INTRODUCTION

The Colourful Heritage Project (CHP) is the first community heritagefocused charitable initiative in Scotland aiming to preserve and to celebrate the contributions of early South Asian and Muslim migrants to Scotland. It has successfully collated a considerable number of oral stories to create an online video archive, providing first-hand accounts of the personal journeys and emotions of the arrival of the earliest generation of these migrants in Scotland and highlighting the inspiring lessons that can be learnt from them.

The CHP's aims are first to capture these stories, second to celebrate the community's achievements, and third to inspire present and future South Asian, Muslim and Scottish generations. It is a community-led charitable project that has been actively documenting a collection of inspirational stories and personal accounts, uniquely told by the protagonists themselves, describing at first hand their stories and adventures. These range all the way from the time of partition itself to resettling in Pakistan, and then to their final accounts of arriving in Scotland. The video footage enables the public to see their facial expressions, feel their emotions and hear their voices, creating poignant memories of these great men and women, and helping to gain a better understanding of the South Asian and Muslim community's earliest days in Scotland.

The website contains nearly seventy oral stories, captured with digital media as short films, all easily accessible and available to view online at www.colourfulheritage.com. No other such project or data sample exists in Scotland. The interviews encompass men and women, the English, Urdu and Punjabi languages, and people from all different walks of life, covering Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee. These stories have been preserved for current and future generations of Scottish Asians and anyone else who has an interest in the evolution of the Scottish Muslim community.

In addition, the CHP, together with Glasgow Life, has launched a dedicated physical archive based at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. The archive, named after Mr Bashir Maan, a leading political figure in the Scottish South Asian community, contains photographs and documents from as far back as the 1930s. The archive gives many useful insights into the lives of these first brave explorers and the CHP seeks to continue to gather stories, personal accounts, anecdotes and any other documents or photographs that could be added to build the archive further so it achieves its full potential.