The core of the Penn Libraries’ outstanding linguistics collection is the library of August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887), professor of general and comparative linguistics at the University of Halle and first librarian of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft.
The Penn Libraries South Asian Collection contains a notable collection of Dalit literature.
The Van Pelt Video Collection is home to more than 1,200 Hindi-language films as well as scholarly and popular books about Hindi and Bollywood film culture.
Penn Libraries has a substantive Indo-Caribbean collection that strives to reveal histories, communities, and cultural expressions that have remained underrepresented in most research libraries.
The Mary Binney Wheeler collection of photographic slides is one of the largest individual collections of its kind in the United States. Amassed over the course of fourteen trips to Afghanistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, the collection provides us with more than 9,000 images of an astounding diversity of people, places, and events throughout the Indian subcontinent. Though considered a great Romantic traveler, her images are more than picturesque or exotic; she was unique in her ability to balance the timeless with the mundane, splendor with domesticity.
Penn Libraries holds more than 3,000 manuscripts from South Asia, making it one of the largest collections of its kind in the Americas. Predominantly Indic in provenance, the manuscripts are chiefly Sanskrit works written in Devanāgarī script. Though generally informed by traditional Hindu learning, the collection nevertheless remains thematically comprehensive and contains significant Buddhist and Jain texts. (Note: this collection is often referred to as the Collection of Indic Manuscripts.)