Young people now more keen on Partition history: Scholar Pippa Virdee
Neha Saini
Amritsar, January 17
The history of Partition of India is a complex study, engaging scholars, researchers, documentarians and authors into exploring the several facets that continue to have ramifications in a larger context. Pippa Virdee, celebrated scholar and historian, spoke about narrating and documenting new histories of Partition at Majha House in its first event of the New Year. The session was moderated by Prof Gurupdesh Singh and Arvinder Chamak.
A professor of South Asian History and currently Head of Department at De Montfort University (DMU), UK, she was born in Ludhiana, and spent her early childhood in Kenya, later migrating to Coventry in the United Kingdom. She joined DMU in 2006, shortly after completing her PhD at Coventry University. Her teaching and research have focused on colonial history, particularly the region of Punjab, which has been shaped by the 1947 Partition. Throughout her time at DMU, she developed and taught courses on ‘British-India: 1857-1947’ and ‘Borders and Boundaries’, which explored the post-colonial history of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Her current interests are related to revisiting local history via the transformation of cities such as Leicester and Coventry. With several scholars from the subcontinent and West having documented the oral history of Partition, her interest was in capturing oral history in Punjabi as all records were in English or other foreign languages. She is also working on a monograph on women’s history in Pakistan. Through her several visits to Pakistan and India, she has managed to study some aspects of oral history of Partition that she shared with the audience at the event, including former diplomat Navdeep Suri.
Sharing her work based on documenting the history of Partition beyond the social and political landscape, Pippa also shared how grateful she was to be addressing the subject in Lahore and Amritsar, back to back. “I was in Lahore a day before coming to Amritsar and I feel excited to be talking about the history of Partition in the two cities, interested to know how the young perceive and interpret history.”
Through her interactions with a generation that did not directly experience the impact of Partition, she said, “Young people are now more engaged and involved with Partition because of social media. It could also be because of the 75th anniversary year. It was interesting to see the interpretation of Partition by the youth of both sides, although the stories were not very different,” she said.
Talking about the reliability of oral history, she said that it is memory laced with nostalgia and it’s difficult to separate both. She also highlighted Malerkotla, the only Muslim-majority district currently in Punjab, which remained non-violent during Partition, a rarity during the dark times. “But there were also accounts of discrimination with refugees that happened on both sides of the border, like refugees from UP and Bihar living in Karachi faced, as they are believed to have given thrust to Partition as they moved willingly.
They are called muhajirs. Also, women in Lahore are usually evasive and reluctant to remember Partition and young men are not allowed to speak about it. Another aspect was that a lot of Muslim migrants shared that they were treated well by Hindus and Sikhs but they had separate utensils for them.” She also spoke about the fact that in Britain, history is being decolonised as many ugly facts about British cruelty are expunged and not taught in school curriculum, but Pippa talks about all this in her classes and regrets that very few Indians register for history classes, it’s mostly foreign students.
