Do you remember Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman to graduate from Bombay University and study law at Oxford University? Or Amrita Sher-Gil, who died at the age of 28, but established herself as one of South Asia's most celebrated artists? Does Indrani Rahman, the first Indian to compete in the Miss Universe beauty pageant in 1952, ring a bell? If not, an Instagram page started by a 31-year-old Karachi-born will come in handy.

When Ahsun Zafar, an electrical engineer in the aerospace industry in Montreal, started Brown History in September 2017, out of sheer curiosity to understand his roots in South Asia better, little did he know that the page would get a whopping 55k followers in one year. While his father is Pakistani and mother half-Pakistani, half-Irani, his maternal great-grandfather taught at Aligarh University and his maternal grandfather was a student there. "Everyone ended up in Pakistan after Partition. However, I grew up in Canada and knew very little of South Asia except for what I had seen on TV," he says.