Five partitions that shaped South Asia

Summary

History Extra Podcast: Five Partitions That Shaped South Asia

Date: November 7, 2025
Host: Danny Byrd (Immediate Media)
Guest: Sam Dalrymple (Historian, Author, Filmmaker, Peace Activist)
Main Theme:
An exploration of how the modern face of South Asia was defined by not just the well-known 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, but by five key partitions, stretching from the separation of Burma in 1937 to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Dalrymple, drawing from his research for his book Shattered Lands, reflects on migration, memory, and the enduring impact of borders on identities and communities in South Asia.

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Overview

This episode delves into the complex and deeply human stories behind five key partitions that shaped South Asia in the 20th century. Through conversation with Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands, host Danny Byrd unpacks the "domino effect" of these geopolitical ruptures, exploring both their geopolitical roots and their ongoing echoes in personal memory, trauma, and identity across the region.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Symbolism of the India-Pakistan Border

• Dalrymple’s opening image: The border as a "bright scar" visible from space – a modern phenomenon, not an age-old division.

  “It’s a complete myth that you can see the Great Wall of China from space... But a line created to separate Hindus from Muslims is visibly etched into the surface of the globe.” (Sam Dalrymple, 02:23)

• Stresses how borders taken as ancient are, in fact, recent, contingent products of 20th-century history.

2. The Five Partitions

Dalrymple walks through five pivotal partitions:

1. Burma's Separation (1937)
   • Impact: Set the stage for tensions including the Rohingya crisis and divided indigenous communities.
   • Memorable Quote:

     “Burma basically gets separated off as a separate British colony in 1937. And yet this border will create, for example, the Rohingya crisis, stranding people who speak a language closely related to Bengali... in the middle of what’s Myanmar.” (Sam Dalrymple, 04:43)

2. Separation of the Arabian Gulf
   • Forgotten ties between British India and what became the Gulf states.
   • “There’s a very real possibility that an independent India or an independent Pakistan could have had all of those countries as part of them.” (Sam Dalrymple, 06:01)
3. The Great Partition (1947):
   • Creation of India and Pakistan by religious lines – leading to the largest migration in recorded history, enormous violence, and millions of deaths.
   • "Dividing this country on the basis of religion would create the largest forced migration ever recorded in human history." (06:30)
4. The Princely States:
   • How semi-independent kingdoms were allotted between successor states, leading to unresolved conflict (e.g., Kashmir).
5. Bangladesh’s Birth (1971):
   • The split of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh after a brutal war and further administrative divisions.

3. Forgotten Connections: South Asia and the Gulf

• Cross-border identities; elite-level interconnectedness (Indian passports in Yemen and Dubai, Maharajas educated in India).
• Even 1920s Yemen nationalists saw themselves aligned with Indian independence movements (10:09–10:24).

4. The Lost Era of Interconnection and Identity

• While largely erased from public memory, there was a brief period where Arabs and Burmese embraced aspects of Indian nationalism (10:10–11:00).
• The idea of a "wider Indian identity" faded rapidly post-empire—yearning persists more for lost interconnectedness than for political reunion.

5. The Contingency and Domino Effect of Partitions

• "I don’t think it was destined to fracture..." (Sam Dalrymple, 15:00)
• Major partitions were often last-minute outcomes, not centuries-old inevitabilities.
• The contemporary map of South Asia would have been “utterly alien” to anyone in the 1920s.

6. Human Stories and Memory

• Dalrymple recounts personal stories, like the Sikh community’s epic migration from Burma during WWII, found through a family’s attic diary (16:54–18:44):

  “It was this extraordinary account...of the entirety of the Sikh community of eastern Burma migrating back to India during World War II... It reads like a kind of first-person Apocalypse Now...”

• Many valuable historical sources remain unrecognized in private family collections.

7. The Princely States: Overlooked Histories

• 1/3 of British India was governed by local kings, not British officials.
• After independence, these princely states were forcefully assimilated, and their legacies were downplayed by nationalist narratives as well as by British “orientalist tropes”.
• "A huge percentage of the British Empire was indirectly ruled..." (19:26)
• Many princely states were actually more industrialized and cultured than British India (21:06).

8. Cartography and Hidden Borders

• The politics of colonial maps: Inclusion or exclusion of regions like Nepal, Bhutan, and Gulf Sheikdoms reflected shifting diplomatic needs rather than realities on the ground (22:08–24:15).

