Libraries

The National Library in Kolkata and the National Archives in Delhi are the largest repositories of nineteenth-century books and periodicals. The former, which began in 1836 as The Kolkata Public Library, houses the most extensive collection of rare books, journals and periodicals of the era.Footnote ¹ The latter, which began as the Imperial Records Department, is the ‘custodian of the records of enduring value of the Government of India’.Footnote ² It was established in 1891 in Kolkata and also houses an extensive collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hindi and Urdu journals. The Bangiya Sahitya Parishat Library, established in 1894, holds very rare and valuable books and periodicals in Bengali and English from the nineteenth century.Footnote ³ The Library hosts its searchable catalogue of holdings online, which is a very helpful resource.Footnote ⁴ Some of the other useful libraries across India include the Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library in Patna, Rampur Raza Library, Saraswati Bhawan Library and the Sampurnanand Sanskrit University in Varanasi. In addition to these public libraries, some institutional archives are open to researchers.

One such archive is the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSS), in Kolkata, which is the ‘pioneer of open access archiving in South Asia’.Footnote ⁵ Over the last three decades of its operation, they have digitally preserved and copied archival material from numerous public and private collections in India and have made about 75 per cent of the digital output available on various open-access platforms. The archive gradually developed a combined pool of textual and visual materials, mostly in digital format, and is home to digital copies of over 15,000 issues of Bangla periodicals, 27,000 issues of Bangla newspapers, 5,000 issues of English newspapers, 6,000 Bangla books, 300 Hindi books and chapbooks, and so on. In 2008, with the Endangered Archive Programme (EAP) grant from the British Library, the CSSS Archive has been able to digitize a massive collection of one of the earliest Bengali newspapers that began publishing during the early 1870s, the Amrita Bazar Patrika (1870–1949), which has been made freely accessible for researchers and scholars all over the globe online through the EAP website and JSTOR.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, the CSSS website provides an idea of the extent of journals that have been digitized, or the ‘collections’ in which they are categorized, but full access to the digitized material is available only on-site. Because the archival material in CSSS and the other physical libraries provides access to a very wide range of materials, narrowing searches to relevant musical material depends on the researcher’s prior knowledge of their selected topic and the particular kind of archival material being examined.

Endangered Archives Project

Taking a cue from the major funding stream through which CSSS could digitize early print material, the Endangered Archive Project (EAP) by the British Library provides a significant amount of musical material from the late colonial period. The EAP was envisioned to capture ‘forgotten and still not written histories, often suppressed or marginalised. It gives voice to the voiceless: it opens a dialogue with global humanity’s multiple pasts. It is a library of history still waiting to be written’.Footnote ⁷

The EAP facilitates the digitization of archives worldwide that are at risk of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. Thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, grants have been awarded to over 500 projects in more than 90 countries, in more than 100 languages and scripts. Since 2004, the programme has helped digitize more than 16 million images and 35,000 soundtracks overall. Various types of archives digitized so far include rare printed sources, manuscripts, visual materials and audio recordings. This continually expanding online collection has been made freely available through local archival partners and is discoverable via the British Library catalogue.

There are two ways to search for the material: search the archives, which is a very broad search covering 562 projects and 10,992 collections, or use the ‘content type’ filter to see the 47 types of primary material. From the broader perspective of historical research, this is important and very useful. Once we narrow the material by selecting ‘India, Asia’ in the related places, we get 1346 collections and a total of 91,245 search results.

For the researcher specifically looking for musical material this might be an unwantedly long route; in that case, they can search directly with the keyword ‘music’ to get an idea of the range of audio visual material available and by narrowing it down by selecting ‘India’ as the ‘related place’ which focuses down to nine collections digitized as part of this project dedicated towards the preservation of ‘endangered archives’ from India (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Results for the keyword ‘music’ in the Endangered Archives Programme, showing nine collections related to music.

