The Collection
IPSOLHA’s collection includes primary and secondary sources related to the history of the Indian Princely States. Most of these sources remain difficult to access—being held by a handful of private research libraries around the world. Over time, we hope to increase access to these items by locating existing digital copies and digitizing items that are out of copyright for inclusion in the collection.
About the Project
The Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive (IPSOLHA) is a digital humanities initiative to collate, compile, and make accessible digital and analog resources for studying the legal history of the Indian Princely States.
During the period of British colonial rule, there were hundreds of semi-sovereign, semi-autonomous states across the South Asian subcontinent. Varying in size and authority, these states (sometimes referred to as native, feudatory, or zamindari states) were incubators for innovative legal, administrative, and political ideas and offered a unique counterbalance to the hegemony of British rule. Yet despite their unique history, studying these states is complicated by the scattered nature of their archival remains.
IPSOLHA (pronounced ip-so-laa) emerged from a desire to build a database and collection of references to facilitate historical study of these states, with a special focus on their legal and administrative history. At the end of the pilot phase, IPSOLHA’s database of references includes over 2,000 items (available for browsing here). In the next phase of the project, we will continue to add new items to the database, work with related projects to digitize and host primary source materials, and work with scholars to demonstrate the utility of IPSOLHA as a research tool.
To read more about the project’s aims and accomplishments thus far, please see our “Background” page. To learn about who has been involved in the project and to see our sponsors, please visit the “Acknowledgments” page. To learn about experimental and ongoing work, check out the “Project Updates” or “Documentation” pages.