9. The Emotional Aftermath and Remembrance

• The work of Project Astan: Using virtual reality to reconnect partition survivors with ancestral homes across borders (24:41–26:56).

  “We send out a team, we interview a partition survivor...then we go and try to find these places, scan them in virtual reality, and allow these often kind of 95-year-olds to have a walk through their childhood home again.” (Sam Dalrymple, 25:28)

• The urgency in collecting oral histories before the last witnesses are gone.
• Older generations, despite experiencing trauma, often retain “softer” views of “the enemy” compared to hardened nationalisms among youth (28:14–28:29).

10. National Memory, Forgetting, and Contingency

• Newly independent countries frequently erase or ignore their shared colonial past in service of national narratives (29:12).
• Dalrymple underscores the arbitrariness of many borders and the danger of assuming ancient, organic nationhood in what are often recent, contingent formations.

11. Religious Life and Change

• Pre-partition South Asia characterized by syncretism—fluid, multifaceted identities:

  “For most of human history, religious syncretism was really the norm, but it was particularly so in South Asia.” (30:32)

• Modern religious boundaries are much harder, and many old cultural/religious practices are now unthinkable (32:22).

12. Lessons and Hopes

• Dalrymple stresses the solvability of many South Asian conflicts; there have been “so many times we’ve come close to solving the entire conflict altogether.” (33:14)
• Looks to Ireland’s peace process as inspiration for South Asia:

  “It shows what is possible with imagination.” (34:48)

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Notable Quotes

On Borders:

• “A line created to separate Hindus from Muslims is visibly etched into the surface of the globe.” (Sam Dalrymple, 02:30)

On Partition’s Contingency:

• “As late as 1946... it was still entirely possible that Pakistan would not become a separate nation state at all.” (15:21)

On Human Stories:

• “It’s this extraordinary, extraordinary account which had never previously been translated... now going to the British Library as a result of the translation, for future researchers.” (18:21–18:25)

On National Memory:

• “There’s been a willful forgetting of the ties that once brought us all together.” (29:12)

On Peace and Hope:

• “So many times we’ve come close to solving the entire conflict altogether... Ireland needs to be looked at more.” (33:14–35:13)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:07: The India-Pakistan border as a visible, modern scar
• 03:41: Explanation of the five key partitions
• 04:42–05:31: Burma's partition and its consequences
• 06:30: The human cost of the 1947 Partition
• 07:27–08:33: Forgotten connections: the Gulf and South Asia
• 16:54–18:44: The Sikh community’s migration diary from Burma
• 19:02–21:18: Role and fate of the Princely States after empire
• 22:08–24:15: Colonial cartography and diplomatic manipulation of borders
• 24:41–26:56: Project Astan and the importance of oral history
• 28:14–28:29: Generational difference in attitudes to partition and the “enemy”
• 30:32–32:22: The fluidity of pre-partition religious life
• 33:14–35:34: Previous peace efforts and lessons from Ireland

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Conclusion

Sam Dalrymple’s discussion offers a nuanced, human-centered perspective on the making, memory, and ongoing consequences of the dividing lines across South Asia. He challenges assumptions of ancient, immutable boundaries, highlights both loss and surprising solidarity across communities, and ultimately leaves listeners with the lesson that conflict’s roots are often recent and reversible:

“The key thing that I’d love for people to go away with is quite how similar we all are and quite how solvable a lot of the conflicts that have been created.” (32:40)

For listeners new to South Asian history, the episode is a revelatory look at the region’s deep entanglements, the trauma of division, and the continuing possibilities for reconciliation.

Transcript

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[Danny Byrd]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you were to look down at South Asia from space at night, you would see a bright scar stretching for over 2,000 miles. This is the border between India and Pakistan, and it's a division that was established within living memory. In this episode, Sam Dalrymple explains how in just a few decades, the British Raj shattered along five partitions, from Burma's separation in 1937 to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. Speaking with Danny Bird, he uncovers stories of migration, memory and resilience that continue to echo through South Asia today.

You open your book with a dramatic image. The India Pakistan border lit up like a scar across the earth, visible from space. Why did you choose to begin there? And what does that border symbolize to you in the broader focus of your book, Shattered Lands?

