A collection of films which captured the final days of the British Empire in India and other parts of south Asia were released yesterday.

The University of Cambridge's film archive has collected the videos from 50 private collections of people who lived and worked in Asia between 1911 and 1956.

The silent films, which were captured on 8mm or 16mm reel, cover topics from the horrors of partition through to everyday life in India.

A spokesman for the university said some of the most moving clips in the collection are about the division of Pakistan from India which took place in 1947.

Hundreds of thousands died in widespread violence as Muslims and Hindus both raced to cross the borders and settle among a religious majority.

The archive contains clips showing trains crammed with people trying to reach safety, scenes of refugee camps and pictures of corpses being pecked at by vultures and the digging of mass graves.

"It's one thing to get an understanding of a place by reading about it or visiting 60 years later, to be able to see people at the time and watch events such as partition actually taking place before your own eyes is quite another," said Kevin Greenbank, archivist at the Centre for South Asian Studies at the university.

"The films are the equivalent of modern-day home videos. This makes the collection particularly valuable because it shows some of the things which aren't recorded in documents or books - like the interactions between people, or the way that the British behaved towards their servants.

"It's a fascinating resource for analysing how these two societies, British and Indian, worked - or perhaps didn't work - together."

A spokesman for the university said that the images have also captured some of the lesser studied facets of Imperial history such as women's roles in colonial India.