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- [00:01]
Anita Anand
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- [00:20]
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- [00:59]
William Dalrymple
Hello. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me.
- [01:02]
Anita Anand
Anita Anand, and me, William Dalrymple.
- [01:06]
William Dalrymple
I have to say, this is a very special episode of Empire, because those of you who listen regularly will know that I have some kind of anaphylactic shock when we have more than one Dalrymple. I mean, you know, there's a splattering of Dalrymples throughout this podcast because William seems to be related to everyone. But I could not be more delighted today because we have, well, one of my favorite Dalrymples. It's not William. It's you, Sam Dalrymple, historian and also, we should say, son of the other Dalrymple. But you're here because you've written this masterful first book. Can I just say, it makes me sick with envy that this is your first book, Sam Dalrymple. It's. I mean, astonishing.
- [01:44]
Anita Anand
I find it irritating, too, if it's any comfort.
- [01:47]
William Dalrymple
Do you know, I've said to your father that if this were a Greek tragedy, you ought to be hiding in a cave. Seriously, these things don't go well. I know. So this is the beautiful, beautiful book. It's called Shattered 5 Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is a beautiful cover for what is an enormously informative book. And it's. I don't know, William, about you, but you're closer to the author than I am. However, I thought I was closer to this subject than it turns out that I am, because it doesn't just talk about partition in terms of India and Pakistan, which we think we know very well, but it's about five partitions that have shaped the world.
- [02:27]
Anita Anand
I think everyone in India was very taken aback by this, too, because partition is always something talked about in the singular, and everyone knows the story of 1947. And, of course, we've dealt with it before on the podcast, these tragic tales of people moving from one country to the other in long lines of bullock carts and then terrible scuffles and bloodshed and massacres which follow. But Sam's book has the idea that there are five partitions which took everybody in India by surprise. And as a result, I'm very irritated to see that it's gone to number one in the Indian charts and knocked me down to number five.
- [03:04]
William Dalrymple
Zoomed past him, Sam. You zoomed past him. And can I just say, that made me laugh a little bit. But delighted for you. Also for me. But delighted for you, Sam. Now, first of all, this is a brilliant story, but I did at one point want to hit myself over the head with your very heavy tone, thinking, have I got concussion already? And am I reading this right? So, first of all, tell us the alien story, because it's such a good one.
- [03:28]
Sam Dalrymple
So, yeah, thank you for having me. So the book begins almost 100 years ago today when the BBC first tries to make contact with aliens. And it's, I think, New Year's Day, 1928. And I was actually looking through the archives for a report which was the first time the Indian National Congress had declared its aim as full national independence from Britain. And this, I thought, would be front page story, number one thing in the newspaper, but of course, it was actually kind of at the bottom right hand corner of page one. And the main story that day was that the BBC tried to contact extraterrestrials and they say kind of, hello, all stars and nebulae. Have our. Have our recordings reached you yet?
- [04:10]
Anita Anand
And there's a terrible silence.
- [04:12]
William Dalrymple
I know, it's wonderful. Can I read it in a BBC voice? Because you've reproduced it so. A greeting to all friendly planets circling with us on the everlasting tour. Have our waves reached you yet? I mean, it will be done in that kind of situation.
- [04:28]
Anita Anand
BBC spirit, a greeting to all friendly planets circling with us on the Everlasting tour. Have our waves reached you yet?
- [04:36]
William Dalrymple
Yes, I think that's probably right. And that's probably why they haven't contacted us, because, you know, would you contact.
- [04:42]
Anita Anand
Someone who talked like that?
- [04:44]
Sam Dalrymple
He follows up with reply, if you please.
- [04:47]
William Dalrymple
Reply, if you please. It's such a fantastic story, but why do you think that it relegated? Actually a story of great importance, as it turns out. India finally deciding, you know what? We don't want this idea of diarchy. We're not going to share anything with you. Get out, get out, get out, get out. Why was that such a small story? At the time, well, I think no.
- [05:08]
Sam Dalrymple
One really conceived how quickly this whole thing would fall apart. Reading it, it's a bit like the Titanic. It's too big to fail. And as late as the 20s, I think that the Indian Empire was so integral to Britain's self image in some sense that no one could imagine a world where just 25 years later, it wasn't part of the British Empire anymore.
- [05:29]
Anita Anand
Sam, maybe you could just give us a picture of the full extent of the British Indian Empire at this point, because I think we're all aware of, you know, the rough shape of the British Empire, but the Indian Empire, as it was called, in other words, the bits that were ruled from Calcutta used the rupee, issued Indian passports. What was the geographical extent of that? Because your theory is that it was much larger than we all believe.
