South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, a free web resource
An introduction to the oral history strand of Remaking Britain, showcasing new digital recordings that reveal the diverse histories of South Asian Britain.
14 January 2026Blog series Sound and Vision
Author Dr Rehana Ahmed and Dr Maya Parmar (Queen Mary University of London)
Dr Rehana Ahmed and Dr Maya Parmar introduce the oral history strand of the AHRC-funded project ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present’. Extracts from the oral history recordings now feature on a new online web resource, which weaves together a wide range of historical sources to paint a picture of South Asian Britain from the 19th century to today.
In summer 2025, we launched South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, a free online digital resource that showcases the rich and multi-layered history of South Asians in Britain from the period of empire to the present day.
It developed from the project ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the Present’, a collaboration between Queen Mary University of London and the University of Bristol in partnership with the British Library, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The resource features around 750 entries on South Asians in Britain and the organisations and events they were involved in, along with digitised archival material, photographs and maps, and theme pages on education, family and relationships, arts and culture, religion, multiple migrations, among many others.
In this post, we wish to highlight an especially exciting feature of the resource: its collection of oral history interviews, which we developed in dialogue with the British Library’s Oral History team. The South Asian Britain oral history hub houses our project collection, which includes clips from 30 interviews together with transcripts, photographs and short biographies of our interviewees, as well as a carefully curated selection of clips from the British Library’s existing collections, the British Ugandan Asian 50 collection, the Hidden Heritages collection, and The Museum of Youth Culture. The full interviews recorded by the ‘Remaking Britain’ team are now archived at the British Library.
Our 30 interviewees range from their 20s to their 90s and hail from across the four nations of the United Kingdom, while their backgrounds span different nations (African as well as East and South Asian) and different religions. Keen to push beyond more typical narratives that circulate about British Asians, we have captured the stories of people from a variety of class backgrounds who live in rural as well as urban locations, from people who identify as LGBTQIA+, who are of mixed heritage, and whose family histories can be traced back to the early twentieth century. In this way, we’ve sought to emphasise the diversity of South Asians in Britain.
Weaving together narratives of South Asian Britain
The range of historical narratives shared on the digital resource complement and enrich one another. By weaving together document-based archival research and oral histories – including testimony from our own project and those from museums, libraries, and community organisations – we layer historical evidence to offer a rich, nuanced picture of South Asian Britain from the 19th century to today.
For example, the digital resource features entries on the Grunwick Dispute and Jayaben Desai, and a British Library audio clip about Desai, which together highlight the struggle for workplace rights in 1970s north-west London and the landmark role of South Asian women in shaping the UK’s equal rights movement.
Description
A BBC Radio 4 news clip detailing Jayaben Desai's overtime protest and resulting union membership to fight for improved worker's rights in 1976.
Programme Title: Milestones 4. 23 August 1977 – the Grunwick strike, broadcast BBC Radio 4, 27 November 1996. British Library reference H8096/3, © BBC.
Transcript
Interviewer: On the 20th of August 1976, Jayaben Desai walked out of Grunwick, a film processing company employing 500 workers at two small factories in the Brent area of north London. They developed films under the True Colour and Bonus Pull labels. Snapshot processing being a seasonal business, overtime was often demanded at short notice in the summer. And when extra work appeared as she was preparing to leave that afternoon, Mrs Desai protested, and, joined by her son Sunil, walked out. Not quite five foot tall, not male, not white, not wearing western clothes, not always speaking English with her Gujarati workmates, Mrs Desai made an unusual shop steward, not least because she first had to find a union to join. Advised by her local Citizens Advice Bureau, she plumped for the moderate Clerical Workers' Union, APEX.
Jayaben Desai: We are here to ask you to put pressure on TUC to cut off vital services to George Ward, and to support the resumption of mass picketing, which we do not want to do, but we have no other alternatives. It is very hard to stand outside on picket line for another winter. I said before, and I say again and again, it is very hard to stand on picket line.
These accounts of political activism are complemented by audio clips collected for the project collection. They include testimonies from Rahila Gupta and Vandana Aparanti. Highlighting contemporary concerns of and campaigning by diasporic women, these stories trace a continuum from the activism of figures like Desai. For instance, Rahila Gupta reflects upon how the landscape of discrimination and resistance has evolved, in her discussion of the shifting dynamics of race and racism from the 1970s to the present.
Description
Rahila Gupta is an acclaimed author and activist. Here she talks about how attitudes towards race have changed since the 1970s and 1980s.
Rahila Gupta interviewed by Maya Parmar, South Asian Britain: Connecting Stories, 2024, catalogue reference C2047/20. © Queen Mary University of London and University ofBristol.
