The Diasammlung Sontheimer contains almost all of the slides taken by Professor Dr Günther-Dietz Sontheimer during his research visits between 1958 and 1992. Sontheimer taught and conducted research at Heidelberg university's South Asia Institute from 1965 to 1992 and left behind an invaluable collection of photographs of Hindu cults and deities, temples and shrines, religious practices, and people's living conditions. The photographs were primarily taken in Maharashtra, but also in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat.

DiGA, short for Digitization of Gandharan Artefacts: A project for the preservation and the study of the Buddhist art of Pakistan is a cultural heritage project that ran from 2021 to 2024 and was conducted by the Center for Religious Studies (Ruhr Universität Bochum). It digitized and catalogued a corpus of around 1500 Buddhist sculptures from the ancient region of Gandhara. Gandhara – or Greater Gandhara, as scholars are now more inclined to name it – is a historical region which covers present-day Northwest Pakistan and Eastern Afghanistan and which was a pivot between South and Central Asia.

The digital text collection Literature on South Asia - Digital includes travelogues from the 18th to the early 20th century, drawn from the holdings of the SAI Library and the Heidelberg University Library. The illustrations are catalogued via the Historic Travelogues on South Asia pool. Individual images are linked to the online presentation of digitised travelogues, ensuring the original context of the illustrations is preserved.

This photographic collection documents the work and everyday life of the Kumbhara Bishoi community. This special community of potters works as hereditary temple servants (sevakas) at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha (formerly Orissa), providing a range of earthenware cooking and serving vessels for the temple kitchen. As a nationally important pilgrimage centre, the Jagannath Temple requires a large quantity of earthenware vessels every day for preparing, offering and distributing sacred food (mahaprasada), an indispensable part of rituals and pilgrimages. The thematic portal The Temple Potters of Puri describes the overall project and provides access to further research material.

This collection contains pictures, studies and drawings from Dr Paul Yule's field research, carried out in North India and Odisha from 1980 to 2006. The research focused on prehistoric metal industries and the so-called Indian Copper Hoards.

The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Arts contains over 4.200 images of Indian popular culture from the late 19th and early 20th century. A large part of the collection consists of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters. This is one of the finest archives of such ephemera in India. Priya Paul has opened her collection for digitization to the Cluster Asia and Europe in a Global Context. In cooperation with the digital network Tasveer Ghar – A House of Pictures and the Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA) the digitized material was uploaded into the image database and enhanced with metadata.