Material Encounters: South Asia through Yale’s Collections

Brent Bianchi is perhaps the most widely-read South Asianist on campus. As the South and Southeast Asian Studies Librarian at Yale, he works with diverse collections from across the regions to aid students and instructors alike.

“I get lots of interesting questions, and I ask people to keep them coming,” said Bianchi. “I think the opportunity to keep learning about really different things is really the exciting part of the job and being part of Yale,” he added.

Before joining Yale, Bianchi worked at universities in Bhutan, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea and China along with Duke University and the University of Washington. Among his interests are cultural anthropology, music, paleography and philology.

In his day-to-day schedule, Bianchi often helps students conducting research find relevant resources, selects books for acquisition, and attends meetings with librarians at Yale and beyond. One of those recent meetings with his colleagues at the national level included discussions regarding collaboration to maximize collective budgets and make the most of their collections.

Yale University recently joined RECAP, a consortium of library research collections that counts Princeton, Columbia and NYU among its members. According to Bianchi, the library storage facility will help limit duplications of material across different universities–a growing problem as budgets shrink.

Bianchi views collaborating with faculty as an important part of his job, and they often serve as his “eyes and ears” for learning about new material to acquire. India alone has over 20,000 publishers, so it is always helpful when faculty draw works to his attention. Bianchi aids faculty with their classes, too.

He provides “bibliographic instruction sessions,” teaching students how to navigate databases, modify their search terms and understand where to start when they approach a research project.

Bianchi also works with collections in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, collaborating with professors to bring special collections to their classes, though such efforts can be complicated by Yale’s history of collecting South Asian material.

According to Bianchi, the University Library collected much of its South Asian books and journals throughout the 1960s and 1970s with the hope of creating a national repository, but collection efforts waned substantially thereafter. Bianchi added that special collections often came to Yale through gifts rather than a systematic effort to make acquisitions.

Bianchi explained that rarity is usually associated with the Beinecke, but that the Library’s circulating collections also include many unique materials, including a colonial manual on tiger-hunting in India that Catherine Kausikan YC ’25 discovered. Kausikan came across the catalogue while conducting research for Who Shot the Tiger? Performing Imperialism in India, an exhibit in the corridor of Sterling Memorial Library. Advised by Bianchi and History of Art Professor Tim Barringer, it ran from last Fall through the Spring as part of Yale Library’s Senior Exhibit Program.

The exhibition focused on representations of tiger hunting in 19th-century British culture as visual reinforcements of British imperialism. Through advising it, Bianchi first came to realize how many objects the Yale Center for British Art has relating to British India. Displays in the exhibition included William Blake’s “The Tyger,” Bhupal Singh’s Emperor Muhammad Shah (1702–1748) Hunting and a printed depiction of “Tipoo’s Tiger,” an automaton created for the ruler of Mysore and famed enemy of the British East India Company, Tipoo Sultan. It also featured The Crystal Palace Game, an 19th century board game oriented around the geography of the world.

Beyond Yale’s links to colonialism, Bianchi mentioned that the University has rare collections relating to missionary activity in South Asia due to its roots as a Christian university founded by congregational ministers. The University collections include the longest-known run of Hitavadi, the earliest missionary journal in India. Bianchi learned of the scholarly value and rarity of the journal through reading an article by Chakali Chandra Sekhar, a professor at Azim Premji University.

Bianchi, who hopes to aid in digitizing the journals, cited digitization as a broader priority for him. Though there has been a pause on digitization projects at the Yale University Library for the past few years as new infrastructure is developed, Bianchi is a member of South Asia Open Archives’ Content Curation Working Group, where he helps digitize materials for the organization.

Part of what has made Bianchi’s work at Yale so compelling is students’ strong emphasis on research that the University’s collections are particularly well-suited for.

“Often, they’re interested in something that’s unique to Yale and isn’t someplace else,” said Bianchi. Though these archival discoveries are often most exciting, Bianchi also highlighted the Library’s abundance of published primary sources, which he thinks more students should make use of.

When asked about other aspects of the Library he feels are underutilized, Bianchi had a simple answer. Rather than highlighting a certain collection or resource, he emphasized an experience: exploration.

After all, what are library studies if not a constant exercise in investigation?

“I see very few people browsing the stacks compared to when I was a graduate student,” Bianchi reflected. “I think there’s a lot to be said for just getting out in the stacks and exploring.”