Transcript
Rahila Gupta: I definitely do think that there is a greater sensitivity to issues of race today in a positive way than there were in the '70s and '80s when I came here. I mean, I cannot...I think we cannot and should not undermine the successes, you know, that we have made as communities in terms of, you know, achieving, progressing through society. I still sort of get surprised by, you know, some...if I'm meeting somebody high up somewhere in an organization and they turn out to be ethnic minority background, in a way that I would never even expected in a million years in the '70s and '80s, that the person I was going to meet was going to be white, you know, in terms of power, the people who hold the power. I mean, at the end of the day, because we live in cap...under capitalism, and because it is inherently unequal, there will always be people at the bottom of society, and those usually will be the newcomers to that society. And they will always be othered in terms of their race and in terms of their... it doesn't have to be about colour because now the white races are trying to become more sophisticated and talk in terms of culture. So they talk about, you know, about Muslim values or Islamic values. They're not worried about colour, they're worried about culture. And we have...we, the British, have a very progressive culture, and they, the minorities, bring with them backwardness. So to that extent, they are forced even to embrace, you know, the lesbian and gay community, which in the past, they would not have. But almost as a marker of how progressive they are. And I remember doing some research some years ago when the EDL, the English Defence League was still a going concern. And I looked at their website and the things that they said about honour killings and forced marriage, they could have taken it off the Southall Black Sisters website. They were very progressive, they were so concerned about women. But of course, at the end of the thing was their solution was, send them back. Our solution is different. And that's where you begin to know, okay, that's why they're concerned about our women. They're concerned about, you know, Asian women, because that's their way of saying, well, it doesn't...you know, it conflicts with our value systems. So this is a kind of a convoluted way of saying some steps forward and some steps back. Is the overall picture better? I mean, if you just take the 1979 National Front Southall Town Hall meeting, the police were there protecting them, not the Asian community. Today, we could say that the police are fighting the racists and not protecting them.
Maya Parmar: Based on the most recent...
Rahila Gupta: With the most...yeah, the...these ini...so, you could call that progress. Okay. Of course, we have seen also that some of the men who were fighting back from minority communities were picked up. So, they didn't necessarily make the differentiation between defence and aggression, which is still a problem. So they were also picked up. But really, the focus has been on the aggression by the white men and women. Unfortunately, there've been women involved in that as well. So you could call that progress. But the very fact that it's happening today is like, where are we? Are we in the twenty-first century? What's going on? How is this even happening? But then of course, if you contextualize it in terms of the rise of the global right wing and so on and so forth, there are all sorts of factors that go into, you know, even a national situation. So it's very hard to answer that that definitively. Same with women. You know, you now go into a police station and there'll be a poster which says, 'Domestic violence is a crime'. In the '70s and '80s, it wasn't a crime. So, you know, that's a step forward. And as a political activist, I have to notch these successes, because otherwise my life wouldn't be worth living. Because even if they are marginal, we have to say that the things we have done were worth it, they were important, they made some progress. They made the life...every woman who came under the domestic violence destitute concessions, who could have...who was eligible for it, was a life saved. Her children's lives were saved. You know, you have to look at it like that. When you look at the global picture you might say, okay, but there was this, that...you know, this or that happened, which...yeah. So, yeah, it's a difficult question to answer.
The Protest and Resistance and Women’s Activism theme pages bring these threads together, offering a broad overview of interconnected struggles.
The digital resource connects other stories through time and across the UK. For example, it includes an entry on Chirag Din Chohan, a medical professional in early 20th-century northeast England, alongside oral history clips from his great nephew Bari Chohan, from the British Library collection. Expanding this conversation on South Asians in medicine, the resource showcases oral history interviews with Subrahmanyam Ganesh, a retired doctor from Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, and Rafait O’Rourke, a nurse in Northern Ireland.
As these examples on medical professionals attest, South Asians are deeply rooted in British history and spread across the UK. Indeed, a key intervention of the oral history collection as a whole is its revision of common conceptions of Britain diversifying only after the Second World War and decolonisation, and only in certain urban spaces.
As well as this however, it brings a long history up to the present, drawing a continuum of how South Asians have changed Britain from then to now. But the most powerful intervention it makes is the way it complements and builds upon written histories or accounts by highlighting the affective experiences of individuals, whose stories have so far been unheard.
The South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories resource is available online now. The 30 oral history interviews recorded for the project are archived at the British Library and will be available to listeners in 2026, collection reference C2047.
You can contact the authors at rehana.ahmed@qmul.ac.uk and maya.parmar@qmul.ac.uk.
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