- [05:55]
Sam Dalrymple
So, yeah, at this moment, when the BBC is trying to contact aliens, when the British Empire is too large to fail. India stretches from modern day Yemen to modern day Burma. It encompasses kind of 12 modern nation states rather than just the India Pakistan that I think we so often imagine. It was kind of patchwork empire, but it was a single colony essentially that encompassed the largest population on the planet and included the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian populations on the planet. And as well as the kind of directly ruled British India, you also had princely states like Jaipur and Hyderabad, but also various princely kingdoms like Dubai and Kuwait, which, you know, survived to the present day.
- [06:41]
Anita Anand
Sam, just go through those 12 very quickly, just so that we get the idea of the full extent, because it is surprising.
- [06:47]
Sam Dalrymple
So it includes modern day Yemen, Oman, the uae, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Burma. It's a much larger story than we tend to remember. And it's five partitions over just 50 years that create the borders that we know today.
- [07:08]
William Dalrymple
And I mean, you know, when people talk about the jewel in the crown, these are the facets of that jewel. I mean, people only think about the front facing surface of India, Pakistan as they are now. But there is a lot more to it. And we're starting, starting today by talking about Burma, now known as Myanmar. First of all, just explain exactly where Burma is. For those who aren't familiar and don't have a map to hand.
- [07:29]
Sam Dalrymple
Sure. So Burma is to the east of India, wedged between India and Thailand, and it's kind of just south of China. And in the 1930s it was one of the richest, most prosperous, most cosmopolitan places on the planet, what Singapore is today, I guess. But thanks to the government looking Inwards and pulling Burma outside of the international community. Military rule, crackdowns on human rights, the Rohingya genocide. It's been so alienated from the world that its history has been largely forgotten.
- [08:03]
Anita Anand
Just go into that a bit more, Sam. You say that it was incredibly prosperous, in fact the richest place in the Raj per capita. Where was that money coming from? Because we do not associate Burma with wealth. We think of it as a marginal country these days with problems with general and arresting Aung San SUU Kyi and so on. Why was Burma so rich at this point?
- [08:22]
Sam Dalrymple
So there is this fascinating little document that was found by Sunil Amrit that says in 1933 the immigration authorities of the Raj write that until recently, Rangoon was second only to New York City as an immigration and emigration port in the world. But now it is number one. So it had overtaken New York in the Burmese dream, had essentially overtaken the American dream as the place that migrants wanted to go. It was thanks to oil wealth discovered Burma oil. You also had the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company.
- [08:55]
Anita Anand
Burma Oil was the ancestor of bp, is that right?
- [08:58]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah. So it's one of the earlier kind of oil conglomerates in the region and was essentially the Raj oil conglomerate.
- [09:04]
William Dalrymple
So it is a magnet for those who want to make their fortune. I mean, what is life like in Burma? Is it different to life living in India, let's say? I mean, you know, freedoms that are enjoyed, powers that are shared between, you know, the British ruling class and the native population.
- [09:22]
Sam Dalrymple
So again, it was India and this is what we've got to kind of wrap our heads around. This wasn't just a separate colony. It was India's easternmost colony and was India's richest and largest province for over 100 years. And life was pretty similar, except more cosmopolitan. And crucially, for a lot of people, caste was less of a thing there because it was Buddhist. And so you get a lot of Dalits, groups formally designated as untouchable, migrating across the sea to escape caste. And women seem to often be treated better. And so a lot of women who want to make a name for themselves will migrate there.
- [09:57]
Anita Anand
Sam, do we have any figures for the population in Burma which we would now call Indian? You've always written in this book about the number of Chettias who these Tamil money lending castes who buy up great chunks of Burma. What was the figures of the number of non ethnic Burmese who went across?
- [10:17]
Sam Dalrymple
So it changes over time, but by the 30s, there is no doubt that Rangoon is basically an Indian city. And when Tagore, the Nobel laureate, arrives in rangoon in the 20s. He talks about it essentially being a city run by double colonialism. You've both got the Brits there, but you've also got Indian merchants and bankers who often refuse to hire Burmese locals in favour of their kind of brethren from across the Bay of Bengal. So you'll get kind of Bengali shipping magnates only wanting to hire Bengalis, or you'll have Tamil bankers only hiring Tamils. And so, increasingly, what you begin to get is a debate that rings oddly similar to the debates that surround Brexit. You get, should we remain part of this massive economic union? Is immigration a force for good and making our culture more cosmopolitan, or is it reducing the economic heft of the kind of, you know, indigenous population? And there's a huge maelstrom in the politics. And it very much divides Burma down the middle, rather than it being a simple, yes, obviously we're not Indian. It's far more complicated. And in the coming years will culminate in what I call the first partition of India and set into motion a series of dominoes that would lead to the Bengal famine, one of the largest refugee crises of the 20th century. The creation of Pakistan is very, very much, kind of inspired, in a sense, by Burma's separation and lead to one of the longest ongoing civil wars in history.