[Sam Dalrymple]

I found it fascinating that it's the only wall that you can see from space. You can't actually see the Great Wall.

Of China from space. Even though we all grew up hearing about this.

It's a complete myth. And yet a line created to separate Hindus from Muslims is visibly etched into the surface of the globe. And it stretches 3,000 kilometers from the Arabian Sea all the way up to the high Himalayas. And the people on both sides have nuclear weapons pointing at one another. And yet, within the last hundred years, this border did not exist. It's not a kind of age old wall. We Heard when the recent India Pakistan conflict happened, I think it was Trump.

Was saying, oh, you know, India and Pakistan have been fighting for thousands of.

Years, and yet within living memory, the people on both sides of this border were one people as late as World War II. And so I think that's why I.

Find it such a fascinating and terrifying, terrifying image.

[Danny Byrd]

And the big idea behind your book, of course, is that modern South Asia was shaped by five different partitions, and not just the famous one that created India and Pakistan in 1947. For those who may not have come across this history before, can you explain what you mean by these partitions and why they matter so much today?

[Sam Dalrymple]

So as late as 1928, when the book opens, and when, bizarrely, the BBC attempted its first attempt to contact aliens, the very same day the news reported about, the Indian people have voted that they want national independence. And yet at this time, India, this single vast British colony, was twice the size of the India that we know today. It's not the same thing. This British Raj, this British India stretched from what's now Yemen, from the city of Aden in the west, included basically much of the Gulf, such as Dubai, Oman, Kuwait included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar. These 12 separate nation states would emerge from a single British colony. And, yeah, they're created by five moments of border making these five partitions that separate people divide identities. And I think after each of these partitions and the creation of each of these nations, their histories have been kind of written back into the deep past.

So that with quite a lot of.

These partitions, they've been completely forgotten. So the first one is the largely forgotten partition of Burma from India. Now, this was partially to do with Rangoon. At the time, the capital of Burma was the New York of its time, had more immigration than any other city other than New York City. And yet this created a tension and increasing demand for independence from the rest of the Raj. And so Burma basically get separated off as a separate British colony in 1937. And yet this border will create, for example, the Rohingya crisis, stranding people who speak a language closely related to Bengali, the language of Bangladesh, in the middle of what's Myanmar. Likewise, the Nagas and the Mesos, two.

More communities that have subsequently raised several.

Insurgencies and separatist movements since would also be divided between these borders. The second partition is the separation of Arabia. This forgotten story of when Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the entire united oil wealth of the Gulf, almost ends up as part of India. And it's only through a series of forgotten administrative transfers that they don't. And there's a very real possibility that an independent India or an independent Pakistan could have had all of those countries.

As part of them.

The third partition is the great partition. This is the central historical event of.

20Th century South Asia.

And it's the event that continues to shape how a quarter of the world see their past, present and their future. Pakistan is basically divided off from India on the basis of Muslim majority districts. And yet in a region as religiously interwoven as South Asia, where each district.

Had Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, etc.

Dividing this country on the basis of religion would create the largest forced migration ever recorded in human history. Something in the vein of 10 million people being forced to migrate in a single year and between 1 and 3 million people dying in the process. The fourth partition is the division of princely states, these semi independent protectorates between these new successor nations. And for example, the story of how Kashmir got divided between India and Pakistan and then the final partition, the fifth partition, is the division of Pakistan itself. When Pakistan was first formed, modern day.

Bangladesh was part of it as East Pakistan.

And yet in 1971, Bangladesh breaks away. And over the next three years there is a kind of administrative division of people, of assets and of history and identity. So by 1975, you're left in a world where there had once been a single colony. There are now 12 independent nation states.

[Danny Byrd]

As you reference there. Your book reveals that places like Dubai, Yemen and Oman were once closely tied to what was then called the British Raj. And that's a connection I think many people won't be aware of. Can you explain how those links came about in the first place and why they've largely disappeared from public memory?

[Sam Dalrymple]

The first British presence in the kind of Arabian Peninsula, it kind of begins around modern day Aden in what's now Yemen. I think it's the first colonial acquisition.

In Queen Victoria's reign.

But the majority of the Gulf states.

So kind of Dubai, Qatar, etc.

They gradually sign protectorate treaties basically to stop piracy. But under Lord Curzon, who's one of the British Viceroys, he begins to integrate them into the kind of system of British Indian princely states. And so just like you have Maharajas.

