South Asian Studies

The combined holdings of Film and Video resources of South Asian titles of Duke, NCCU, NC State and UNC number about 2,000 films and are by far the largest of any collection in the Southeast.  These holdings consist of both feature and documentary films in various formats: laser discs, videocassettes, DVDs, VCDs and 16mm films.  With about 1,000 titles NC State has the largest collection of films in the Triangle followed by Duke (about 600) and UNC (about 300) and NCCU (about 100).   Duke has an impressive collection of documentaries (over 200) on a variety of social, political and environmental issues.  NC State and UNC combined together have about 50 documentaries. About 90% of the feature films are in Hindi/Urdu and the remaining ones in various regional languages, such as Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil.  With a few exceptions, all the films have English subtitles.

The video collections of the Triangle libraries are accessible through their online catalogs.  You can search by title, director, producer and artists.
For country listings check under the subject headings: Feature films – [Name of the country] and Documentary films – [Name of the country]:

South Asian films at Duke are housed at Lilly Library on East campus. For information on loan periods and other policies please see Lilly Library’s Film and Video Circulation Policy. For a sampling of Bollywood films (a term used to describe the films made in the Indian city of Mumbai, formerly Bombay), in Hindi/Urdu, available at Duke see http://library.duke.edu/lilly/film-video/index.html.

Films can be borrowed from other Triangle Research Libraries Network institutions through their respective ILL departments.  For films held at UNC and NC State see South Asian Studies Filmography at UNC and Feature Films at North Carolina State.

In addition to the preceding sources the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) – an index of  films produced around the world, lists  nearly 20,000 films, videos, and television programs from India alone, and has several entries on other South Asian countries.  IMDb (an Amazon.com company) provides extensive information, where available, on the cast and production crew, plot, language, country and suggestions for titles on similar subjects.  IMDb is a little complicated, but useful database.