South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, a free web resource

Blog 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.

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.

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.