The gramophone era began in India in 1902, marking modernity in the music field. Early gramophone recordings are the only auditory cues for any researcher of nineteenth-century music in India. A broader survey of endangered audio material still available among private collectors in India (EAP 1054) was conducted by Suresh Chandvankar of the Society for Indian Record Collectors. A preliminary study revealed more than 50 collectors across various locations, many of whom hold material in the form of phonograph cylinders, gramophone discs, magnetic wire recordings, open-reel spool tapes and audio cassettes. These collections, a significant part of which contains sound material related to the first half of the nineteenth century in India, were chosen because traditional audio recording and playback formats have become obsolete due to the lack of playback devices. In addition to producing a comprehensive report on 50 available collections of early recorded music in India, Chandvankar also shared a permanent link to his private collection, which is freely accessible online.Footnote ⁸

An important sub-section of this collection consists of the early commercial gramophone recordings produced and released by the ‘Young India’ record label (EAP190). Produced between the 1930s and 1950s, this ‘indigenous’ effort at record production in India issued over 10,000 songs on different subjects such as film music, Indian classical music, folk music, publicity and educational material.Footnote ⁹ For the researcher, digitized copies of more than 1,450 songs from 725 discs are now freely available for download. Along with the audio recordings, a large number of accompanying catalogues, advertising materials, documents and disc labels have also been digitized and made available.

SHAMSA Database on Hindustani Music

In 2011, Katherine Butler Schofield undertook ‘Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean’ (MUSTECIO) – a European Research Council (ERC) project which led to the creation of the SHAMSA bibliographical database and the digital collection, which ‘constitutes the largest single repository of primary written sources on Indian music and dance in the world, and is planned to be a major ongoing resource for future researchers on Indian music, dance, and cultural history’.Footnote ¹⁰

The SHAMSA digital collection describes 324 major written sources (c. 1700–1900) for the history and analysis of North Indian (Hindustani) music and dance in Mughal and British-colonial South Asia. The SHAMSA_MUSTECIO_1.0 Database contains bibliographic details of 324 music texts written in India between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries in languages including Sanskrit, English, Bengali, Hindi/Braj, Urdu, Persian and Punjabi. Within this vast listing of primary material, the database contains bibliographic details for 195 published and unpublished books and manuscripts from the nineteenth century, helping researchers access the breadth of available primary material.

The sources of SHAMSA 1.0 were located and consulted during the four-year project from January 2011 to December 2015 by members of the ‘Awadh Case Study’, including prominent ethnomusicologists and music historians like James Kippen, David Lunn, Allyn Miner, Katherine Butler Schofield, Margaret E. Walker and Richard David Williams. The project description lists the source materials, which include ‘music and dance treatises, biographical works (tazkiras), song-collections, ethnographic works, department archives, encyclopaedias, cosmographies, theatre scripts, moral and ethical tracts, histories and a tiny handful of the large number of extant ragamala painting sets’. Being aware of the large number of sources, especially visual ones, that have not been included in this listing, SHAMSA 1.0 was published as ‘a mere starting point’ – but authentic and reconfirmed sources that at least one of the team members personally consulted’.

This database is important not only because it is the only musical primary-sources database in Indian languages and English, but also because about one third, well over 100, of these sources are currently held in digital copies in the Department of Music at King’s College London. As the copyright statuses of these copies are exceedingly complex, and King’s College London aims to make as many of them available under Creative Commons licenses with the holders’ approval, scholars and researchers can gain access to them by writing to the principal investigator of the MUSTECIO project, Katherine Schofield.Footnote ¹¹

Music Research Library

The Music Research Library is a collection of publicly accessible, downloadable electronic resources related to Indian music, organized into various collections. These include manuscripts, articles, books, periodicals, source texts and teaching resources.Footnote ¹²

Presently, this website is the only accessible repository of downloadable material dedicated to the research and study of music, especially from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The website provides open access to 3,146 downloadable items, including books, articles, indexes and bibliographies, catalogues, manuscripts, dissertations, source texts and teaching resources. Most importantly, the website also gives access to the ‘Music Research Library Catalogue’ as updated last on 7 July 2025.Footnote ¹³ It also provides a detailed breakdown of the downloadable material available on the website: 513 articles, 1,490 books, 44 catalogues, 59 dissertations, 46 index and bibliography, 626 manuscripts, 56 periodicals, 234 source texts and 15 teaching resources in Indian languages including Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odiya, Sanskrit, Tamil and Telugu, and non-Indian languages including English, French and German.