Of Jaipur, Jodhpur running these, you know, if you've ever been to a lovely holiday in Rajasthan in India and seen any of those lovely palaces, there were.

Hundreds, there were 565 semi independent princely states that, you know, paid their taxes and offered their defence over to the Brits, but were Otherwise internally independent and under Curzon, the Gulf is essentially sort of attached to this system. So suddenly it's the Indian army that's defending this region. You know, there are people in Dubai, etcetera, Who are being offered Indian passports. There's a Yemeni Jewish woman who's trying.

To migrate to mandate Palestine after the Balfour Declaration.

And her passport that she uses to migrate is an Indian passport.

Despite the fact that she's got no Indian ancestry whatsoever, she's Yemeni, but because.

Of the simple fact that she's Yemeni, she has to be defined as Indian. And you get, you know, the Sultan of Oman begins to be educated in Rajasthan's Mayo College, so that he's more fluent in Urdu than in Arabic. So over time these states become very intermixed with India, if in just on an elite level. So I think by and large the.

Population of Dubai wouldn't have necessarily been that aware of what was going on.

But amongst the elites it was very.

Much one and the same system.

[Danny Byrd]

Do you think this was an identity that people had throughout society across this vast region of the world? Or as you've just mentioned, there was it more elite buy in rather than grassroots up?

[Sam Dalrymple]

So there's definitely an elite buy in. But what's fascinating is how much by the 1920s you are beginning to find Arabs and Burmese people thinking of themselves as Indian nationalists.

There's a character called Muhammad Ali Luqman who's later one of the founding fathers.

Of Yemen and who later kind of, you know, lays out in his newspaper a lot of the intellectual foundations of.

The country of Yemen.

And yet in the 1920s, he's going traveling with the great Indian nationalist leader.

Ambedkar, the great Dalit leader.

And he's considering himself an Indian nationalist.

And he's talking in terms of, you know, Yemen becoming Indian.

And so I think there was this.

Sense of becoming Indian rather than necessarily automatically being Indian.

But for example, in Burma, Burma's most influential politician of the twenties is this guy called Mahatma Ottama. Now he's called Mahatma because he's a disciple of Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi. And Ottoma spends the second half of his career basically trying to convince the people of Burma and India to remain united, because as far as he's concerned, Burma should be considered India's easternmost province because India is the birthplace of the Buddha. And so he very much has an Indian identity.

And I think, you know, it wasn't necessarily across the system you always had people who didn't think of themselves as.

Indian, but You also had that in places that are part of India today.

There are all sorts of bits of India today that didn't necessarily consider themselves Indian in the twenties.

[Danny Byrd]

Obviously this was a big geopolitical unit. Is there any sense of an irredentist movement within any of these modern day nations of recapturing this former territory which has vanished?

[Sam Dalrymple]

So by and large, no. There's definitely, for example, in India there's a lot of people will talk about Akan Bharat, which is the idea of reclaiming what's now Pakistan and Bangladesh. I don't think it's ever had any.

Serious legs though, outside of kind of, you know, random Twitter kind of crazies.

But you do get all sorts of people who yearn back to that kind of era of interconnectedness. I think, I think few people ever look back on this time as a moment of good.

I think they look at it as a time of empire, as a time of humiliation.

And yet this moment where you could.

Have interconnectedness, this moment where you know your neighbors in what's now Pakistan or India or Dubai didn't feel far away. There weren't these national borders separating you all.

I think there's a yearning for a.

Time before that, but not necessarily for the 1920s to come back.

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[Danny Byrd]

You describe the collapse of the Indian Empire as a bit like a row of dominoes, each partition triggering the next. Do you think this chain reaction was avoidable, or was the empire always destined to fracture this way?

[Sam Dalrymple]

I don't think it was destined to fracture, and I think one of the most fascinating things is how last minute.

Almost all of these partitions were.

So the the Great Partition 1947, is.

The one that I've worked the most on. Long before I was working on this book, I was working on a project reconnecting survivors who had lost friends on the other side of the India Pakistan border, et cetera.

And I think one of the things that I found fascinating was how as late as 1946, a year before that partition, was drawn out, it was still entirely possible that Pakistan would not become.

A separate nation state at all.

