Research Guides: A Guide for South Asian Studies Resources: Partition Studies

Primary Source Collections Online

1947 Partition Archive
The 1947 Partition Archive is a people-powered non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving and sharing eye witness accounts from all ethnic, religious and economic communities affected by the Partition of British India in 1947.
Centre of South Asian Studies Oral Histories
Digitized oral histories with transcripts from the University of Cambridge
LUMS Digital Archive
Lahore University of Management Sciences Digital Archive focuses on events, groups, movements and personalities relating to broader historical, political and cultural trends in South Asia, with an emphasis on preserving the accounts of marginalized and subaltern groups.
South Asia Open Archives (SAOA)
The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a rich and growing collection of historical and contemporary sources covering the arts, humanities, and social sciences, in English and South Asian languages, from and about South Asia.
Digital South Asia Library
Digital South Asia Library provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users. (From website)

Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 (Parts I, II and III)
Sourced from the British Foreign Office files at The National Archives, the UK government's official archive. Focuses on the political and social history of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Lok Sabha Debates
The proceedings and debates of the Lok Sabha Parliamentary Council from 1952 to 1997
Empire Online
Contains primary documents, together with brief introductory essays by historians, under the following headings: Cultural Contacts, 1492-1969; Empire Writing and the Literature of Empire; The Visible Empire; Religion & Empire; Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, 1607-2007
Indian Culture Repository
Digitized cultural materials from various repositories and institutions all over India.
Tasveer Ghar
A site 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 Asian Newspapers
A fully searchable collection of historical newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries, featuring titles from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. This uniquely comprehensive online resource was created in partnership with the Center for Research Libraries - one of the world's largest and most important newspaper repositories.
Guardian (1821-2003) and the Observer (1791-2003)
The Historical Guardian (1821-2003) and the Historical Observer (1791-2003) offer full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue. Learn more about this database.

India; the transfer of power 1942-7
Unpublished documents drawn either from the official archives of the British India Office in the custody of the India Office Records or from the private collections of the Viceregal papers in the India Office Library
The evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947 : select documents

Search the catalog and look for useful subject headings. Examples: