Muslim and South Asian histories are often preserved, except by those establishments that have long excluded us. I realised this when scrolling through pictures of the Los Angeles premiere of the new Wuthering Heights adaptation. Like many readers, I was excited, until I stopped in my tracks.
I noticed a stunning piece of jewellery around Margot Robbie’s neck and zoomed in closer. It was the infamous Nur Jahan necklace, gifted to her by her husband, Shah Jahangir, the Mughal Emperor.
But the headlines didn’t reflect this. Vogue called it “Elizabeth Taylor’s Legendary Necklace”, erasing its South Asian history, only referencing it a few paragraphs into the article. Instead, it credited the necklace to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s “romance and history”. Cartier happened to ‘acquire’ this pendant and it has now become a historic piece in the Hollywood archives. Museums and magazines do the same thing: they decide what history looks like and who gets to tell it.
Missing heritage, missing stories
Muslims have been in the UK for generations, yet there is a notable absence of stories told by our own people. I realised how much of my own heritage I didn’t know about, from the Partition of India to the migrations of the 60s and 70s until I went looking for it myself.
The British Museum and similar institutions have long shaped the narrative of the “backwardness” of colonised regions, displaying objects that were removed from Muslim countries, which perpetuates myths about Islam and civilisation. According to Al Jazeera – who analysed the British Museum’s online database – of the 2.2 million items that have been catalogued so far, 164,140 pieces came from Iraq.
Words of a nation
In response, communities have been reclaiming these stories themselves. One example is the Tape Letters Project.
“It was like I am listening to him for the first time; it’s like I am listening to what is in his heart for the first time, and what he thinks about me. It was just an amazing feeling.”
The project collates the cassette tapes used by Pakistani migrants to communicate with their families back home. For those who settled in the UK between 1960 and 1980, these tapes became an intimate method of communication, hearing every breath and whisper across thousands of miles of ocean. They include everyday news, poetry, love notes, and discussions of life in a new country – experiences that official archives normally ignore.
In one recording, a woman recalls her lover’s messages to her. Spoken in a mixture of languages, it highlights the unseen words that museums flatten into English summaries, stripped of all cultural and emotional meaning. These are the kinds of records that never make it into our official archives because it seems that they are seen as too ordinary. Yet they are exactly what the next generation needs to know about how their ancestors built their lives in a country that refused to honour them.
What gets left behind
The Partition of India is another defining event where archives are now being reclaimed. Coventry University has preserved over 20,000 images and documents post-Partition in a new digital heritage project. From passport photographs to invoices, these items show how one of the most transformative events in South Asian history shaped the lives of ordinary people in ways official records never captured.
By digitising this material, it challenges the traditional idea of what belongs in an archive – one that prioritises state documents and war narratives over the everyday experiences of displacement.
History on our own terms
Across the UK, families are starting to preserve their own photographs and memories, refusing to wait for institutions to decide they are worth saving. These projects aren’t just about preservation: they are taking back the right to define what counts as history.
Archives shape what future generations know about the past. If the stories of Muslims and South Asians are missing, then their inherited history is incomplete. Reclaiming archives is an act of resistance, and for many, it is also an act of survival.
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