Further resources for the study of sciences in South Asia

South Asia is a large place and science is a big thing. This means that the study of sciences in South Asia will necessarily be a collaborative effort. Below are links to ongoing collaborative projects related to the history of science in South Asia that eager people can participate in. Please reach out to me if you host a working group or other collaborative resource that I should add to the list.

A useful tool for converting between scripts of the Indian Ocean world.


A tool for calculating and calibrating South Asian calendars, created by M. Yano and M. Fushimi and funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture of the Japanese Government.

A tool for navigating the various calendar systems of South and Southeast Asia developed by L. Gislén & J. C. Eade and funded by the École française d’Extrême-Orient.

A tool for calibrating a range of calendars, developed by Harys Dalvi.

A tool for converting a few more calendars, developed by Bhante Ānandajoti.


Estimates of the annual monsoon for the past 700 years from the Data Library of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia.


Data from peer-reviewed historical climatology publications mapped and maintained by the US National Centers for Environmental Information.


Digital Sanskrit literature with word-by-word analysis and integrated dictionaries.


A website I have put together compiling resources for the study of the middle Indic language Apabhraṃśa. Includes a library of texts, course handouts, and a skeleton grammar I wrote together with Thibaut d'Hubert.


A database maintained by the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad that compiles over 500 physical and digital archives and repositories relevant to the history and cultural heritage of the Indian subcontinent.


An important resource for approaching the vast primary and secondary literature related to philosophy written in Sanskrit compiled by Karl Potter Z"L. Unfortunately, the University of Washington no longer hosts this resource.


A searchable version of the 42-volume catalogue of Sanskrit manuscripts initially organized by V. Raghavan.


Fully searchable dictionaries of South Asian Languages covering languages everything from Assamese to Urdu and much in between.


An important collection of digitized manuscript catalogues.


A resource platform providing standardized machine-readable texts in Indian languages that have been contributed by various individuals and institutions.


Decolonizing the History of Science in Asia is a monthly virtual reading group that discusses recent scholarship which "engages questions regarding the deconstruction of imperial visions and definitions of the sciences in Asia, and explores how new work can contribute to the diversification of perspectives in the history of science."


The History of Science in Early South Asia is a  monthly virtual reading group that engages in "group readings of premodern scientific texts in early Indian languages, especially Sanskrit." The group largely focuses on medical and alchemical literatures.


What follows are some resources for the identification of plants and their properties based on lexicons and pharmacopeias from South Asia.



The Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts (PANDiT) "seeks to store, curate, and share reliable data on works, people, places, institutions, and manuscripts from premodern South Asia, in addition to relevant secondary sources, and to do so across period, language, discipline and subject matter. It is designed as an interactive web-based repository that scholars of every South Asian specialty and interest can contribute to and as a basic tool on which they will routinely come to rely."


A digital reposatory of Sanskrit texts.