Panjab University was founded at Lahore in 1882, the fourth university in British India. Its alumni include Iqbal, Manmohan Singh, Abdus Salam, Har Gobind Khorana and Bhagat Singh, who did not finish.
In 1947 it was divided. The Lahore campus became the University of the Punjab, Pakistan. The Indian portion was homeless for nearly a decade, operating from Solan, Shimla, Jalandhar, Hoshiarpur, Delhi and Amritsar at once, before it began moving to a new campus at Chandigarh in 1956.
The Chandigarh campus was planned by Pierre Jeanneret with Le Corbusier's involvement and its Gandhi Bhawan is one of the finest modernist buildings in India.
It is administered under an unusual arrangement, funded substantially by the central government with Punjab holding a share, reflecting Chandigarh's unresolved status.
Two universities, both called Panjab University, exist fifty kilometres apart in two countries, descended from one institution, with a shared alumni list up to 1947 and no contact since.
Its Senate Hall at Lahore was designed by Bhai Ram Singh and is one of the buildings the province used to represent itself. The Indian successor got the name, the seal and the alumni roll up to 1947, and none of the buildings.
The eleven years without a campus are the part nobody records. Departments sat in different towns, examinations were run out of borrowed rooms and the library was assembled from donations. A university that went on existing as a legal entity while having no address is an odd sort of survival and it worked.
Its governance is unusual and contested. Chandigarh is a union territory, Punjab funds a share, and who controls the university has been an open dispute for decades.