Mr James Nye, Center for South Asia Libraries
2005 award - major project
£54,305 for 24 months
Urdu was the dominant language of interchange in India through most of the nineteenth century. Since printing in India was cheap, anyone with an opinion might and often did publish a statement of his views. Often such publications were of limited editions and were not collected by many libraries. Yet these publications provide us today with a broad spectrum of writings by Indians on all the major and many minor issues that stirred them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Unfortunately, political disenfranchisement of Urdu culture in India and the high acid paper used to produce the periodicals have made this literature highly vulnerable. It is rare to find complete runs of even the most important Urdu periodicals in Indian libraries. And, when one does locate them, the paper is often very brittle. Many of the periodicals are not in the British colonial archives. Many of the Urdu periodicals, especially newspapers, are as rare and endangered as manuscripts - some have already completely vanished.
A panel of eminent Urdu scholars in the social sciences and humanities and librarians will select the seventy-five most important Urdu periodical titles not yet available as preservation microfilm. The project will preserve the selected titles by creating microfilm of the periodicals available at Aligarh Muslim University. Microfilming will continue at other Indian and Pakistani collections as necessary to assemble as complete runs as possible. Access to the preserved periodicals will be provided through microfilm and digital images created from the microfilm.