- [11:47]
William Dalrymple
You said that. Look, don't get this all in a muddle. You know, Burma was very much part of India. It was for the British. But did the Burmese feel that way too? I mean, what did they think? And you've just highlighted the fact that there was a sort of ruling class of Indians who favoured their own. So what did Burmese people, ethnically Burmese, if one can use that phrase, think of themselves and their place in the Raj.
- [12:10]
Sam Dalrymple
So this extraordinary figure called Mahatma Ottama exists, and he is the biggest politician in burma in the 1920s. He's a kind of acolyte of Gandhi's, and he's this kind of short Buddhist monk with large ears, a scar on his forehead, and is and is named Mahatma in honour of his similarities to Gandhi, essentially. Now for almost the entirety of his career as Burma's most important politician. Initially, he's a member of the Indian National Congress, although later leaves and spends half of his life campaigning for Burma to remain a part of India, saying basically that Burma is India's easternmost province because, you know, Buddha was an Indian.
- [12:53]
Anita Anand
Is that the logic, the link with Buddhism is an important part of the story.
- [12:56]
Sam Dalrymple
It's an important part. But he also feels that there is no natural border, border. So there is no time in history before the 1930s that the border that we now see had existed. There are Burmese empires that stretch into modern Bengal and there are Bengali empires that stretch well into modern Burma.
- [13:12]
Anita Anand
You have a quote in your book, Sam, which I'll read out. Burma refuses to be a helot on her own sword. This is Mahatma Ottama speaking to be cut off from her age long associations. Geographically she is of India rather than of any other country. Burma's demand is for her rightful place as an honored and equal partner in the coming All India Federation.
- [13:36]
Sam Dalrymple
So what's fascinating is how much this speech makes him fall out with Gandhi. Because as far as Gandhi's concerned, the Indian nation state that he wants to form is that of what he calls Bharat, this sacred Hindu geography that dates back to the ancient Hindu epics of the Mahabharata etc. And he sees this is the basis of Indian nationhood. And crucially, this epic does not mention Burma and it does not mention the Arab states. And so Gandhi and several other Indian nationalists throughout the 20s are actively campaigning to separate off the Arabian and Burmese sections of the Raj.
- [14:16]
William Dalrymple
Right. And he goes as far as to say, I have no doubt in my mind that Burma cannot form part of India under Swaraj, Swaraj being the word for self rule. So that must make the people of Burma and particularly Mahatma Ottama, who you know, shares a name but not much else at this point with his, his mentor Mahatma Gandhi, feel isolated and fearful about the future.
- [14:40]
Sam Dalrymple
Precisely. And it becomes an increasing divide in the country. There's an anti British rebellion that breaks out around this time called the Siasan Rebellion. And in the aftermath of this it very much divides people down the middle because during this rebellion it's often Indian troops who are sent to suppress the rebellion. And so a lot of the public start seeing Indians as the enemy because they're the ones who brought in guns to Burma. Whereas other people will say that no, we're all under colonialism together essentially. And so the solution, as far as the Brits see it, is to send in the Simon Commission.
- [15:16]
William Dalrymple
Ah, Simon, go home. The big cry of Simon, go home from Indian nationalists, they hated it so much. It was a complete sort of flag around which nationalists of different colors gathered to say we're not having this, we're not having you decide our constitution and decide what shape we are.
- [15:32]
Anita Anand
It's one of those quotes that everybody from an Indian background knows and no one in this country does and if you go to Dishoom, the restaurant, any of their branches, they, they have large placards saying Simon go home all over the walls. I always wonder what kind of ordinary Brits who don't know their Indian 1940s independence history think when they see that.
- [15:51]
William Dalrymple
Or indeed my husband, who's called Simon, if I take him there?
- [15:54]
Sam Dalrymple
No, no, just what does he think of it?
- [15:56]
William Dalrymple
Well, haven't taken him yet, Sam, but just explain why, you know, the Simon Commission stirred up such strong feelings and. And Simon go home. Simon go back with such a clarion call.
- [16:08]
Sam Dalrymple
So this is a group of seven men, crucially including a young Clement Attlee who, you know will later grant independence to India and Burma. But it's seven Brits, all white, no Indians involved, who were appointed to suggest a new constitution for India and debate whether or not Burma should be separated. And as far as Indians saw it, the fact that not a single Indian had been put on the committee to create a new constitution was just outright racist. And even Indians who kind of, you know, liked the empire but thought, you know, we want equal rights within a joint union, even they are beginning to turn against Britain at this point.
- [16:48]
Anita Anand
There was still talk at this point of dominion status. Wasn't it like Canada or New Zealand or Australia that one of the early ideas in the 20s still was to give India this sort of independence, but within a British Commonwealth? And this was going one stage further saying, no, we want complete independence.
