Browsing by Author "Virdee, Pippa"

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    Coming to Coventry: Stories from the South Asian Pioneers
    (The Herbert, 2006) Virdee, Pippa
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    Conclusion and legacies.
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) Panayi, Panikos; Virdee, Pippa
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    Dreams, Memories and Legacies: Partitioning India
    (Routledge, 2015-08) Virdee, Pippa
    This chapter examines the dreams, memories and legacies of partitioning the Punjab. It explores the expectations people had and the results of brutal and violent partition, which divided the people of Punjab.
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    Forward
    (Research Centre for the History of Religious and Cultural Diversity, Meiji University, Tokyo, 2012) Virdee, Pippa
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    From Mano Majra to Faqiranwalla: Revisiting the Train to Pakistan
    (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2018-02) Virdee, Pippa; Safdar, Arafat
    Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan was published in 1956, almost ten years after the partition of India/ creation of Pakistan in 1947. Its publication inaugurated what has been called 'South Asian Partition Fiction in English' (Roy 2010). It remains, to date, one of the most poignant and realistic fictional accounts depicting the welter of partition and saw a sensitive screen adaptation in 1998 by Pamela Rooks. It captures one of the most horrific symbols of partition—that of the burning, charred and lifeless trains that moved migrants and evacuated refugees from one side of the border to the other. The trains that previously served to bring people and goods from disparate worlds closer together were overnight turned into targets of mob attacks and transporters of mass corpses. They thus became an emblem, a much-photographed representation (Kapoor 2013) of the wider violence and ethnic cleansing that was taking place in Panjab (Ahmed 2002: 9-28); one of the two regions divided to make way for the two new nation-states. Selecting some key individuals in the village, relevant to and representative of our efforts to excavate the myths and memories associated with partition, and situating their sensibilities vis-à-vis the sentiments exhibited in the novel, we conducted interviews to collect and compare experiential accounts. An attempt in the Wildean spirit to attest that 'life imitates art far more than art imitates life', the article, located in the Faqiranwalla of 2017, looks back to the Mano Majra of 1947. In doing so, not only does it reflect on this intervening time-span and what it has done to those remembrances, but, also brings to fore the well-remarked realisation that, in this case too, 'the past is another country' (Judt 1992). Like in the novel then and life today, the connecting link in this article too, between Faqiranwalla and Mano Majra, is the train, as both share the overweening presence of the railways in the village, through which its life is/was governed.
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    From the Ashes of 1947: Reimagining Punjab
    (Cambridge University Press, 2018-02-28) Virdee, Pippa
    This book revisits the partition of the Punjab, its attendant violence and, as a consequence, the divided and dislocated Punjabi lives. Navigating nostalgia and trauma, dreams and laments, identity(s) and homeland(s), it explores the partition of the very idea of Punjabiyat. It was Punjab (along with Bengal) that was divided to create the new nations of India and Pakistan and that inherited a communalised and fractured self. In subsequent years, religious and linguistic sub-divisions followed – arguably, no other region of the sub-continent has had its linguistic and ethnic history submerged within respective national and religious identity(s) and none paid the price of partition like the pluralistic, pre-partition Punjab. This book is about the dissonance, distortion and dilution which details the past of the region. It describes ‘people’s history’ through diverse oral narratives, literary traditions and popular accounts. In terms of space, it documents the experience of partition in the two prosperous localities of Ludhiana and Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), with a focus on migration; and in the Muslim princely state of Malerkotla, with a focus on its escape from the violence of 1947. In terms of groups, it especially attends to women and their experiences, beyond the symbolic prism of ‘honour’. Critically examining existing accounts, discussing the differential impact of partition, and partaking in the ever democratising discourse on it, this book attempts to illustrate the lack of closure associated with 1947.
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    The Heart Divided: Writing the Human Drama of Partition in India/Pakistan
    (International Musuem of Women, 2013-09-25) Virdee, Pippa
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    Histories and Memories in the Digital Age of Partition Studies
    (Routledge, 2022-08-01) Virdee, Pippa
    Since its 70th anniversary in 2017, a wider public caravan of commemoration led by interested individuals and groups has joined academic studies of India’s Partition. These are more popular among the South Asian Diaspora in the Global North (UK/US), where they are a part of the ‘intellectual decolonization’ agenda. The digital turn in oral history has been a catalyst for this development, in which documentation, production, and consumption are all in digital formats. This essay asks some questions of this growing field, starting with interrogation of its location in the West, away from the partitioned ground and its socio-political realities in the East. The essay retraces the twentieth-century genealogy of oral history and its interaction with Partition Studies prior to the current trends, before commenting upon the place of Partition in Memory Studies. Above all, this essay attempts to question the power dynamics around the ways digital projects excerpt, de-contextualize, and de-politicize oral testimonies, by reducing them to sound bites for wider social and community engagement, in which memory is passively consumed.
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    Migration and post-partition resettlement in Lyallpur: The impact of refugee labour
    (Sama Editorial & Publishing Services, 2006) Virdee, Pippa
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    ‘No Home but in Memory’: The Legacies of Colonial Rule in the Punjab
    (Palgrave, 2011) Virdee, Pippa
    This chapter explores the legacies of colonial rule in the Punjab and its consequences for those who were uprooted due to Partition. Individual accounts highlight the longevity of the resettlement process, rebuilding homes and lives, which at times went on for ten to fifteen years. Some refugees moved a number of times before finally settling down, this restlessness and loss of their homeland is evident through oral narratives that capture those traumatic years of being perpetually displaced. The chapter then focuses on individuals who chose to leave and resettle in Britain. This is at a time when nationalism and patriotism was at its height in the two new states. What compelled these individuals to migrate to a country that had subjugated their land for over 300 years? And why having already been displaced did they chose to go through that process again?
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    'No-mans Land' and the Creation of Partitioned Histories in India/Pakistan
    (2014) Virdee, Pippa
    This chapter contextualizes the background to the violence and migration that accompanied independence and Britain’s departure from its ‘jewel in the crown’. It then discusses remembrance of these events as reflected in the main controversies among scholars surrounding the nature of the violence, the number of casualties and more recently to what extent partition-related violence should be considered genocide and/or a form of ethnic cleansing. The chapter then considers the ways in which literature and film have represented partition and debates over a peace museum and a memorial. The chapter finally considers the ways in which oral testimonies have been increasingly used to delve into the human cost of partition and consider the legacy of partition in conserving a re-imagined Punjabi community in the sub-continent and among the diaspora.
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    Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction
    (Oxford University Press, 2021-11-25) Virdee, Pippa
    What is Pakistan? The name refers to a seventy-year-old post-colonial product of the bloodiest partition of territory and population that accompanied the end of British empire in South Asia. But the region of the Indus Valley has a four-thousand-year-old history, and was the site of one of the earliest and greatest riverine civilisations in the world. Although the modern nation of Pakistan as we know it was created as a homeland for the Muslims of British India, it is impossible to understand the complex tapestry of linguistic, ethnic, and cultural identities and tensions of the region without tracing its deep past. This Very Short Introduction looks at Pakistan as one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947. Pippa Virdee reaches into the ancient past to demonstrate the influence of trajectories of human settlement and civilisation on Pakistan's contemporary political arena, and shows how the longer continuities between the land and its peoples are as important as the short-term changes in the political landscape. She considers Pakistan's religion and society, the state and the military, everyday life, popular culture, languages and literature, as well as Pakistan's relationship with the rest of the world. Virdee also looks to the challenges of the 21st century and the future of Pakistan.
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    Pakistan: women's quest for entitlement
    (Open Democracy, 2009-04) Virdee, Pippa
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    Partition and the absence of communal violence in Malerkotla
    (Oxford University Press, 2007) Virdee, Pippa
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    Partitioning the University of the Panjab, 1947
    (Sage, 2022-10-30) Virdee, Pippa; Bangash, Yaqoob Khan
    In the summer of 1947, as preparations commenced for the partition of the province of Punjab in British India, the Lahore-based Panjab University became the site of a fierce debate concerning its future. Waged within, by its officials, as well as between the members of the Punjab Partition Committee, this debate saw the Hindus and Sikhs among them desiring a ‘physical’ partitioning of the university, while the Muslims wanted it to stay intact at Lahore, which was expected to fall in Pakistan. With no agreement forthcoming, and after references to the respective ‘national’ governments, the university remained where it was, while any ideas of academic cooperation between the two sides collapsed, as a new ‘East Panjab University’ was established at Simla, India. The debate over this new university vis-à-vis its old counterpart, further carved out the university as a space of not just education, but one of exhibiting new-found sovereignty and creating a staff/student-citizenry, in those partitioned times.