Digging through the Trust’s Allchin Archive proves rewarding for visiting fellow

Jo Salisbury News, Stories from the Collection Leave a Comment

At the beginning of March, the Trust welcomed NTICVA (Nehru Trust for the Indian Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum) Visiting Fellowhip recipient Professor Arjun Rao. Professor Rao is from the Department of History and Archaeology at Central University, Karnataka, and is currently working on several areas of prehistoric archaeological research, but wanted to visit AIIT during his fellowship in the UK to look at the research papers and notes related to Raymond Allchin’s PhD thesis on prehistoric sites in South India. The trust archive holds a copy of …

Feasting on the Shahnameh

Munizha Ahmad-Cooke Stories from the Collection 2 Comments

Amongst the manuscripts we hold at the Trust is Abolqasem Ferdawsi’s tenth-century epic Persian poem, the Shahnameh, copied in Samarkand in 1604. When I first applied for the Administrator post, this felt like an added reason to work here, as my name derives from that of Manizheh, the daughter of King Afrasyab and the heroine of the love story ‘Bizhan and Manizheh’ told in the Shahnameh. That this story was housed here reinforced the personal affinity I have always felt with the Trust. However, while I was aware of my …

Recent Library Acquisitions – Murty Classical Library of India

Jo Salisbury Book Notes Leave a Comment

Recent acquisitions of new books for the AIIT library include the first 18 volumes in the new Murty Classical Library of India series (MCLI), published by Harvard University Press. The Murty Classical Library is a facing-page translation series. The series includes English translations of classical works alongside the original texts in the appropriate regional script. The original Indic languages include Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pali, Panjabi, Persian, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Below is a list of the library’s holdings – the complete series published so far, but new …

AIIT Library’s New Bookstacks in the Basement

Jo Salisbury News Leave a Comment

Following a summer of building works, the library at the AIIT has a new basement book store, complete with new rolling bookstacks, providing over 120 linear metres of much needed archival storage space.  The conversion of our former laundry room into a purpose-built collections store also included the removal of our behemoth of a boiler and the installation of a new efficient heating system for the trust. We would like to thank our visitors over the summer and particularly our regular readers and visiting scholars for their patience and flexible …

The Ancient India & Iran Trust

AIIT Lecture – Friday 3 November: Mark Elliott on curating ‘Another India’ exhibition at MAA, Cambridge

Jo Salisbury News 4 Comments

This week’s lecture at 5.30pm on Friday November 3rd at the AIIT: Mark Elliott (MAA, Cambridge) ‘Curating Another India: object histories and contemporary voices’ All welcome. Refreshments from 5pm The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA) cares for rich and eclectic collections of artefacts and images from India and South Asia, which have been largely unresearched in recent decades. The results of archaeological excavation, ethnographic fieldwork, colonial administration, missionary expeditions, travel or military operations, what these collections have are important stories to tell about the people who made and used …