About the LSE Archives Student Blog Project
The South Asia Centre, in partnership with LSE Library, is looking for postgraduate students to write articles on the LSE's extensive holdings relating to the Indian subcontinent.
The archives contain some fantastic primary documents dating from the late 19th century to independence and beyond. These include Dr BR Ambedkar's PhD thesis and student documents, materials relating to British women who campaigned for Indian women's rights in the early 20th century, an interview with Indira Gandhi and various records of official discussions about partition.
Contributors are invited to select a small number of documents and write a blog post of around 1000 words on them, giving context and highlighting the key insights offered. The articles will be published on South Asia @ LSE and the LSE History blog.
If you are interested in participating in the project, get in touch with Sonali Campion, Editor of South Asia @ LSE, at southasia@lse.ac.uk.
About LSE Library's South Asia Archives
Since the late 1800’s, LSE Library has focused on collecting the archives of individuals and organisations that have either helped shape the development of legislative policy and services at a national level in the UK, or significantly influenced the public agenda. These archives can include anything produced by an individual or an organisation, such as the notes of a politician, the minutes of a network or group, a campaigning leaflet etc.
As a result of this collection strategy, the Library has inevitably collected documents that comment in some way on South Asia affairs across this time period, and reflects these affairs from a British perspective. Whilst where are interesting holdings related to South Asia, there has never been a distinct collection referred to as the “South Asia Collection”, since it exists scattered across disparate files within “British” collections.
This short overview attempts to organise the collections into themes and surface some of the South Asia archives, although there is a degree of overlap between them, with many potential sub themes (e.g. “health”). These themes refer to archives held both in the LSE Library Archives as well as the Women’s Library; both of which are held at the LSE and can be more exhaustively searched using the LSE archives catalogue and the Women’s Library catalogue.
All archives are accessible to researchers and the public in the 4th floor archives reading room of the Library. They can also be consulted in the teaching and learning room for activities/events/teaching by special arrangement with the curator for politics and international relations, Daniel Payne (d.payne1@lse.ac.uk)
The five themes of the South Asia collections are:
1. LSE and South Asia
2. British Women and South Asia
3. Trade, Currency and Economics
4. The British Left
5. Partition and Conflict