Kanta Bhatia

Kanta grew up in a small village in the northwest of Punjab and moved to New Delhi as a refugee in 1947 when India was divided to create Pakistan. She came to the United States in 1957.

She received a master’s degree in library science from Simmons College in Boston and a master’s degree in South Asia Regional Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

She interned at Bryn Mawr College and worked at the University of Pennsylvania as a South Asia Regional Studies bibliographer. During tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, she developed one of the best South Asia collections in the country. She was consultant to: (i) the Library of Congress and traveled through India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh several times to test their network of acquisitions for the region; (ii) Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi to develop a computer database for Indian manuscripts. She served as director of the College of Arts and Science Library, Pahlavi University in Shiraz, Iran. This library was developed for the Shah of Iran, and she greeted His Majesty when he came to perform the opening ceremony.

She now lives at Kendal, a retirement community in Pennsylvania.