- [17:04]
Sam Dalrymple
There's a remarkable sense that around the 20s, there's a complete debate about whether or not independence should be a thing at all. And a lot of Indians are looking towards the Roman Empire and saying Rome, I think around 200 AD had granted equal citizenship to everyone across Rome. So suddenly Philip the Arab could become a Roman emperor. And they were basically arguing that that's maybe what we should have, that sort of system. But by the time that the Simon Commission is created and it's an all white jury of people who've largely never been to India, this is a kind of a breaking point.
- [17:36]
Anita Anand
Sam, One of the things I remember when you were doing research, you came back from the archives astonished by how racist Clement Attlee was and how sort of naive, because we often think of him in this country as this more liberal figure who breaks with Churchill and grants India independence. But you said his letters were sort of almost Victorian in their racial attitudes.
- [17:56]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah. So he writes to his brother Tom that Rangoon's pagodas were rather jolly, being all gilded, but he refused to visit any of them due to Sundry quarrels about removing shoes. And then he goes on to say that the Burmans are very cheery looking folk, rather Japanese, but with an unfortunate propensity to murder. So this is the kind of attitude that he's got when he's visiting.
- [18:19]
William Dalrymple
This is not uncommon for people serving the Raj or even people visiting on behalf of, you know, great commissions set up in London and Westminster that they feel the need to classify Indians. And I've seen it before, I mean, I've seen it with the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab who, you know, just goes through every racial and ethnic group, every tribal community and gives like two lines about what is wrong with them, what is congenitally wrong with these people. You know, they dance too much, they laugh too much, they're a bit thievy, they're a bit rapey, they're a bit violent. And it reads like some kind of biological specimen list. But that kind of antipathy is returned in kind because when the Simon Commission, with its seven white members, some of whom have never been to India, as you pointed out, are touring around, they are referred to as the seven dwarfs. I mean, people have no respect for what they're doing in the local community. There is resentment not just at the top, but from top to bottom. And that's what's so unusual about the Simon Go Back Simon Go Home movement is that it started maybe from the top, but it spread to grassroots and then bounced back up again. It was very unifying.
- [19:23]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah. And crucially, the commissioners arrive in Rangoon by sea, they don't travel by land and so they don't see how one land turns into the next. And so by the time they arrive in Rangoon, they spend about a, you know, a couple days there and decide, yes, it should be separated because it feels a bit different, essentially. And quite a lot of them have been reading Kipling and deciding that, you know. Oh, he makes it sound really different too. And it's this remarkably unique unread group of seven men who then push forward the idea that Burma should be made into a separate colony. And so it is. So on April Fools Day 1937, a new border is created which follows no known pre existing border. It follows the ceasefire line of an earlier British Burmese war and so cuts through communities like the Nagas or the Rohingya population.
- [20:14]
Anita Anand
What was the reaction in Burma? Was there a sense that many people welcomed this or was there a difference? How did it go down the news that Berber was to become a separate colony?
- [20:24]
Sam Dalrymple
So there was actually immediately an election and anti separationists win the election.
- [20:30]
Anita Anand
So they don't want to be separate, they want to be part of India still.
- [20:34]
Sam Dalrymple
They want to be part of India still. But crucially, the Great Depression, which begins around this time, you know, the great economic recession of the 1930s, that in Europe is kind of, you know, giving credence to fascism, etc. This leads to all of the Tamil bankers, the Chettyyars, seizing up assets, because when people default on their loans, the Chettyars go in and take up their land. So that something ridiculous like in the course of seven years, Tamil bankers seize a quarter of all Burmese land, and it's this that begins to turn Burmese popular opinion towards that maybe separation is a good thing and maybe we can do something about this.
- [21:11]
Anita Anand
Sam, I remember reading in the book that one of the Chettiar bankers justifies their seizure of so much Burmese land by saying, but we built the railways. So you have the Indians, literally. What's the context of that quote, when.
- [21:28]
Sam Dalrymple
It seems absolutely certain that Burma's going to be separated, going to be partitioned off from the Indian empire? All of the Indian businesses that have put so much money into Burma are now horrified that they're going to lose all their assets. And you get a huge protest that, you know, we civilized Burma, we built their railways. And it's a very eerily similar response from what the British will say to India decades later.
- [21:53]
William Dalrymple
And where do they draw the partition line? How do they do it? Because famously, the man who draws the partition between India and Pakistan, what was the quote? He's never been east of Rome and he's never set foot in India before. Who draws the line and where did they do the demarcation?
- [22:06]
Sam Dalrymple
Well, so this is what's ridiculous. They don't. So there's.
- [22:11]
William Dalrymple
What, what, what?
- [22:13]
Sam Dalrymple
So the border that had existed between Burma province and the rest of India automatically becomes a new international border, but no one's ever been there. And so if you go today to Nagaland, along the India Burmese border, people talk about the Burma border arriving in the 60s because they had no idea that they lived on a border for the first three decades, that it wasn't in existence.
- [22:38]
Anita Anand
It was completely open, people could wander backwards and forwards.