I think there's so much contingency here, and I think likewise, I think, you know, although the people who are now.

Bangladeshis, who were East Pakistanis, suffered huge humiliation at the hands of West Pakistanis over the previous 24 years of West.

Pakistani domination, I don't think it wasn't.

Necessarily going to happen that Bangladesh would.

Become completely independent until as late as.

Kind of, you know, the end of 1970, a year before Bangladesh gets its independence, I think all of these things are hugely contingent. It could have so easily gone the other way in each case.

And I think that the map that we have today, although I doubt that the Raj would have ever remained looking.

Exactly as it was Today, with, you.

Know, Indian nationalists just inheriting the steel.

Frame of the British Empire.

What I do think is that in the 1920s, nobody would have been able to foreseen the borders that exist today. And I think that the map of the world that we look at today.

Would have been utterly alien to anyone in the 1920s.

[Danny Byrd]

Some of the most powerful moments in the book come from ordinary people, such as the tea workers in Burma, musicians displaced by partition and traders in the Gulf. Was there a particular story or person you uncovered that stayed with you long after writing?

[Sam Dalrymple]

Yes. I mean, so many. I think one of the stories that I found most fascinating was the story of this Sikh miner, mining foreman Uttam Singh, now his grandson lives in London. Now he is an amazing filmmaker and.

Also does events with Dushoom, the amazing Indian restaurant chain.

And I was interviewing his family about Indian independence and about their migration over to Britain and mentioned that I was.

Doing some work on Indians in Burma as well. At which point Sanvir, my friend, says.

Oh, you know, we found, recently found a. A family diary in the attic that was written by my grandfather when he migrated over. And it turned out to be this extraordinary account, previously untranslated, of the entirety of the Sikh community of eastern Burma migrating back to India during World War II, escaping Japanese bombs and kind of.

Pogroms at the hands of Burmese ethno nationalists.

And the account, although it was written in Punjabi, and my friend Harleen helped me translate the whole thing, it reads like a kind of first person Apocalypse.

Now, in a sense. It's a group of men and women.

Sailing on a boat up a river.

Through a jungle, as war is going on around them, as the world goes mad around them, and just trying to kind of do the good thing, but gradually all going a bit mad.

It's this extraordinary, extraordinary account which had.

Never previously been translated, which is now.

I think, going to the British Library.

As a result of the translation, we're now getting it deposited there for future researchers. But Sandvir's whole family have been extraordinarily.

Helpful and since then, I think, have found, managed to fish out all sorts of old photographs from Burma of this.

Sikh community that left.

And it's incredibly valuable story.

And I think all across Britain you.

Have people from every possible community who've.

Got memories and stories that would be.

Hugely valuable to history, which they don't.

Think of necessarily as important or as history, but yet should be sitting in the British Library for researchers to look at.

[Danny Byrd]

You write a lot also about the Princely States, regions ruled by Local kings and princes. Some of these were huge, powerful places. And I was wondering, how did these kingdoms fit into the bigger picture of empire and partition and why have they been. Been overlooked?

[Sam Dalrymple]

Essentially, it's always difficult to try and actually draw maps of the British Empire because Britain actually only directly ruled a small portion of it.

A huge percentage of the British Empire.

Was indirectly ruled through kind of, you.

Know, local kings and princes who had handed over their foreign policy etc to the Brits, but who were otherwise independent.

And so I think about a third of South Asia was never actually ruled.

By the Brits, but through these kind of proxies, essentially these maharajas, sultans, sheikhs, nawabs, etc.

And one of the most fascinating things is how much they, they are wiped off the map after the British leave by Indian nationalists. And there's this kind of rather strange irony that it's after the British depart that British ideas of nationality and sovereignty and of law and of government are.

Essentially pushed over finally, the third of.

South Asia that Britain had never forced it onto.

It's this rather fascinating thing.

But I think within South Asia, a lot of these princely states are quite deliberately overlooked because they kind of stand in the way of this idea of the Indian or Pakistani nation.

The fact that, you know, it had been a smattering of different states with different sovereignties as recently as the 1930s.

And some of them are kind of annexed and brought into India and Pakistan.

And Burma quite violently.

And yet they've got fascinating histories. And I think so many of the.

Places that people go out to visit in India and Pakistan and Burma today.

You can still see the legacies, these extraordinary different, like, traditions of art and literature. Quite a lot of these princely states were far more industrialized than British India ever was.

