Hi, I’m Ally, I’m a student currently on a year long placement at the WCML, and this is an introduction to one of the projects I’m working on!

The library has a large collection of material, stored in boxes, and on shelves, whether that be documents, books, tapes, oral histories, or badges. However, some material is not organised all in one place, but in multiple boxes and spaces due to the nature of them. And this is where I come in, and introduce one of the library’s new projects for this year.

Being South Asian in a sector and country that sometimes overlooks my community’s histories, finding material about Bangladeshis coming to the UK and how they lived has been important to me. South Asian history has been an interest of mine before starting my placement, and was something I wanted to focus on during my time at the library. Here at the library, there are boxes on India, and sling folders on the countries that make up the Indian subcontinent, but material remains scattered around the library in ‘Race’ boxes, and ‘Liberation’, for example.

At the beginning of my placement, I began to note down where South Asian material lay, and this list has only grown. And so, after discussion, we have decided to create a project out of it. This comes at a great time when not only do working-class and mancunian communities need to come together, but the library is also running ‘Grunwick Strike Revisited’. This project commemorates 50 years since Jayaben Desai, a Gujrati woman, picketed against the conditions of her workplace, where many brown women worked. 

So far, the project, which I shorten to ‘SAMP’ in all my notes and references to it, is a spreadsheet of material I have found so far in the archive. It is early days, so I hope that it grows massively, as much of it was originally listed with the intention of open archives and showing fellow South Asians within this sector, interested in history and archives.

We hope that this project results in people finding these materials more easily via the library’s online catalogue, creating a label or database where they can be found, and includes a description of the material. My hopes for this project are that it gets the community more involved in its history. As someone who is a second-generation immigrant, I rarely hear about my own history, so perhaps it will spark up conversations, creating more connections within our community. I think this project being started opens up new pathways to highlight other communities that don’t have specific boxes, or seem to have much material at a glance in the library, like the queer community. 

Keep an eye out for any updates on this project! I hope to get another blog written and uploaded once we have more updates.