Lancaster's History Department is producing India’s first cultural heritage app. SHARC Dilli will be the principal outcome of the Digital Heritage in India network, led by Dr Deborah Sutton, Senior Lecturer in Modern South Asian History. The network is funded by the AHRC.

Using software developed at the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, SHARC Dilli will allow users to explore erased or only faintly recalled stories from the partition city of Delhi. The app will contain fragments – images, texts and sound recordings – of the events that transformed the city after the partition of British and Princely India into India and Pakistan.

The Partition caused unprecedented communal violence across northern India: the urban and social fabric of Delhi was transformed by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees and the displacement and departure of swathes of the city’s inhabitants.

The information contained in SHARC Dilli, dating from 1947 until 1959, comes from archives (including the Delhi State Archives and Nehru Memorial Library), from newspapers and from oral narratives held by the Peoples History Project at the Centre for Community Knowledge in Delhi.

The app will alert users as they move around the (vast) city by road, rail, metro, auto and foot. As the user travels, they will receive alerts from their phone telling them that a site associated with a partition story is near. The app is an opportunity to create new connections and new understandings of the heritage of one of the most exciting, exhilarating and complex cities in the world.

SHARC Dilli app will launch in Delhi at the end of 2018.