You know, it was the Nawab of.

Rampur who had the subcontinent's best library.

For example, it was the Maharaja Roda.

Who created the most industrialized state with the best dams and the best factories.

Not the British Indians.

So I think the British themselves often.

Liked to slightly diminish their standing and.

Make them into these kind of orientalist.

Tropes of these kind of ridiculous maharajas who just go around in Rolls Royces shooting lions and tigers and doing all.

That sort of stuff, rather than extraordinary politicians in their own right who are governing kingdoms in their own right.

I think the Brits were equally complicit in covering up that whole story. And so British books on the Raj also tend not to focus on the predecessor states.

And it's only in recent decades that we've really got really, really incredible scholarship.

Really coming out on a lot of these states and what was actually going on inside them.

[Danny Byrd]

And I wanted to ask you a question about the imperial cartography of these kingdoms, essentially because from what I understand, a lot of them were coloured differently for diplomatic reasons. And I would like to know what the consequences of those old maps have been in the here and now today.

[Sam Dalrymple]

So it was always a deeply contentious issue what the Brits could actually put on their map. As I said, a lot of these princely states were essentially independent, but had.

Offered up their defence or foreign policy, etc. To the Brits.

And so, for example, Nepal and Bhutan.

That are both independent nation states in.

The 21st century, both appear in maps of the Raj in 1909, but then.

Mysteriously vanish in the 1930s maps because they basically, they didn't want to get.

In the way of negotiations with China and Tibet.

And the whole question of Tibetan independence from China was already kicking off as early as then. And so the British presence in these states was considered somehow, you know, dangerous.

And likewise, the reason that the Arabian.

States, Dubai, Kaiti State, Kuwait, etc, are never shown on these maps is to.

Do with, firstly, not wanting to piss off Constantinople. So the Ottoman Empire always had a big claim on the Arabian Peninsula. And so even though there was a British presence there, even though these sheikhs.

Were showing up at the kind of Delhi durbars and meeting the Viceroy and, you know, the Indian army had established bases in these regions, putting them on Indian maps would create a diplomatic incident with the Ottomans. And so right Until World War I, it's not included on maps.

And then after World War I, the creation of Saudi Arabia, after that point.

It'S contentious how far Saudi extends into these states and, you know, where the border between, say, Saudi and Dubai is or Saudi and Oman is.

And in order to not disturb that.

Relationship, they continue being left off maps.

To the point that there are basically no maps. There are very few maps of Indian.

Arabia is what it's often referred to as in the sources.

So you get often small little maps, you get maps of it. If you look up maps of Aden.

Which is again in modern day Yemen, you often see the list, the states that are in modern day Yemen called, you know, Indian Arabia as part of these maps.

But they're never on the main maps.

If that makes sense. They're never on the kind of the ones that everyone was hanging on their walls. You know, it's always political what people choose to color in on their maps. And I think it's a particularly fascinating example.

[Danny Byrd]

Absolutely. And we've spoken a little bit about this already. The emotional side of the partitions and the migrations and the memories and the trauma that they've inflicted. And you've also alluded to the fact that you've worked with Project Astan that uses virtual reality to help families reconnect with places that they were forced to leave. How did that work shape the way you approached writing and researching this book?

[Sam Dalrymple]

It was absolutely central. So Project Astan was a project that me and some university friends created at college. Essentially, my friends Sparsh and Amina had a conversation right at the beginning of.

Our final year in kind of 2018.

This strange realization that Sparsh would never be able to go back to his.

Ancestral home in Pakistan because he has an Indian passport. And Aminah, she's of Pakistani origin, will probably never be able to get to India and see her ancestral home.

And yet here in Oxford, we were able to all be chatting and sitting in one room and meet people who.

Could potentially take pictures of ancestral homes.

Find long lost friends, et cetera. And so we spent about four or five years reconnecting families using virtual reality.

The idea was we send out a.

Team, we interview a partition survivor about their old home, their mosque, their temple.

Their haveli, their old school, etc.

And then we go and try and find these places, scan them in virtual reality, and allow these often kind of.

You know, 95 year olds to have a walk through their childhood home again, to go see their school again, et cetera.

And we managed to do this for about 30 people. We managed to reconnect long lost friends.

