L0035004 Snakes and Ladders (Game of Heaven & Hell) Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Game of Heaven and Hell (Jnana Bagi). This old Indian game, known to us as 'Snakes and Ladders', was originally a vehicle for teaching ethics. Each square has not only a number but a legend which comprises the names of various virtues and vices. The longest ladder reaches from square 17 'Compassionate Love' to 69 'The World of the Absolute' Late 18th Century Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Funding Resources

  • University of Alberta
  • The Prem Singhmar Graduate Award in Indian Studies (now closed).
  • SHASTRI, The SHASTRI Indo-Canadian Institute provides several funding possibilities for developing Indian studies.  It’s mission statement is, “To improve the quality of life of the peoples of Canada and India by building and strengthening intellectual and cultural linkages through research, dialogue and exchange.”
  • AIIS, The American Institute of Indian Studies.  The AIIS has been supporting students to travel and learn in India for over half a century. AIIS has a good infrastructure in India, including places to live and established courses for the study of Indian languages and reading advanced Sanskrit śāstric texts, including 8-week summer courses, semester courses, and whole academic year courses.  Canadian students are welcome to contact the AIIS and explore their fellowship program and discuss possibilities.
  • Travel Awards for students in the Department of History and Classics.  For example, contributions to conference travel.
  • FGSR graduate travel awards, “to financially support graduate students who travel in the interests of disseminating their research results or developing their research.”
  • Mitacs Globalink Research Awards, support research collaborations between Canada and select partner countries including India. The award is open to senior undergraduate and graduate students.
  • Associated Medical Services funds history of medicine projects and also post-doctoral fellowships.  Annual deadline in the first week of April.

Digital Resources

The study of Classical India has benefited hugely by the rapid development of the Digital Humanities since the 1990s.  Today, scholars of Indian studies take digital resources for granted as part of their scholarly toolkit. The list below is just a sampling of of the more prominent resources available today.

  • INDOLOGY website and mailman forum on classical Indian studies, also supporting SARIT, OLDSSPMC, John Smith’s Bombay, and other resources.
  • SARIT, a collection of electronic editions of classical Indian works in the original languages, keyword-searchable, downloadable and free.
  • OLDSPMC, Online Library of Digitized Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscript Catalogues.
  • PANDiT, a prosopographical Database for Indic Texts
  • EAST,  Epistemology and Argumentation in South Asia and Tibet
  • GRETIL – Göttingen Register of Electronic Texts in Indian Languages, a large archive of unedited Sanskrit and related text in plain text form
  • GRETIL e-library, scanned books on Indian studies
  • École Française  d’Extrême-Orient, Pondicherry, research centre near Chennai providing excellent academic hospitality and library facilities
  • The Hartsuiker Archive, British Library, documents Indian mendicants in the later 20th century in northern India.
  • The Wellcome Library, London, a fine research library with major holdings of Sanskrit manuscripts and printed books on all aspects of Indian studies.
  • The Wellcome Images Archive, London, includes many images from Indian paintings and manuscripts in the library’s collection.  Freely downloadable and usable under Creative Commons terms.
  • Bharat Ek Khoj (was “Digital Library of India”), contains scans of over a million books, including sources in Sanskrit and other Indian languages and English books on Indian history and culture.
  • The Archive.org, also a mine of downloadable literature of and from India, much of it digitized by Google, U. Toronto, U. Oxford, Harvard and other academic libraries.
  • Digitized manuscripts from the Raghunatha Temple Library, Jammu, results of a digitizing project carried out by Chetan Pandey.

Related Scholarly Centres and Projects