Homepage of South Asian Canadian Digital Archive website. Image credit: South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. 

The South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (SACDA) is an initiative of the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. It is a pan-Canadian digital archive that documents the rich and multifaceted history and heritage of the South Asian diaspora in Canada. By collaborating with individuals, families, community organizations, and heritage institutions, SACDA ensures that the stories and legacies of South Asian Canadians are digitized, described, and made accessible to the public with open access. With a vision centered on inclusivity, community engagement, and collaboration, SACDA addresses a pressing gap in the Canadian record by prioritizing the often-overlooked histories of South Asian communities.  

The history of South Asians in Canada spans over 120 years, beginning in 1903 when the first immigrants arrived on Canadian shores. These early settlers faced numerous challenges, from systemic racism to discriminatory immigration policies, yet their resilience and determination laid the groundwork for future generations. Today, the South Asian community is Canada’s largest racialized group, with the 2021 Census reporting a population of 2.6 million. South Asian Canadians have played a pivotal role in shaping Canada’s identity and their contributions extend across industries, politics, arts, and social activism. Despite this rich history, archival representation of South Asians in Canada has been sparse. Many stories, histories, and records remain undocumented, inaccessible, or lost to time. SACDA addresses this historical void, ensuring the preservation of the community’s social and cultural heritage.  

Central to SACDA’s mission is its commitment to community-driven archival praxis. SACDA emphasizes active collaboration with community members at all stages of archival processing work. This approach allows individuals and families to actively participate in shaping how their histories are preserved and shared. Community involvement extends to identification of materials and collections, creation of descriptive metadata, and curation of exhibits. This participatory model not only democratizes knowledge creation but also ensures that the archive authentically reflects the lived experiences and cultural nuances of South Asian Canadians. 

Collection page of South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. Image credit: South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. 

SACDA currently holds 75 collections and five online exhibits. These collections span a wide range of topics, from migration and settlement patterns to labor activism, arts, and culture. A hallmark of SACDA’s collections is their multilingual and multimodal nature. Materials are available in languages such as Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, and Persian, reflecting the linguistic diversity of the South Asian diaspora. Formats include letters, manuscripts, ledgers, photographs, videos, oral histories, and ephemera, ensuring comprehensive documentation of the community’s heritage. 

SACDA’s work goes beyond preservation—it also seeks to transform the way knowledge about South Asian Canadian communities is created, shared, and understood. One of its key milestones is the development of a custom metadata dictionary and a local authorities database featuring over 10,000 entities, including individuals and organizations. These tools and methods address gaps in existing knowledge systems, ensuring that the archive accurately reflects the complexities of South Asian Canadian histories.  

Chandra Bodalia fonds 

Vimal Bodalia and Dr. Satwinder Bains going through a box. Image credit: Thamilini Jothilingam 

A recent and significant addition to SACDA is the Chandra Bodalia fonds, which comprises over three million photographs documenting the vibrant social, cultural, political, and economic life of South Asian communities in British Columbia. Spanning from the late 1980s to 2017, the fonds represents the largest known private archive of a South Asian Canadian photojournalist. 

Born in 1948 in Sisodra, a village in Gujarat, India, Chandravadan "Chandra" Bodalia was a talented artist who pursued higher education in commercial arts and painting at the prestigious Sheth C. N. College of Fine Arts in Ahmedabad. After immigrating to Canada in 1976, Bodalia settled in Vancouver, where he initially worked various jobs, including creating art props and souvenirs for cultural events. 

Chandra Bodalia. Image credit: Vimal Bodalia family 

In the late 1980s, Bodalia embarked on a career as a photojournalist, documenting the lives of South Asian Canadians with unparalleled dedication. Bodalia photographed important events for the South Asian Canadian community across BC and highlighted the unique stories and experiences of the community. He covered a range of events and various facets of life, from community programs and celebrations to cradle to grave events such as weddings, birthdays, cultural festivals, honoring events, political gatherings, and religious ceremonies. The photographs also reflect the intercultural connections and collaborations within the immigrant communities in Canada as well as transnational ties to the South Asian region. Bodalia’s work appeared in local newspapers such as The Voice and The Link, earning him widespread recognition and over 20 awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Times of Canada. 

Business card of Chandra Bodalia. Image credit: South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. 

The Bodalia fonds focuses on the rich and diverse history of BC, capturing the experiences of South Asian Canadian communities through the lens of a South Asian photojournalist. The SACDA team plans to digitize, digitally preserve, and provide open access to this unique BC-based content in the coming years, offering invaluable insights into the vibrant cultural heritage of the province's South Asian communities. The fonds will provide a critical ethnographic framework to social sciences and humanities educators, researchers, learners, and policymakers to understand historically marginalized communities of South Asian origin, women, refugees, indentured, colonized and disenfranchised people.   

Bodalia’s altruism set him apart—he photographed countless events without seeking compensation, distributing prints freely to community members. His legacy is a testament to his belief in the power of photography to preserve memories and foster connections. He once said in an interview, “I always believed it was important that the work and sacrifices of others be recorded and acknowledged so I decided to use my abilities in photography to contribute to the community.”  

After his passing in 2017, Bodalia’s extensive archive, stored in his son’s garage, became a treasure trove of South Asian Canadian history. The SACDA team, in partnership with Royal BC Museum (RBCM)/ BC Archives, Department of Information Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley, University of the Fraser Valley Library, Sikh Heritage Museum, and the Poetic Justice Foundation is now working to digitize, preserve, and make the fonds accessible to the public. 

Left: Chandra Bodalia boxes with photographs, right: an envelope with Chandra Bodalia’s handwritten notes. Image credit: Thamilini Jothilingam.  

The Chandra Bodaliafonds presents both a challenge and an opportunity due to its vast scope. The SACDA team plans to employ a framework rooted in anti-racist, reparative, and social justice archival practices in the processing of the fonds, from record selection and metadata creation to public access and outreach. The initial phase of the digital preservation work will focus on digitizing 20,000 selected photographs from the fonds, with priority given to materials of high historical and cultural value. The digitization and digital preservation will follow a methodical selection process and consultation with the project partners, community members, and the advisory committee to ensure inclusivity and representational equity. The physical collection, comprising photographic prints and negatives, will be rehoused in a climate-controlled facility managed by RBCM to ensure long-term preservation.  

Chandra Bodalia’s planner. Image credit: South Asian Canadian Digital Archive.  

The SACDA team is currently in the process of creating a detailed file-level inventory of the fonds for preliminary access. The inventory will be shared on the SACDA website once completed. The digitized records will be preserved in SACDA at the University of the Fraser Valley and at the Royal BC Museum. The photographs will be openly and freely available on the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (https://sacda.ca).   

Thamilini Jothilingam is the Digital Asset Archivist at the South Asian Studies Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley, where she manages the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive. Thamilini’s research and archival interests lie at the confluence of art and anthropology, with a focus on digital memory, social and visual histories, and community-centered heritage work. With over a decade of experience in ethnographic research, documentary and archival work, she has collaborated with academic and community organizations globally, spearheading preservation projects.