Voices across time: the Tape Letters project preserving British-Pakistani heritage

How a bunch of old cassettes are a passage into the languages and histories of Pakistani migration. The Tape Letters project will soon be showcased in an exhibition in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee featuring stories of local residents.

Illustration by Sascha Delmage

By Devon McCole & Samar Jamal | Illustration by Sasha Delmage

These days, to connect with a distant loved one too busy for calls, many of us send voice notes that become animated tales. This might seem like a method of communication only made possible by the digital age, but this isn’t a new phenomenon. Between the 1960s-1990s, conversations were recorded and sent back and forth between families in the UK and Pakistan on cassette tapes. These coils of magnetic tape, encased in plastic would contain intimate stories of migration, love and loss.  

“My darling, tell me what should I do? I don’t have control of my tears. Are you laughing or crying whilst listening to my voice? I might be crying throughout this cassette but please don't worry, OK… I don’t have anything except these tears, sweetheart… Give me two minutes, please. I will carry on recording after I stop crying…” [click] 

That’s an excerpt from a digitised tape available on the Tape Letters project website. The combination of the words, the vulnerability in the voice, the crackling sound of the tape spinning in the reel and finally the echo of the button being pressed, freeze this intimate moment in time. If you close your eyes it feels like you are sitting next to the narrator.  

What is the Tape Letters Project?

Tabbusum Niammat | Photo by Iain McLellan

Tape Letters originated in Manchester when project director, Wajid Yaseen, was searching through his late father’s belongings for the cassettes he had recorded naats (devotional hymns) on. Instead, he found tapes recorded with letters sent to family in Pakistan dating back to the early 1960s. To memorialise them, he created the Tape Letters project and set out to find other tapes and the people behind them. 

The project discovered that this form of communication preserves stories and unearths migration patterns. This is particularly the case for tapes recorded in Pothwari, a Punjabi dialect spoken in Northern Pakistan’s Mirpur, Azad Kashmir which is an oral-only language. Further south, in cities like Karachi, Urdu is more prominent. 

In May 2023, The Tape Letters project headed north of the border and since then researchers have found tapes across Scotland, including in Pollokshields which has one of the nation’s biggest Pakistani communities.

When Tabassum (Tab) Niammat, executive director of The Bowling Green, saw there was an opening for a project coordinator in Scotland, she jumped at the opportunity. Since May last year, Tab and her colleagues have unearthed 15 tapes and interviewed around 40 people across Scotland who used tape letters. 

Why The Tape Letters?

One participant that Tab worked with was Shaheen Akhtar (Auntie Shaheen). We visited her flat in Pollokshields one chilly afternoon to find out more about the project.  After making sure we had tea and toast and sitting down on her grey sofa covered in blankets, Auntie Shaheen reflected on the reality of what it means to migrate to a country where few people understand your mother tongue and you can’t understand theirs. 

“My life started when my daughter Samina was born. I had problems communicating in English so as a young girl Samina would communicate for me. Now, when I speak with someone I worry that I might say the wrong thing, so I tend to stay silent. Whenever I need to communicate, I ask Samina to speak for me. Sometimes it feels like I have forgotten what I sound like.”

Auntie Shaheen, like many of the participants, felt that she was recalling an unspoken part of her history. She said: “I've never spoken so openly about this subject because nobody asks.”  

The Tape Letters project unveils that stories of migration are worthy of documentation whatever your experience is. This feels critical in an era when migration stories are reduced to demonisation or commendability. 

“British society tends to have records,” Tab explains, “they've got their history and they can date back to their ancestors, thousands of years. For us, [South Asians] it's very different. Some of us can't even go as far back as our great-grandparents, because there's no record keeping and for a myriad of reasons… we don't have our history recorded.” 

Looking back to when the tapes were being sent, technology was scarce and international calls were expensive. Those who couldn’t afford the phone bill would have to use someone else’s in the village, potentially missing long awaited calls from distant loved ones. The calls that went through were often short lived. But Pakistanis were determined to maintain contact with loved ones. 

Cassette tapes granted them that opportunity. This also meant people could be more vulnerable and intimate with each other. Resulting in some truly moving and eye-opening tapes that read like diaries. 

Asim Rafiq, a participant in the project, said: “She is my wife now, but then [the 1990s] she couldn’t really express her feelings when we tried to talk on the phone. We had a tape recorder at home, I thought ‘I’m going to start recording, it might make things a little bit easier…’ I used to talk really quietly, just in case my brothers or my sisters were earwigging outside.”

Between the trills of her pet budgie Meetu (meaning sweet in Urdu), Auntie Shaheen told us how  the tapes were a family affair: “If we had a family that stayed in other houses we would say, ‘Come over to listen to the tape’. It felt like they were sitting with us and we were talking to them as I am talking to you now.”

Auntie Shaheen, her daughter and her grandchildren sat down to listen to the tapes together  after being invited onto the project, just like she did with her family back in the ‘60s. She told us how the younger generation were laughing because they didn’t understand what was being said or why they did it.

“You can tell from the voice if they are missing us or if they’re happy listening to our voices.” added Auntie, “even though I am not always feeling strong enough to listen back, it’s great that even now I have their voices.” 

After listening to Tab and Auntie Shaheen talk about their life experiences and their involvement in the project, it was clear just how profound taking part has been for them. 

Tab recalled the day of the interview: “Auntie Shaheen seemed surprised her story came across so naturally after our interview ended. I think it’s because, as migrants, we self-edit. We do this in every aspect of life. We often wonder if what we have to say will even be understood or validated. She said to me ‘it was like a therapy session. It was cathartic.’” 

What is unique about Tape Letters?

Asking those questions, curating those experiences, and documenting how people maintained a sense of community, is an act of preservation that proves to be invaluable work. 

Tab explained: “You get to see what is holding people back. How we adapted. You see how we rely so much on our children, especially the first generation of people that got here, and how they’ll take on those parental roles and responsibilities.”

Tab explains how her mum faced hostility and she took on a parental role to protect her: “I don't know why GP receptionists were hostile, but my mum would be interrogated. I translated on her behalf. I understood that this woman was not looking at my mum like a human being. She's looking at my mum as an immigrant, and that's how she's talking to her. The relationship between language and your sense of belonging are so intertwined but unfortunately, some people can’t see your humanity past the language barrier.” 

The interviews validated those experiences for so many people who took part and had their side of the story told. “Not all Pakistani migrants have the same experience,” Tab said, “but people faced a similar struggle to belong.”

Stories like those shared with us in Tape Letters are a window into the hearts and minds of the people who moved their entire lives all the way over to the West.  

But participants like Tab are finding it to be an archaeologist's task, digging up the decades old tapes that are still out there. As time marches on, the people who lived through these experiences are harder and harder to reach. 

Tab muses how, for her children, it’s now easier to speak in English than Urdu, Punjabi and Pothwari like their elders. “I realise now how important it is for us to keep our culture and it is kept alive through your language,” says Tab. The project comes to a close soon and interviewers are pushing the boat out even further, speaking with communities directly and going off of word of mouth to find their last interviewees.

Tape Letters is now a major new exhibition opening in three cities in Scotland in autumn. In Glasgow, we are delighted to be hosting Tape Letters in the Greater Govanhill Community Canvas space upstairs at Tramway from the 13 October to 31 January.

This article was originally published in Issue 13 of the magazine.