone Mosques of Maldives - A digital documentation project on the distinctive coral stone mosques found across the Maldivian archipelago, recording the endangered architectural heritage of historic mosques built from coral stone, lacquerwork, and carved wood.
The Lacquer Crafts of the Maldives (Google Arts & Culture) - An online exhibition documenting Maldivian lacquer work (liyelaa jehun) by the Department of Heritage and UNESCO’s ICHCAP, with photographs, video, and documentation of this endangered traditional craft.
Library of Congress Maldives Government Web Archive - An ongoing web archive (since 2021) preserving Maldives government websites in Dhivehi and English, motivated by the climate change threat to the island nation’s physical and digital records.
USA Library of Congress - Maldives

Sri Lanka

Chelvanayakam Papers - Digitized papers of Tamil political leader S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and the Federal Party, with bilingual Tamil-English description.
Collections from Sri Lanka - EAP - Endangered Archives Programme projects digitizing Sri Lankan manuscripts and records, including Tamil palm-leaf and Malay manuscripts.
Digital Museum of Memory and Coexistence - A digital museum by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies archiving art projects and narratives documenting Sri Lanka’s recovery from decades of civil conflict, including post-war experiences of women in northern Sri Lanka.
Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka - An open-access digital collection by AISLS, Princeton, and University of Edinburgh documenting Sri Lankan radical activists, covering trade union struggles, plantation worker rights, statelessness of Malaiyaha Tamils, and left-wing perspectives on the ethnic conflict.
FID4SA-Repository - The full-text server of the Specialized Information Service South Asia – FID4SA, provided by Heidelberg University Library.
John Rylands Pali Manuscripts - Digitized Pali and Sinhala palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka in the University of Manchester Library.
National Digital Library of Sri Lanka - The National Library of Sri Lanka’s open repository of digitized rare books, government publications, newspapers and intangible heritage material.
Noolaham Digital Library - Volunteer-run digital library of books, newspapers, journals and ephemera from Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking communities.
Aavanaham Multimedia Archive - The Noolaham Foundation’s multimedia archive of photographs, audio, video, oral histories and ephemera from Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking communities.
Upcountry Tamil Archival Records (UCLA MEAP) - Survey and digitization of private and organizational collections of Sri Lanka’s Upcountry (plantation) Tamil community.
Memory Map Sri Lanka - An archive of 320 village histories and life stories from three Sri Lankan districts, memorializing experiences of violence and conflict through community-collected narratives across ethnic lines during and after the civil war.
Sri Lankan Tamil Palm-Leaf Manuscripts (EAP1260) - A British Library Endangered Archives project cataloguing and digitizing 300-500 Tamil and Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts from Sri Lanka’s Northern and Eastern provinces, endangered by displacement and decades of armed conflict.
Digitising Malay Writing in Sri Lanka (EAP609) - A British Library project surveying and digitizing Malay-language manuscripts and printed books in Sri Lanka, documenting the little-known Sri Lankan Malay Muslim community’s literary heritage in a critically endangered language.
USA Library of Congress - Sri Lanka

