Basement: Sanskrit and Persian Literary Cultures Online

 This part of my website was written in the early 2010s and has not been maintained. Links may be broken, and information may be out of date. I am keeping it, in case it is of use to someone.

This part of the website provides easily accessible resources for studying South Asia, especially Sanskrit, Persian, and Mughal history. Among my primary concerns are advancing the use of online resources, making primary texts as widely available as possible, and promoting a culture of academic sharing.

Manuscripts

Sanskrit and Persian Manuscripts are often difficult to locate and access.

Worldwide

India

Outside of India

  • An overview of Sanskrit manuscripts outside of India with a focus on medical texts is available here

Manuscript Catalogues

Sanskrit

South Asia

Generally, see Dominik Wujastyk's collection of manuscript catalogs.


Europe


Persian

Everywhere: Marshall's catalog and appendix list many Persian manuscripts related to the Mughals in India.

South Asia

  • ALIGARH

    • Aligarh Muslim University, Zaidi's catalogue of their Persian manuscripts on Hinduism.

  • BENGAL

  • DELHI

    • IGNCA has digital copies of manuscripts from all over India, many of them Persian. Full lists--divided by collection--are available here.

    • Noor Microfilm Center in Delhi has some of their catalogues online here. Microfilms of manuscripts available for viewing on grounds of Iran Culture House.

  • HYDERABAD

    • Hyderabad's Oriental Manuscripts Library and Research Center (OMLRI), Osmania University has four hand-written catalogues of the Persian and Arabic works: Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4.

  • MAHARASHTRA

  • PATNA: Khuda Bakhsh offers their catalogues online, which works at least some of the time.

  • RAMPUR: Raza Library's Persian manuscript catalogs from 1996-2000, volume 1, volume 2, and volume 3. (Hat tip to Owen Cornwall and Daniel Majchrowicz)

  • TONK, RAJASTHAN (Hat tip to Owen Cornwall and Daniel Majchrowicz)

    • Tonk's Research Institute lists some the titles of available manuscripts here.

    • Volume 3 of Tonk's Persian manuscripts, on the history of India.

    • Tonk's 2012 published handlist of their Persian manuscripts.


Europe


North America

Primary Texts

Many primary texts are available online but the hard part can be finding precisely where.


More broadly here a few starting points---

  • Googlebooks. Googlebooks has put up a number of primary texts, although their search engine sometimes has problems processing and transliterating non-roman characters. Try searching under a variety of texts names as well as by publisher. Note that those outside the U.S. will likely not have full access to non-copyrighted materials.

  • Internet Archive. Individuals can post non-copyrighted material here. Easily searchable and available worldwide.

  • Hathi Trust is well-intentioned but to date much more restrictive than googlebooks. Hint—if you have a university affiliation, you can often sign-in and get fuller access.

  • The Digital Library of India (also here).

  • For more ideas on finding books online see Princeton’s tips.


Sanskrit Texts

  • GRETIL. A growing collection of electronic Sanskrit texts. Highly useful because the texts are searchable.

  • Indology and Sanskrit Library offer a number of GRETIL-like Sanskrit e-texts and related materials.

  • Jain e-library has some useful scanned texts online.

  • SARIT allows you to search various Sanskrit texts online. A list of their searchable texts is here.


Translations

Use these with caution since they are generally quite old. Many texts have been retranslated in far superior editions.

  • Bibliotheca Hindu Intratext and Sacred Texts. Mainly Sanskrit materials with a religious focus.

  • Persian Packhum. A range of Indo-Persian texts in translation are readable on their website although not available for download. Note that the bizarre spelling of names and foreign words can make searching challenging.

  • Avetsa.org offers a variety of Old and Middle Persian texts in translation.

  • Delhi University's online library offers a number of books available as pdfs--a mix of primary and secondary sources.


Access Outside of U.S. borders

Several major attempts to digitize printed materials are based in the United States and primarily intended for a U.S.-based audience. Most notably googlebooks does not offer the same availability to those outside of U.S. borders as it does to those accessing the website from within the U.S. We can combat this problem. Two ideas:

  • If you are outside of the U.S., mask your IP address, i.e., don't tell the websites that you visit where you are located. You can do this either via a proxy server or, often more successfully, via VPN. The latter often costs money, although there are free programs if you google around.

  • For everyone, post public domain materials that you have scanned on websites that everyone around the world can access, such as this website.

Language Resources

Sanskrit Dictionaries and Materials 

Persian Dictionaries: 

  • Steingass (Persian to English). I recommend typing in Perso-Arabic script.

  • Dehkhoda (Persian to Persian) is the largest Persian dictionary ever published. He often also gives poetic examples of particular words (also here).


There's an App for that!

  • Living as we do in an age of amazing technology, there are an increasing number of apps that can help you with Sanskrit, Persian, and many other languages. A few favorites here--

  • Sanskrit--iphone: Sanskrit Dictionary that includes Apte, Macdonell and Monier-Williams

  • Sanskrit--all platforms: Stardict

  • Persian--iphone: Dehkhoda and Moin

Images

Finding high quality reproductions of images for study and teaching purposes, preferably that can be downloaded, remains surprisingly difficult. Perhaps your university's library has access to ARTstor or even its own image bank. Many museums will also provide copies of images upon request. Here are resources that are freely available to all. Also see my page on digitized manuscripts, which often include illustrated copies:

Individual Collections

  • The Victoria and Albert Museum in London offers free downloads of many of their images online, including folios from their Akbarnamah and other Indo-Persian texts.

  • The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has many of their Mughal miniatures online with zoom capabilities (search here).

  • The David Collection in Denmark has much of their collection online that can be downloaded by drag and drop.

  • The Walters Museum in Baltimore has digitized their manuscripts, including several valuable Indo-Persian works, that can be downloaded in different size images (see list here).

  • The Udaipur miniatures (primarily held now in the National Museum Delhi) for Bhanudatta's Rasamanjari can be viewed here.

  • You can drag and drop medium-quality images from the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC.

  • The Chester Beatty Image Gallery allows you to zoom in.

  • The Rijksmuseum has made 125,000 of its images available for download.

  • St. John's College, Cambridge has their Oriental Manuscripts listed online with illustrations available for drag and drop.


Collaborative Projects

Links

There are many good Indology blogs and resources out there, but a few of my favorites: