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Professor Pippa Virdee

Job: Professor of Modern South Asian History

Faculty: Arts, Design and Humanities

School/department: School of Humanities

Address: 黑料网, The Gateway, Leicester, UK, LE1 9BH

T: +44 (0)116 207 8595

E: pvirdee@dmu.ac.uk

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Personal profile

I joined 黑料网 in 2006, shortly after completing my PhD at Coventry University. My teaching and research have focused on colonial history, particularly the region of the Punjab, which has been shaped by the 1947 Partition. Throughout my time at 黑料网, I have developed and taught courses on British India: 1857-1947 and Borders and Boundaries, which explored the post-colonial history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

My current interests are related to revisiting local history via the transformation of cities such as Leicester and Coventry. I am also working on a monograph on women's history in Pakistan. 

Publications and outputs


  • dc.title: Partitioning the University of the Panjab, 1947 dc.contributor.author: Virdee, Pippa; Bangash, Yaqoob Khan dc.description.abstract: 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 鈥榩hysical鈥� 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 鈥榥ational鈥� governments, the university remained where it was, while any ideas of academic cooperation between the two sides collapsed, as a new 鈥楨ast Panjab University鈥� was established at Simla, India. The debate over this new university vis-脿-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. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. open access article

  • dc.title: Histories and Memories in the Digital Age of Partition Studies dc.contributor.author: Virdee, Pippa dc.description.abstract: Since its 70th anniversary in 2017, a wider public caravan of commemoration led by interested individuals and groups has joined academic studies of India鈥檚 Partition. These are more popular among the South Asian Diaspora in the Global North (UK/US), where they are a part of the 鈥榠ntellectual decolonization鈥� 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. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction dc.contributor.author: Virdee, Pippa dc.description.abstract: 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.

  • dc.title: Women and Pakistan International Airlines in Ayub Khan's Pakistan dc.contributor.author: Virdee, Pippa dc.description.abstract: This article weaves together several unique circumstances that inadvertently created spaces for women to emerge away from the traditional roles of womanhood ascribed to them in Pakistan. It begins by tracing the emergence of the Pakistan International Airlines as a national carrier that provided an essential glue to the two wings of Pakistan. Operating in the backdrop of nascent nationhood, the airline opens an opportunity for the new working women in Pakistan. Based on first-hand accounts provided by former female employees, and supplementing it with official documents, newspaper reports and the advertising used for marketing at the time, it seeks to provide an illuminating insight into the early history of women in Pakistan. While the use of women as markers of modernity and propaganda is not new, here within the context of Cold War and American cultural diplomacy, the 鈥榤odernist鈥� vision of the Ayub-era in Pakistan (1958鈥�1969), and its accompanying jet-age provide a unique lens through which to explore the changing role of women. The article showcases a different approach to understanding the so-called 鈥榞olden age鈥� of Pakistani history: a neglected area of the international history on Pakistan, which is far too often one-dimensional. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: From Mano Majra to Faqiranwalla: Revisiting the Train to Pakistan dc.contributor.author: Virdee, Pippa; Safdar, Arafat dc.description.abstract: Khushwant Singh鈥檚 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鈥攖hat 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 targ