- [22:41]
William Dalrymple
So literally, where there was no border, where people had no idea that they were living on a threshold, do signs and barbed wire go up? What does it look like? And what does it feel like to these people who didn't realise that they were in such a geopolitical hotspot?
- [22:53]
Sam Dalrymple
So it kind of doesn't. So for at Least the first few years. There's no British outposts there, there's no border guards. Life continues as normal. And it'll just be three decades later that a bunch of officials will suddenly arrive in these villages and say, oh, you've been living on a border for the last three decades. Please move your houses. So it's less the border that changes things so much as the rise of xenophobia. So in the wake of separation, racial relations worsen beyond anyone's imagination. And the man at the center of this is a guy called Ooh Sor. He's a Hitler enthusiast who essentially transforms anti Indian xenophobia into a political ideology. He is this kind of absolutely charming man with a way of wrapping British officials around his little finger. And despite frequent boasts about his nine maternal uncles having quite literally got away with murder, he spends all the years before separation lauding Hitler's treatment of the Jews as a role model for what Burma should do with its immigrants in his newspaper, the Thuria. And he then seems to join the secretive society called the Black Dragon Society when he visits Tokyo. And he returns to Burma incredibly rich with all this new funding from the Japanese. And this secret society had encouraged the annexation of Korea, the encroachment of Chinese territory, and basically been pushing for Japan to become an imperial power in its own right.
- [24:20]
Anita Anand
And Sam, to try and see this through his eyes for a minute, what's attracting him about Japan? Japan is the successful Asian power which has created its own empire. Is that what he likes about it?
- [24:33]
Sam Dalrymple
Exactly. It's proof that Asians can rule the world.
- [24:37]
Anita Anand
Well, China is, in a sense today, this idea of a super successful new Asian economy which is taking over everything.
- [24:44]
William Dalrymple
Asian tigers with their paws on everything.
- [24:46]
Anita Anand
Yeah, this is what he would have seen in Japan in the 1940s. It's not just that he loves sort of Japanese militarism, or maybe it's that too.
- [24:52]
Sam Dalrymple
Exactly. Well, it's both. He praises them as the only Asiatic people to become a great world power. And in response to this, he gets a free car from them. But so awash with money, he founds a political party called Milchit, literally the Love of Race party, and creates his own kind of counterpart to Mussolini's brown shirt and will, in the succeeding years after separation, after the first partition of India, will transform anti Indian xenophobia to the point that almost all of India's population is forced into exile. This begins just two years after separation, in 1939, when he distributes a letter, a pamphlet, which is all about kind of you know, Burmese and Muslims having a debate about which religion, Buddhism or Islam is better. And Islam wins. And he gets this distributed to all of the monasteries in Rangoon and basically tries to start an anti Muslim and anti Indian race riot. And it's literally known as the Burmese Kristallnacht.
- [25:55]
William Dalrymple
Gosh. And the parallels, I mean, the parallels of this stretch into the here and now, or am I reading too much into it that that kind of anti immigration rhetoric that, you know, was so espoused ironically. Let me just leave in a newspaper called the sun at the time, you know, that stretches into the here and now with the attitudes and the kind of rhetoric that's used against the Rohingya population. I mean, I've heard sort of similar things about, you know, these are not.
- [26:18]
Anita Anand
Burmese, even from, famously from Aung San SUU Kyi herself was known to make.
- [26:23]
William Dalrymple
Those sort of speeches 100%. But this is sort of the kind of thing that you saw was putting in his pamphlets back in the 30s.
- [26:30]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah. I mean, it's no surprise that Usor is the person who first designates the Rohingya population as non indigenous to Burma and in need of expulsion. It's him who starts that and sets into motion a ball that will roll down into the modern Rohingya genocide.
- [26:48]
William Dalrymple
So, I mean, just first of all, for our benefit, who are the Rohingya? And you know, forget about his argument for a moment. What is their claim to being Burmese and how long have they been there? And just give us a little bit of a potted history of their situation.
- [27:00]
Sam Dalrymple
Sure. So they are a group that has been in what's now Burma for hundreds of years. They are definitely there through many empires in Burma's history. But they speak a language that is distantly related to Bengali, the language of modern Bangladesh and eastern India. And by virtue of their speaking a language related to an Indian language, he designates them as Indians and as immigrants that need to be pushed back as opposed to an indigenous group that just happens to speak a language related to those across the border. Remember, of course, that this border has never existed before.
- [27:36]
William Dalrymple
So I mean, look, it's a good point to take a break, but we've got a mirror image of what's going on in Europe. You've got anti immigrant rhetoric, xenophobia swirling around and economic depression, brown shirt mirrors striding around the streets of Burma and a charismatic scoundrel as a leader in usor. Join us after the break where we find out what happens next.
- [28:02]
Anita Anand
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- [29:15]
Sam Dalrymple
On.