A particularly emotional moment where this man, Iqbal, who'd left India with just a photograph of his house and his best friend, Narendra Singh, who was a Sikh man who remained in India, and he said, you know, all I want to do is meet Narendra Singh again. We managed to track down Narendra Singh's family. Sadly, Narendra had passed away, but his.

Family was living outside of the city of Chandigarh.

And we managed to put them in touch again. And they were all crying, inviting each other on holiday and that kind of thing.

And I think those connections very much shaped the book. It also got me very invested in oral histories. And I think the idea that, you know, we're seeing the end of people who really remember World War II, for example. There's been a lot of work recently interviewing war veterans, survivors of the Holocaust, et cetera, because people are very aware that this is the last generation that's.

Going to be able to record those stories.

Suddenly it's going to become what was.

Written down, as opposed to being able to just ask your grandparents what happened.

And I think that we started doing this a year after the 70th anniversary and very quickly realized that this was the last moment that we could really do this. I think something like 70% of the.

People that we've interviewed have passed away since we started the project in 2018, which gives you a sense of how urgent oral histories are.

And I think that it completely shaped.

The approach that oral history gives you.

And the. One of the things from Project Astan is that often when you ask people about partition, they'll say, oh, Gandhi did.

This and Nehru did this and Jenna did this, and then, you know, Louis Mountbatten did this.

And it becomes a story of the.

High politics, as opposed to saying, you.

Know, what was your school like?

What was the communal relations in your street like? Do you remember celebrating Muslim holidays before, you know, all the Muslims left for Pakistan?

And that approach of asking about life.

Before the big events, I think also shaped a lot of this work because.

It'S about looking at both what's been gained and what's been lost by nationalism in some sense. And I think everyone's very aware that there's all sorts of friends that have been lost on the other side.

And I think that that was something.

That consistently amazed me was when often, so often when you chat to the younger generations, I think their idea of the other is much more hard and crystallized, because often, you know, like, people, my generation haven't grown up knowing what.

It was like for Pakistanis and Indians to be one people, if that makes sense for Burma to have just been the easternmost province of your country.

Growing up with these nationalisms, with these ideas of borders, I think. I think it's the amazing oral historian.

Anam Zakaria, who said that so often.

The elder generations, although that they're the ones who went through the trauma, have.

Softer ideas of the enemy because they knew what it was like to not have them as the enemy.

[Danny Byrd]

And that leads me on to my next question, because a lot of your book is of course, about memory, and not just personal memory, but also what countries choose to remember or to forget. For example, you mention how some modern nations like Bangladesh or the United Arab Emirates sometimes leave out the fact that they were once part of British India. And I just wondered, why do you think that matters so the.

[Sam Dalrymple]

The Bangladesh doesn't forget that it was part of India? But sort of does talk about Bengali.

Muslims always having been fated for nationhood. And although the UAE definitely does completely kind of ignore any Indian connections whatsoever.

I think there's been a willful forgetting of the ties that once brought us all together. I think we're living through an age of resurgent nationalism.

We're seeing walls go up again. We're seeing, you know, the same conversations.

That dominated the 1940s of who's in the in group, who's in the out group. And I think that remembering quite how.

Arbitrary so many of these borders are.

Remembering that, you know, the line between.

Us and them was drawn by someone on the other side of the world.

Who'D never been to this land, is important. And, you know, it doesn't mean that.

Things were necessarily rosy before those lines were drawn.

All of these, that, you know, there's a reason why each of these nations came into being.

There's no doubt about that.

But I think that so often we.

Take these borders as a given and assume some sort of ancient nationhood and.

Forget how contingent upon the events of.

The 1920s, 30s, 40s, 60s and 70s, in the case of Bangladesh, these really were.

[Danny Byrd]

And even before those borders were drawn, communities in South Asia, such as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, they often live with very fluid religious identities. You've mentioned, I think, in the book, that there are examples of Hindus raising Sikh sons or Christian saints being worshipped alongside Hindu goddesses. How different was religious life before Partition and what changed?

[Sam Dalrymple]

So I think across the world, to.

Some extent, you know, I mean, for most of human history, religious syncretism was really the norm, but it was particularly so in South Asia.

So you get, for example, in much of Kerala, the Virgin Mary was worshipped.

As the sister of the goddess Bhagwati.

In much of the Punjabi Khatris, Hindus.

