Review: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple

From my Substack:

When South Asians speak of “Partition” they are usually referring to the 1947 partition of British India that created the nation-states of India and Pakistan. This partition involved the division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal on the basis of religious demographics and led to some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. It is estimated that between 200,000 to 2 million people were killed and 12 to 20 million people were displaced. The word “partition” may also remind Pakistanis of the 1971 secession of East Pakistan (what Bangladeshis refer to as the “liberation” of Bangladesh). However, as Sam Dalrymple argues in his new book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins 2025), the British Indian Empire actually spanned a much greater geographical extent than today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including areas such as Aden (in today’s Yemen) and Burma. In his “Introduction” he writes:

The collapse of the Indian Empire has remarkably never been told as a single story. With every division archives were scattered across twelve nation states– thirteen if we include Britain. Subsequent divisions between the ‘Middle East’, ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ crystallised after the Second World War. Each Partition is now studied by a different group of scholars and the ties that once linked a quarter of the world lie forgotten… This book, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. (Dalrymple 8)

Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian (he is the son of noted historian William Dalrymple). His book is a lucidly written chronological account of the history of the British Indian Empire from 1928 until 1971 (the book ends with the creation of Bangladesh after the third Indo-Pakistani War). It is no small feat to be able to carry the reader along through various complicated events such as the Partition of India in 1947, the 1965 War between the two countries and the lead-up to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. As one would expect of a book of this nature, the text is full of references to historical figures such as Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Mujibur Rahman. However, we also hear from quite ordinary people who are caught up in events beyond their own making.

While the partitions of India and later of Pakistan will be very familiar ground for most South Asian readers, the added value of the book is in telling the stories of how Burma and the Arabian Peninsula were separated from India. It will come as a surprise to most readers that the Sultan of Qu’aiti State (in today’s Yemen) was a relative of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Similarly, most readers will not be aware that it was Hindu nationalists (and even Mahatma Gandhi) who argued that Burma should be separated from India because it did not form part of the “holy land” of “Bharat”. The separation of Burma from India led to the ethnic cleansing of Indians from that country. It also forms part of the background to the ongoing Rohingya genocide since the Burmese government argues that Rohingyas are “Indians” (specifically Bengalis).

Other reviewers have addressed what they see as a weakness of Dalrymple’s thesis. While Burma and the Arabian Peninsula were attached to British India mostly for administrative convenience, there was a core sense of “Hindustan” or “Bharat” (today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). While I agree with this criticism to an extent, I believe that Dalrymple’s intention was to show that the borders between these nation-states are in many ways arbitrary. There is no inherent reason that Dubai (for example) could not be a part of modern Pakistan.

In his “Epilogue”, Dalrymple writes:

Today the divides across South Asia grow ever wider. Politicians still stoke the embers for their own ends with the now nuclear-armed nations of India and Pakistan continuing to teeter on the brink of all-out war. In Burma the military maintains its assault on the Rohingya minority and at the time of writing the Indian government was planning to fence the Indo-Burmese border, one of the last unfenced borders in the region. The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalization, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold. (Dalrymple 430).

In conclusion, I would highly recommend Shattered Lands to South Asians and to those interested in the history of the British Indian Empire.