- [29:15]
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- [30:19]
Anita Anand
Welcome back. So we left the last half with Burma, mirroring the terrible tensions which were breaking 1930s Europe with Brown shirts, the rise of a form of fascism with the growing racial dividend. Tell us what happens as we come closer to the outbreak of World War II. And particularly tell us about Amartya Sen, whose family lived in Burma at this point. What were they thinking about it all?
- [30:50]
Sam Dalrymple
So Amartya is one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Indians living in Burma at the time. And in the wake of these race riots that break out in Rangoon for the very first time in the wake of separation after USOR goes and distributes his pamphlets. Amartya's family decides to move back to their homes in India in Dhaka, which will later become Bangladesh, show how many of these borders are later created. But his family decides to leave because of the growing anti Indian sentiment and also because their term, I think, in Mandalay University had ended. I think we forget how much of a massive effect these race riots had across the board. One of the most affected people who writes the most about this is the future founders of Pakistan who use the increasing anti Indian and anti Muslim sentiment in Burma to justify potentially creating a new Muslim state. So firstly, you get Rahmat Ali Chaudhary, the guy who creates the word Pakistan, who basically says, while Burma is being separated, it remains a mystery to us why Muslims are being forced to remain in the Indian Federation. And you also get Jinnah, who writes all these letters about how horrified he is that without any legal protections, the Muslims of Burma are now being kind of slaughtered. And he, having earlier perceived the idea of Pakistan as some sort of Walt Disney dreamland, if not a Wellsian nightmare, that's literally the founder of Pakistan's first recorded thoughts on the creation of a Muslim state. In the aftermath of these race riots in Burma, he begins to change his mind. And a lot of his writings on why we should create Pakistan will explicitly use the creation of Burma as precedent. So there's a direct line that you can draw between the partition of Burma and the partition of Pakistan. It's a direct one.
- [32:47]
Anita Anand
Sam, just to clarify something, you said that is there definitely a sense that Muslims are suffering more than Hindus and Sikhs among the Indian immigrants being targeted for violence by the Burmese.
- [33:01]
Sam Dalrymple
So USO uses this term, kallah, to conflate the idea of Muslims and Indians as the dual kind of leeches on Burmese society. So it's all Indians and all Muslims, including indigenous Muslims, that he's attacking.
- [33:19]
William Dalrymple
But again, I mean, it's a mirror playbook, isn't it? It's Jews and Slavs in Europe. So, you know, it's a kind of like, let's hate them and get them all out. The thing is, though, this is now, you know, World War II is. Is declared. This is all the preamble to the war. And what happens when World War II begins is that Britain desperately needs its empire to come on side and fight with it. And so, you know, many promises are made, inducements given to people, come and fight in our war and then you'll come back as heroes and you'll come back with your own land and you'll come back, we'll reward you for this. Some even saying, look, if we fight hard enough, we may get our independence from all of this. In Burma you have got a really uncomfortable situation where uso, who is clearly verging on genocidal, certainly the stuff that he's saying is inspiring great violence against minority groups, is the man the Brits have to do business with. How comfortably do they go about that?
- [34:16]
Sam Dalrymple
So you get a mixed group of people. Initially, he's not premier, he's not the kind of, you know, leading statesman and they are quite dismissive of him. But as soon as it becomes clear that he's increasingly popular, they all kind of go on side and eventually he's elected premier, everyone looks the other way.
- [34:33]
Anita Anand
Are they not aware of his fascist tendencies and his love of Hitler and the Japanese or in the pre war period, many Brits also have ideas of Hitler which they will obviously reverse later. But at the time there is that famous, particularly aristocratic right wing people and the Mitfords.
- [34:52]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, they exemplify it, don't they? Oswald Mosley and all of that.
- [34:55]
Anita Anand
Exactly. And a whole world that we like to forget about, but which, which was very pro Hitler at the time.
- [35:01]
Sam Dalrymple
Brits are pretty much divided. And you get for example, the Viceroy in India, Linlithgow, who begins sending a stream of letters to the Secretary of State back in Britain warning that USOR had organized anti Indian feeling in the past and will do so again. The parallel with Nazi tactics is exact. And the new governor of Burma, I fear, is already in danger of succumbing. So the new governor of Burma, Dorman Smith, who's this kind of guy with a fantastic penchant for exotic animals. There's a passionate opposition against pasteurised milk and leads a long campaign against pasteurized.
- [35:36]
William Dalrymple
What's his problem with pasteurised milk? Why is this policy issue here?
- [35:41]
Sam Dalrymple
Okay, it always comes up, keeps on coming up.
- [35:44]
Anita Anand
It's the kind of 1930s anti vaxxer, is it? It's that sort of thing.