Myanmar

Collections from Myanmar - EAP - The Endangered Archives Programme hosts multiple digitized collections from Myanmar, including early 78rpm music recordings, post-independence photographic negatives, Pa’O minority manuscripts, and monastic palm-leaf manuscripts from the 1660s to the 1940s.
Library of Congress - Burma/Myanmar Elections Web Archive - A web archive preserving websites of political parties, pro-democracy groups, human rights organizations, and minority groups that documented Myanmar’s 2010 and 2015 General Elections and 2012 by-elections.
Myanmar Manuscript Digital Library - Open-access library of digitized Pali and Pali-Burmese palm-leaf manuscripts from Myanmar monasteries.
Myanmar Photo Archive - Myanmar photography from 1889 to 1995 by local studio and amateur photographers, founded in 2013 by Lukas Birk.
Online Burma/Myanmar Library - A free, searchable library of full-text documents on Burma/Myanmar, started in 2001 by David Arnott.
Public Memory of Myanmar - A digital collection documenting daily life in Burma/Myanmar through photographs and interviews, directed by Tun Myint, a political scientist and former student leader of the 1988 democracy movement.
Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre - A joint IOM and Rohingya community initiative providing an online interactive gallery and digital archive, with Rohingya cultural agents in Cox’s Bazar camps collecting cultural objects, oral histories, and audiovisual storytelling.
Rohingya Genocide Archive - Rohingya-led archive created in 2018 by Rohingya Vision and WITNESS, preserving verified videos documenting atrocities against the Rohingya.
Anglo-Burmese Library - Dedicated to collecting, indexing, and preserving records and histories of families in colonial-era Burma, including historical evacuation and casualty documentation from 1942 and the Japanese occupation.
Bodleian Library Burmese Collection - Oxford University’s digitized Burmese manuscripts collection including palm-leaf and folding-book (parabaik) manuscripts, Buddhist texts, and historical documents from Burma’s literary heritage.
SOAS Digital Collections - Myanmar - Digitized Burma/Myanmar material at SOAS, including colonial circulars, the Burma News periodical and Burmese-language publications.
Save Myanmar Film - A preservation initiative partnering with the Myanmar National Film Archive to rescue, digitize, and restore Myanmar’s endangered cinematic heritage, including rare films at risk of deterioration.
CyArk - Bagan Heritage - High-resolution 3D documentation and digital preservation of Bagan’s ancient Buddhist temples and pagodas, one of Southeast Asia’s most significant archaeological sites with over 3,000 monuments spanning the 9th-13th centuries.
Myanmar Law Library - A digital repository of Myanmar’s legal heritage including historical legislation, constitutional documents, and legal texts documenting the country’s governance from the colonial era to the present.
The Music of Burma on Record (EAP592) - A British Library Endangered Archives project that digitized approximately 6,000 rare 78rpm recordings from the 1920s-1950s of Burmese court, classical, dramatic, vocal, and folk music — the earliest aural documentation of pre-industrial Burmese musical traditions.
Inya Institute Digital Archive - A Yangon-based institute’s digital archive of manuscripts, books, paintings, and photographs collected during research projects across Myanmar, including Shan State monastic manuscript surveys and ethnographic materials.

