Collège de France Institute of Indian Studies Library

One of the Collège de France's Far East Libraries and a member of the DRPD, the department of libraries, documentary resources and networks.

The IEI, Institute of Indian Studies Library, founded on June 13th 1927 by Émile Sénart, holds a collection of over 36,000 titles (including 630 journal titles of which 40 are current publications) on India and the Indian zone of cultural influence: the Republic of India, Indianized Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Holdings in Sanskrit, Indo-Aryan languages, languages of the Indo-Iranian boarder region, and in Tamil cover a broad range of disciplines: philology, linguistics, the political and religious history of Classical India, etc

The library also houses some 100 manuscripts, works of art, the well-catalogued scientific archives of S. Lévi, L. Renou, P. Reichert ,and G. Fussman, and a digitized collection of some 2,700 maps covering nearly all of the Indian sub-continent at scales 1:50,000 and 1:250,000. The 30,000-image photo library is now entirely digitized and will soon be accessible via the Collège de France website.

Lectors can request books from the reserves from Tuesday through Friday. Reserve book requests are treated three times a day, at 2:30 pm, 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm.

The library offers 58 seats, including 3 carrels and 2 rooms for group work in a reading room shared by the 5 Asian Worlds libraries. Reservations are made via the Affluences platform.

Access terms

The library is open to researchers, university faculty, PhD and post-doctoral students, on recommendation from their research supervisor. Master's students may also use the library on formal request from their research advisor.