- [35:47]
Sam Dalrymple
Yeah, but it's clearly a thing that divides Brits down the middle. But ultimately he's premier and they have to work with him. He's the representative of the Burmese people. And the turning point comes when Churchill basically signs the Atlantic Charter saying that all people have the right to choose the government under which they will live by which he means kind of, you know, the Poles and that Germany should not be charging into Poland and ruling over foreign peoples, that they should be able to choose whether they want to be under German rule. But Indians and Burmese people rightly feel that this should apply to colonial subjects, too.
- [36:23]
Anita Anand
It's true of Poles, it's true of Punjabis.
- [36:25]
Sam Dalrymple
Exactly. And so USO goes off to London to try and talk to Churchill. He decides to get into a plane, circles the Shwedegon Pagoda in downtown Rangoon nine times for good luck, and then heads off to parley with Churchill.
- [36:39]
William Dalrymple
And this is 1941. Let's put a date on this.
- [36:41]
Sam Dalrymple
Is this sort of middle of the Blitz?
- [36:43]
William Dalrymple
Right. Okay, so the Blitz is happening.
- [36:44]
Sam Dalrymple
Blitz is happening. India is still mostly out of the war. Burma's mostly out of the war still. But when he arrives, Churchill has no interest in granting sudden independence to Burma. He says, we're in the middle of the Blitz, we'll talk about this once the war's over, don't push me now kind of thing. And so he flies on and tries to ask for help in America. He asks Roosevelt for help in supporting the Burmese independence cause. Once again, USOR is turned down. And on his flight back to Burma, he flies via a certain place known as Pearl Harbor. And he lands there, stays the night, wakes up and sees Japan suddenly bomb Pearl Harbor.
- [37:27]
Anita Anand
He's there at the.
- [37:28]
William Dalrymple
He witnesses it.
- [37:29]
Sam Dalrymple
He's there. He's there. He witnesses it and sees in a moment an Asian power cripple America, cripple the West. And at this moment, saw, decides to throw in his lot with the Japanese. He tries to sneak into a Japanese embassy in Lisbon when he has to go back the other way around via Europe again, but is caught by the Brits doing so trying to contact the Japanese, and is finally arrested, is deported to Uganda for the rest of the war from Lisbon or where from Palestine. Bizarrely, he gets to mandate Palestine for a fuel stop and then gets suddenly locked up and is forbidden from having his hair cut out of fear that he will attempt to transmit a message through a barber.
- [38:11]
William Dalrymple
Oh, right. I'm really fascinated by the brass neck on this man because on you know, on the one hand, he's been sort of playing footsie with the Japanese even before. And anyone with any kind of, you know, sort of intelligence community will possibly have known that. And yet he goes to America, he goes to Roosevelt, who's already got a fear that Japan is going to, you know, push against America and the United States. And he goes and asks America for help before then fully throwing in with the Japanese. I mean, what is the calculus going on here? And how much did people know how close he was to the Japanese even before he officially throws in with. With them? And even before Pearl Harbor, I don't.
- [38:50]
Sam Dalrymple
Think they knew as much as they later would find out. So most of the documents that I found about his early communications with the Japanese, I think, were discovered by the intelligence services once they'd arrested him, and once they'd found out that he'd gone into that Japanese embassy in Lisbon, then they start to look into his past more closely and discover all of these earlier links. But it's not there in the archives until this point.
- [39:13]
Anita Anand
Sam, the most exciting passage in your book, I think a brilliant chapter, is the extraordinary description of the Japanese invasion of Burma and the terrible march that so many Indians had to make up to the Indian border. Could you give us a little picture of that? Particularly the Japanese attack on Rangoon.
- [39:33]
Sam Dalrymple
Sure. So, literally, days later, suddenly, the Japanese Empire sweeps across Asia. You get suddenly, in quick succession, the fall of Hong Kong, the fall of Singapore, and within days, the Japanese kind of blitzkrieg is passing up through Burma. Britain suddenly begins evacuating and it's too late to really put up any defence. And so the entire army begins evacuating up to what's now the Burma, India.
- [40:01]
Anita Anand
Border to remind people everyone had imagined that Singapore would be this redoubt that could not fall, and that there was a massive British troop concentration in Singapore ready to fight the Japanese coming in from the sea. But the Japanese go by bicycle behind the British lines, surround Singapore, and an enormous British army surrenders to the Japanese, leaving Burma completely without any hope of being guarded against the Japanese invasion.
- [40:29]
Sam Dalrymple
Precisely. And as the army basically begins evacuating Burma, the Brits begin burning boats across Bengal so that the Japanese can't push through to there. And with the Brits gone essentially from Rangoon within weeks, the Indian population of Burma begins to worry that what will happen to them with this kind of radicalised Burmese population that's increasingly anti Indian? What will happen once the Brits are actually gone? What begins is, at the time, the largest known mass migration ever recorded. Something like 600,000 Indian civilians flee Burma for India in 1942. 80,000 would never make it. And the testimonies that have written about this are remarkably few. So you get a couple of British testimonies, but one of the things that I've been doing with my book is trying to find Indian testimonies. And there's this amazing old diary that I found in North London. My friend Sanvir's grandfather, and he writes this extraordinary memoir of the Indian evacuation from Burma, where there was, you know, no roads, they had to take these kind of boats up the Chindwin river and then hike through the jungle for days. And it reads like something like Apocalypse now, where there's 40 Sikh families on makeshift rafts rowing up the Chindwin River.