History of the Digital in South Asia

A Personal History of the Internet in Myanmar - A 2016 interview with engineer Ko Ye Tun Aung on Myanmar’s early internet: late-1990s email services, cybercafes, early blogs, censorship and the post-2013 mobile boom.
Afghanistan Online (1997) - Abdullah Qazi’s afghan-web.com, relaunched on its own domain in May 1997 and still running.
alt.language.urdu.poetry - Usenet (1994) - Newsgroup for Urdu poetry started in May 1994 by Syed Zafar Kazmi, written mostly in Roman transliteration.
Asia Internet History Projects - Kilnam Chon’s project publishing decade-by-decade histories of the internet across Asia, including South Asian countries.
Avro Keyboard (2003) - Free Unicode Bangla typing software released by OmicronLab on 26 March 2003.
Baraha (1998) - Phonetic Kannada and Indian-language typing software by Sheshadrivasu Chandrasekharan, distributed as freeware from 1998 to 2010.
bdnews24.com - Bangladesh’s first online newspaper (2006) - Relaunched in October 2006 as a free online newspaper, edited by former BBC journalist Toufique Imrose Khalidi.
BHUTAN : Land of the Thunder Dragon - Blog 2010
Bhutan Post 2002
BOL forums 1999
Bytes for All (1999) - South Asian network of ICT practitioners and activists founded in July 1999 to discuss technology for social development.
Chapati Mystery - South Asian academic blog (2004) - One of the earliest South Asian academic blogs, founded by historian Manan Ahmed, covering histories and cultures of Hindustan and bridging academic South Asian history with commentary on the War on Terror.
Citizen Archivists of South Asian Oral Cultures (Global Voices) - Documentation of how citizen archivists in India and Pakistan are recording endangered oral culture videos — from Tulu agricultural folk songs to Torwali minority traditions — and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons to confront the online marginalization of oral languages.
Dawn.com (1996) - Early web edition of Pakistan’s English daily, online since 1996; earliest archived capture.
DesiPundit (2005) - Indian group filter blog founded by Patrix that linked to notable posts across the Indian blogosphere.
Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? - CIS India (2011) - Centre for Internet and Society and Hivos research programme and four-book series on young people, technology and social change.
Don’t Block the Blog - Pakistan (2006) - Campaign launched in March 2006 by Awab Alvi and Omer Alvie against Pakistan’s blanket block of Blogspot, which was lifted that May.
Found in Translation: Urdu on the Web (2004) - Spider magazine article tracing Urdu online from a 1994 newsgroup through Urdu fonts, Urdu98 and InPage GIFs.
Free Tibet- 1996
Groundviews - Sri Lanka’s first citizen journalism platform (2006) - Founded in 2006 by Sanjana Hattotuwa as Sri Lanka’s first citizen journalism website, providing alternative perspectives during and after the civil war when mainstream media faced restrictions, and winner of multiple international press freedom awards.
Gyandoot (2000) - Rural intranet of village-run information kiosks in Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh, commissioned in January 2000.
High Peaks Pure Earth - Tibetan digital voices (2007) - A blog founded in 2007 translating Tibetan-language blog posts, poems, and social media from inside Tibet into English, documenting how Tibetans use the internet for cultural expression under heavy censorship and surveillance.
Himal Southasian Online (1997) - Reportedly the first Nepali magazine on its own web domain; earliest archived capture.
Hole in the Wall - Kalkaji (1999) - Sugata Mitra’s NIIT experiment placing a freely usable computer in a wall facing a Delhi slum.
How fiber came to Cox Bazaar, Bangladesh
IndiaWorld (1995) - Rajesh Jain’s portal (Samachar, Khel, Khoj, Bawarchi), launched in 1995 and bought by Satyam Infoway (Sify) for US$115 million in 1999.
Internet Shutdowns Tracker - India (SFLC.in) - SFLC.in’s running database of government-ordered internet shutdowns in India since 2012.
Kafila (2006) - Indian team blog of scholars, activists and journalists practising political and media critique.
Kashmir’s Internet Siege - JKCCS (2020) - Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society report on the effects of the shutdown and 2G limit in Jammu and Kashmir from August 2019.
Kottu - Sri Lanka (2005) - Sri Lankan blog aggregator set up by Indi Samarajiva and Mahangu Weerasinghe.
Kuensel online (1999) - Bhutan’s national newspaper went online in 1999, the year the country introduced internet and television.
Letters to the Internet
Manzoor’s Homepage for Bangladeshis - 1995 - 1999
Minivan News - Maldives (2004) - Archive of the Maldives’ independent English-language online news service, renamed Maldives Independent in 2015.
