Projects

The 'India 75 Events' programme follows on from the ‘Two Centuries of Indian Print’ (2CIP) project with an exciting series of events, talks and engagement activities.

Published date:

15 November 2022

Aim of the project

The India 75 events programme highlights and celebrates the achievements of the AHRC-funded project Two Centuries of Indian Print (2CIP) showcasing its cataloguing, digitisation and research outputs. India 75 Events seeks to celebrate South Asian print, film, and literary history with a dedicated events programme that aims to maximise the impact of 2CIP as well as engage with new users to the British Library. The programme coincides with the 75th anniversary of independence in India, as well as important commemorations of national events across South Asia, and is part of a wider public engagement programme.

Events will include community workshops, research seminars and film screenings for interested audiences in the UK and South Asia. These events will lay the foundation for wider plans being developed that seek to broaden the regional and linguistic focus of the Library’s future South Asian collections conservation, digitisation and research projects. 

What we have achieved so far

Since 2016 the 2CIP project achieved the following research, community engagement and digitisation aims and objectives:

• Digitisation: an estimated 200,000 pages from 1000 early print Bengali books from both British Library and SOAS collections were digitised and preserved in the British Library’s Digital Library System (DLS) and made available online through the British Library's website. A list of all books catalogued by 2CIP and in the digitisation workflow is available on the project webspace.
• Cataloguing: 2CIP successfully created over 2000 catalogue records for titles in four different languages (Bengali, Sylheti, Assamese and Urdu) from 1714-1914. These records, are discoverable through the British Library’s online catalogue Explore.
• Workshops: Eight Digital Skills Sharing workshops were delivered, in India, for training and capacity building in digital scholarship and digitisation. An academic workshop on ‘Islam and Print in South Asia’ was delivered in the UK in 2018 involving academics from the UK and South Asia.
• Additional resources: datasets derived from the digitised books have been made available under open licenses through the British Library's Research Repository and contain page images, ‘ground truth’ transcriptions and bibliographic data as ALTO XML files and searchable PDFs.    

Events

India 75 Events will take place from July – December 2022. The three main strands are as follows:

• Community Workshops: We will be holding three community workshops on the North Indian, Islamic South Asian and South Indian collections respectively. During these workshops, we will invite community members to share their knowledge and experiences and capture new information about the Library’s collections potentially leading to a co-curated online exhibition.
• Research Seminars and Conference: Two research seminars will take place at the Library on the 14 and 21 September 2022. The full programme of speakers can be downloaded here. In addition to this, our partner Jadavpur University will host an online conference in November 2022, which will provide an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of 2CIP as well as look towards new digitisation projects that are taking place in India, the UK and beyond.
• Film Screenings: The Library will host three film screenings showcasing South Asia’s rich film history. These screenings will draw from the subcontinent’s diverse regional and national film industries and touch on a variety of themes that are significant in contemporary South Asia.     

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