South Asia

As with the other Area Programs Divisions of the Hatcher Library, our division is defined both geographically and culturally. Our division focuses on the following South Asia countries: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. In addition, we are concerned with South Asian diasporic communities, be they in the United States, Europe, Africa or elsewhere.

Our main objective in the South Asia Division is to support the research and teaching needs of students, scholars and faculty at the University of Michigan, and the collection reflects this focus. The collection is strong in the humanities and the social sciences, with notable secondary collections in other fields--including law, medicine, public health, architecture, natural sciences and mathematics. The collection is primarily housed in the Hatcher Graduate Library, but can be found in other relevant libraries across campus, for example, the Film and Video Library, the Fine Arts Library, the Law Library, the Map Library and the Music Library.

In all, the South Asia collection consists of over 300,000 titles in various formats, including over 70,000 monographs in South Asian languages (to see a breakdown of the language holdings, click here), over 1,500 current serial titles (for a list of the titles currently received and a growing collection of feature films. Notable holdings of the collection include complete runs of newspapers extending over one hundred years; complete Census of India reports going back to the 19th century; imperial and district gazetteers; archeological surveys and epigraphical reports; a Linguistic Survey of India; missionary archives on microfilm; extensive sets on religious literature (including Buddhist Tripitaka--120 and 72 volume sets published in USA and Taipei respectively); various vernacular bi-lingual and multi-lingual dictionaries and more.