MINORITY- the aliens in own homeland & mirror of the past century
Mumbai Help (2005) - Citizen blog that posted helplines and updates during the July 2005 Mumbai floods, revived for the 2006 train bombings and the 2008 attacks.
Myanmar Internet Project - Tracks Myanmar’s post-2021 “digital coup”: regional internet shutdowns, platform use and digital resistance.
Nagaland Post
Nau Do Gyarah - first Hindi blog (2003) - Alok Kumar’s blog, started on 21 April 2003 and the first recorded Hindi blog; he coined “chittha” as the Hindi word for blog.
Nepal Wireless Networking Project (2002) - Mahabir Pun’s Wi-Fi network linking Nangi and other remote Myagdi villages to the internet.
NepalNews.com - Nepal’s first online news portal (1999) - Mercantile Communications’ news portal, widely described as Nepal’s first online news portal.
Netchakra - Chronology of the Internet in India - Chronology of the internet in India from ERNET (1986) onward, published by the Digital Empowerment Foundation and NIXI.
Pakistan’s Internet Timeline - Pakzilla (2007) - A comprehensive timeline documenting Pakistan’s internet history from the 786 BBS in 1988 and first email node at Karachi University in 1992 through early ISPs, cybercafes, and pioneering websites.
Pakistaniat blog - 2006
PakPassion Forum (2005) - Pakistani cricket fan site whose forum launched in February 2005.
RAWA.org (1997) - The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan’s website, online since 1997, documenting Taliban abuses against women; earliest archived capture.
rec.music.indian.misc - Usenet (1992) - One of the earliest online communities dedicated to Indian music, this Usenet newsgroup was created on 1 January 1992 by Sridhar Venkataraman for discussing folk, fusion, and non-classical Indian music, with archives preserved on Google Groups.
Rediff On The NeT (1996) - Mumbai-based portal launched in 1996, one of India’s early web portals; earliest archived capture.
Rezwan’s blogs from 2003 - Bangladesh
Secular Maldives - 2007
Sepia Mutiny (2004) - South Asian American group blog started in August 2004 that closed in April 2012.
Simputer (2001) - Low-cost Linux handheld designed by the Simputer Trust (IISc and Encore Software) for shared rural use in Indian languages.
soc.culture.bangladesh - Usenet (1991) - Usenet newsgroup for discussion about Bangladesh, with archived threads on Google Groups.
soc.culture.indian - Usenet - Long-running Usenet newsgroup for the Indian diaspora, with archived discussions on Google Groups.
soc.culture.nepal - Usenet (1991) - Usenet newsgroup for discussion of people and things in and from Nepal.
soc.culture.pakistan - Usenet (1991) - Usenet newsgroup for discussion of Pakistan, with posts from the 1990s preserved on Google Groups.
soc.culture.sri-lanka - Usenet (1991) - Usenet newsgroup set up to take discussion traffic off the SLNet mailing list, archived on Google Groups.
Someone one found remnants of the very early internet in India
Somewherein Blog - First Bangla blog platform (2005) - Bangladesh’s first and most popular Bangla-language community blogging platform, launched on 16 December 2005 (Victory Day), which catalyzed an explosion of Bangla-language writing online and became central to the 2013 Shahbag movement.
South Asia Citizens Web (1996) - Harsh Kapoor’s site archiving dissent on communalism, secularism and rights across South Asia since 1996.
Teeth Maestro - Pakistani blogger (2005) - Awab Alvi’s blog, which co-launched the Don’t Block the Blog campaign and posted protest updates during the 2007 emergency.
The Hindu Online - India’s first newspaper website (1995) - Widely cited as the first Indian newspaper online (1995); earliest archived capture.
The Irrawaddy online (2000) - Early website of the exile Burmese news magazine, blocked inside Myanmar until 2011.
Tibetan support for the new Panchen Lama forces China to make plans to set up a rival candidate - 1997
Tsunami Help Blog (2004) - Volunteer clearinghouse for relief information started by Mumbai bloggers after the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
United We Blog! - Nepal (2004) - Blog by journalists Dinesh Wagle and Ujjwal Acharya that reported from Kathmandu under censorship after the February 2005 royal coup.
Virtual Bangladesh - first website about Bangladesh (1993) - Zunaid Kazi’s site, which describes itself as the first comprehensive website on Bangladesh (1993).
Where is Kalpana Chakma
YouTube Hijacking: A RIPE NCC RIS Case Study (2008) - Routing timeline of Pakistan Telecom’s February 2008 announcement of a YouTube prefix that cut off YouTube worldwide for about two hours.
Zawgyi - Myanmar (2007) - Non-Unicode Burmese font that dominated Myanmar’s web until the official move to Unicode in 2019.

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