Notable Collections

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.

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.)

Because of longstanding collection strengths in area studies as well as because of disciplinary trends recognizing philosophers outside of the traditional western canon, the Penn Libraries have a significant amount of material relating to philosophy and philosophers in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.