Often raised their eldest son as a Sikh. And that's a practice that to some extent still continues in some parts of North India.

I think the first biography of the.

Prophet Muhammad in the Bengali language speaks of him as an avatar of the Hindu God Naranjana. So long before, there was a kind of definable.

And then there's all sorts of.

Kind of forest spirits that are common to all sorts of different religions. But, you know, in Islam, it'll be views, they'll be viewed as a Sufi, but in Hinduism, they'll be viewed as a. As a forest spirit, but the same character will be worshiped in the same way.

I think religion was much more fluid, but there was always a sense of difference.

And I think it's easy to again imagine this kind of rosy era of everyone getting along. I think the two coexisted, you know, different religions coexisted with one another and dealt with difference in nuanced and interesting ways.

You have a number of things that.

Gradually pull these different communities apart.

And I think one is religious based voting.

So when elections are introduced with different electorates that are based off different religious communities, that suddenly makes, you know, lobbying on behalf of one's religion much more important, etc.

And so there's all sorts of that.

Kind of stuff that you can very clearly talk about.

But I think that, you know, right the way through to the 1940s, you still had shared festivals and there were differences. You know, a lot of Pakistanis will.

Talk about how Muslims were not allowed to eat on the same plates as their Hindu neighbors, even though they might be best friends.

I think that the lines have hardened.

To such an extent that so many of the practices of pre 47 South Asia seem impossible today.

[Danny Byrd]

Finally, Sam, if there's one misunderstanding about this part of history you wish more people could let go of, or one idea you hope readers will take away from shattered lands, what would it be and why?

[Sam Dalrymple]

I think the key thing that I'd love for people to go away with is quite how similar we all are and quite how solvable a lot of.

The conflicts that have been created.

So, you know, as I mentioned, so many of the conflicts that we see.

In modern South Asia arise from these partitions. Everything from Kashmir to Baluchistan to insurgencies in northeast India, the Rohingya crisis, and.

Particularly with the India Pakistan conflict that.

I think so recently was, you know, almost brought the world to nuclear war.

I think one of the things that I'd love people to take away from the book is how many times we've.

Come close to solving the entire conflict altogether. One of the things that really surprises people about the book is throughout the.

1950S, India and Pakistan, despite partition and.

Despite the animosity between them, it shared military intelligence in order to stop communist overthrow. And so you've got kind of, you know, Indian and Pakistani spies working together.

In Burma and Malaysia, et cetera. In 1960, India and Pakistan proposed a military alliance with one another.

It was never signed, but they did sign a water treaty, which was hopefully going to be the first step to something broader. Now, obviously this all falls apart and both countries have been funding proxies in each other's countries for decades. And you know, this was, this recent conflict was caused by, you know, this terrorist attack in Kashmir that supposedly linked to, that India has claims is linked to the Pakistani government, etc.

But I think that so many times.

We'Ve come so close to resolving these conflicts.

I think one of the things that I found Fascinating is the three great religious partitions of the 20th century. The first is the partition of Ireland. Then you get the partition of India and Pakistan and then you get the.

Partition of mandate Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.

Now of these three, I think two of them have been majorly in the.

News in recent weeks in the ways.

That these legacies are continuing to bleed into the present. I think that you look at Ireland.

And you see the peace process there.

And I think it's, it's, it's rather.

Extraordinary what's been done and it shows what is possible with imagination.

And what I also didn't expect before researching this book is how much Indian politicians and Pakistani politicians were looking at.

For example, the Good Friday agreement in.

The 90s and began proposing a similar.

Solution that very almost got signed and would have allowed a kind of, you know, a borderless Kashmir region where people could cross over to both sides of the border, demilitarize zones, et cetera.

And I think Ireland needs to be looked at more.

You know, the Good Friday Agreement's very much still a work in progress, but.

The amount of money that's been now put into cross border peace initiatives, the fact that today Ireland is infinitely safer.

Than it was 30 years ago, and.

There'S so much in a way that was inconceivable 30 years ago. And I think that, you know, it is something that we should all be looking at more often when we think.

Of these other partition conflicts that continue to bleed into the present.

[Danny Byrd]

That was historian, author, filmmaker and peace activist Sam Dalrymple, whose book Shattered five Partitions in the Making of Modern Asia is out now. Sam was speaking to Danny Byrd.