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)