- [41:50]
Anita Anand
And, Sam, you also give a brilliant description of the Japanese bombing of Rangoon, which is one of the most sort of terrifying and moving passages in the book. Give us a little hint of that.
- [42:01]
Sam Dalrymple
So it's on Christmas Day that suddenly the Japanese decide to give Christmas presents to the people of Rangoon. That's how it's always referred to. And you get basically just kind of carpet bombing of the city. The Brits misidentify the planes as Allied planes and so do nothing to stop these bomber planes that enter the city. But you get cheaters that escape from the zoo. You get half of the officials just becoming convinced that there's no hope. And so British being drunk in the streets as there's accounts of monks looting the bazaars, of women's underwear, and all the while just entire sections of the city being razed to the ground.
- [42:41]
Anita Anand
And no one's expecting this. They haven't got bomb shelters or they're just sort of doing their daily work.
- [42:46]
Sam Dalrymple
Most of the Rangoon officials had been up the previous night drinking at the Governor's Horse Racing cup, and so they've all got hangovers that morning.
- [42:54]
William Dalrymple
You've been looking at the Indian sources, which is fantastic. And I know this is a book that you, like, me, think a lot of, but there was Fergal Keen's really harrowing description of Kohima and the march through there, where you have sort of accounts of people watching these columns go by. And, I mean, I read it years and years ago when it first came out, but there's one of this woman in a red sari who walks past holding her baby. And it's only sort of a couple of chapters in that the same officer who saw her leaving on the march then finds the red sari all mangled in blood and left by the side, and terrible atrocities have taken place. And this is, again, it's a foreshadowing of what will happen in Partition, the partition that we talk about between India and Pakistan, which is the levels of sexual violence that take place against the women and children that are fleeing. And it's the impotence with which some British officers who are not equipped to stop this from happening and just bear witness to this it, who just see this horror unfolding and they can do nothing about it, they have nothing, no power, no weapons to stop this advance. And These people are sitting ducks. You know, they're hated by the Burmese. The Japanese are killing them. And I just wanted to, you know, sort of again, point out and commend anyone to if who's very interested in, you know, of course, Sam's book is. Is masterful in the telling of this, but also, you know, just for the sheer human horror of this, Fergal's done a lot of very good work on this as well.
- [44:18]
Anita Anand
There's also, of course, Amitav Ghosh's Glass palace for a fictional version of this, which is the first time I ever came across this. And I think it's Amitav's greatest book. It's an extraordinary account of the Indians leaving Rangoon in large numbers. Exactly the fictional counterpart to your amazing story of the Sikhs on their boat going up through the jungles.
- [44:40]
Sam Dalrymple
But I think, like the later Partition, one of the most extraordinary things is how much also people look after each other. So, you know, yes, there are all sorts of Burmese people who are. Who hate the Indians right now, but there's also so many who view them as their brothers and who shelter them and who kind of get them through the war. There's all sorts of families that don't leave, but that stay with kind of close Burmese friends who protect them for the next four years up in the highlands or something. And there's a huge amount of just people being good amidst horror that I think is important to highlight.
- [45:12]
William Dalrymple
No, and thank God you are pointing out, because it's sometimes very easy to be hammered by the horror of all this and only see that. And human kindness is always there. So, look, we're going to leave you at the end of this particular episode of Empire with an entirely reformed, reconfigurated Burma. The Indian population has fled. The border between two British colonies has transformed, formed. The Japanese have started issuing Japanese government rupees. You know, they've made a huge push into what was once British imperial territory. The next episode that we're going to bring, you and Sam Dalrymple will be with us again, I'm delighted to say. We will talk about one of the most surprising partitions of the Indian Empire and ask, how did Dubai. That's right, I said Dubai escape being part of India. And if you want to hear that episode right now and all of the episodes of this mini series with Sam about the five partitions that reshape modern Asia, just become a member of our club. Empirepod uk.com empirepoduk.com for the price of a cappuccino, a month. You get early access to our miniseries, exclusive bonus episodes, a weekly newsletter, and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.
- [46:19]
Anita Anand
Do join our club. It's a wonderful community you can you can be part of online with all your comments and enthusiasm for all the different things we've talked about. And we have a wonderful magazine which which is not written by us. And I learn often more about the episodes that we've just done reading the magazine than I knew when I went in to make the podcast.
- [46:41]
William Dalrymple
So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and.
- [46:45]
Anita Anand
Goodbye from me, William Durrimple.