While the 65 Hindi and 411 English music books are primarily early-twentieth-century publications, their focus remains on the musical scene of the nineteenth century. Apart from the primary materials in Indian languages, including books, catalogues, bibliographies and source texts, the website hosts a wide range of secondary material on Indian music in the form of articles (513) and dissertations (59).

Shodhganga

The most elaborate and extensive resource of the most contemporary research by scholars registered in Indian universities is Shodhganga – the ‘Ganga’ (Ganges – the largest and longest river in India) of research (Shodh).Footnote ¹⁴ It is the official repository of doctoral dissertations submitted by researchers and is open access for future generations. The UGC Notification (Minimum Standards & Procedure for Award of M.Phil./Ph.D Degree, Regulation, 2009 Amendment made on 2016) dated 5 May 2016 mandates submission of electronic version of theses and dissertations because they are ‘often the only source of research work that does not find its way into various publication channels’ and therefore often remain ‘an un-tapped and under-utilized asset’. This resource aims to ensure easy access, create a space for archiving Indian doctoral theses, and raise the standard and quality of research. The responsibility for hosting and maintaining this repository is assigned to the INFLIBNET Centre. Shodhganga has already reached 600,000 theses and dissertations in its repository as of 7 May 2025.

Shodhganga is thus an excellent source for early-career music researchers to get a sense of current trends and research topics, as the database updates the submitted theses and dissertations within six months of their submission. The general search bar at the home page is only useful if one searches for something specific: using the exact title or the name of the author; in that case, the search engine fetches everything that exactly matches the words typed in. Appended below the main search bar are two additional search gateways: ‘Advanced Search’ and ‘Subject-Wise’. Advanced search lets you search by category (title, researcher-guide, keyword, date completed and language). Among these, the most useful category for the music researcher is the keyword tab, which automatically prompts and displays the music theses in different categories marked according to their subjects (see Figure 2): Music (386), Musicology (17), Musical Instruments–India (13), Musicians (11), music (9), Music therapy (6), Music-India (6). These resources encompass music theses in general – biographical works on musicians, works on debates in Indian musicology, and historical works on various musical forms. It needs further in-depth review to determine how many of them relate to nineteenth-century music.

Figure 2.

Results for the keyword ‘music’ in Shodhganga, displaying Indian theses on music, musicology, musical instruments, musicians, music therapy, and related areas, with totals indicated in parentheses.

Indian Culture and National Digital Library of India

The Indian Culture Portal (ICP) was launched in 2019 as a pioneering digital initiative of the Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India, in association with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, to make India’s rich cultural heritage widely accessible.Footnote ¹⁵ As part of the National Mission on Libraries (NML), the Indian Culture Portal serves as a key component of the National Virtual Library of India (NVLI), the main focus of which was ‘digital preservation of cultural artefacts’. The content available on the portal is broadly organized into two streams: curated categories and original categories. In the context of our survey, the curated categories include separate subsections on books, manuscripts, rare books, photo archives, reports and proceedings, which have been systematically structured to form an accessible archive. Browsing through these categories, I found that the rare books section is helpful: it fetched 53 books whose titles include the keyword ‘music’. Narrowing them down by selecting only the years between 1800 and 1900 and then individually inspecting the titles, I finally got 15 unique books related to nineteenth-century Indian music written by Sourindro Mohun Tagore, Chinnaswamy Mudaliar, Kshetramohan Goswami and Harishchandra Dutta. The scanned copies are of good quality, and they are only readable online (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Rare Books section of the Indian Culture website, illustrating the filtering of nineteenth-century music publications using the ‘Copyright dates’ range.

As part of the same initiative, the National Digital Library of India (NDLI) – One Library All of India has a dedicated section of their portal for researchers.Footnote ¹⁶ The main search tab allows the researcher to search for material by language. I searched for the phrase ‘nineteenth century music India’, which returned 1,499 results (see Figure 4) after narrowing them with the following filters: subject – ‘music’; language – ‘English’; resource type – ‘article’ (there were no books available for this search). In order to pull out materials related to India one has to manually inspect the results because there is no filter such as: ‘Country’ or ‘Place of Publication’.

Figure 4.

Results for the search query ‘nineteenth century music India’ in the National Digital Library of India, yielding 1,499 English-language secondary resources.

British Library Catalogue

The British Library Catalogue is probably the best-catalogued and most-searchable online library database for materials related to music in India. India was the largest British colony during the nineteenth century, and almost all published textual material, from illustrated volumes to chapbooks, ended up in the India Office Archives, which later made this archive available through the British Library. The generic search mechanism works the same way as any other online search engine: Advanced Search allows searching with selected terms within a chosen date range. Given my research interest in Sourindro Mohun Tagore and his works, I used the generic search term ‘Tagore’ to avoid limiting results due to variations in name spellings, which returned 9,468 results across various formats, including 8,944 books. Broadening the search with ‘music’ in the nineteenth century yields 327,083 results, but further narrowing it to materials relevant to Indian music does not provide a filter to extract Indian material. Searching the database with terms such as ‘music india’ or ‘india music’ and narrowing down the results by applying the filter of ‘creation date’ to 1800–1900, returns only 181 results across formats (see Figure 5). Applying the same filters while using ‘Advanced Search’ also fetches 184 search results. On the other hand, like any other search engine, searching with specific keywords, such as a composer’s or author’s name or the actual title of a work, yields much more precise and fruitful results.

Figure 5.

Results from the British Library Online Catalogue for the keywords ‘music India’, refined using the ‘Creation Date’ filter (1800–1900), returning 181 records across formats.

South Asia Commons

South Asia Commons is one of the most curated repositories of nineteenth-century primary textual and visual archives related to South Asia.Footnote ¹⁷ On its homepage, the portal offers a few curated collections under labels such as ‘Art History’, ‘Literature’, ‘Indology’, etc., but the general search tab is also quite useful. One can search with their intended keyword: for example, I searched with ‘music’, which automatically searched the entire database ‘for everything’. I filtered out the search results by selecting the ‘filter year’ option and clicking against all the years that fall within my target date range, ‘1800–1900’, to narrow the results to 689 across different formats (see Figure 6). Selecting or filtering out publications on or from India was not possible, but the retrieved results were mostly primary textual sources for the selected period. The search results revealed that although the algorithm primarily looks for the keyword in book titles, it also fetches results that contain ‘music’ within the text. The documents uploaded to this portal are scanned with great care, using high-end scanners that enable searching within the body text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. This is indeed an important feature that marks this portal out from other websites, but it comes at a price: only 15 ‘searches’ per month are free, and none of the content is downloadable without a premium account.

Figure 6.

Results for the keyword ‘music’ in South Asia Commons, showing 689 records, largely primary-source materials.

Archive.org

The Internet Archive, hosted through the platform archive.org, is the largest repository of primary textual material in the digital domain. Like any other search engine, the Internet Archive also works through definitive searches. Before going into the working of the general search tab, I want to explore how the advanced search mechanism works on this platform. The advanced search allows you to search for words or phrases across any field, including title, creator, description, collection, media type, etc., and the results can be filtered by date range. If the researcher wants to explore the breadth of available material on music in the nineteenth century, they can search for ‘music’ in the description field and filter the results to the 1800–1900 date range. Doing that yields 20,945 search results, but there’s no way to further filter for material specific to India. Otherwise, the material can be filtered by language: selecting English, Bengali, Arabic, Tamil, Telugu, and other Indian languages narrows it down to 13,848 items. While one can browse all the pages and try to find material that relates to their research, another way to search this database is to specifically search for ‘Indian music’ or ‘music India’ within the same date range; this narrows the results to only 193 items. Searching the Internet Archive with keywords thus works only partially; the keyword tags embedded in items during scanning and upload are not sufficiently populated to yield fruitful results. Being familiar with the nineteenth-century archive of Indian musical writings, I searched for the keyword ‘Hindu music’ and got only 22 results.

The only alternative that allows the researcher to exploit The Internet Archive fully is to search for works by specific ‘authors’ and ‘book titles’. I tried searching for my research interest, Sourindro Mohun Tagore, with all lowercase letters, which returned 89 results – all published in the nineteenth century. Similarly, works by other authors can be retrieved through specific and targeted searches. Another tip for widening the search is to try different spellings of the same author: most publications use different spellings of the same name, and the database also includes these variations. For example: Sourindro, Sourindra, Shourindro, Shourindra, Sourendra, etc.