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Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)
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Hello, I am Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Partition. The rapid, uncoordinated and often bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn't the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, notes that British India once spanned all the way from the Arabian Peninsula to the border with Thailand, covering South Arabia, South Asia, and burma. Yet between 1937 and 1971, the region split into various different national entities, creating the countries and borders we see today. Sam is a historian, filmmaker, and co founder of Project Astan, a peacebuilding initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by 1947 partition of India. Sam, thanks so much for coming on the show today. You know, let's start with the framing of your book, kind of, why did you want to frame this history of the region around five partitions? These five Splits, rather than just the big well known one between India and Pakistan in 47.
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Thank you so much for having me on the show. So the origin of the book really began out of a conversation that I had whilst I was researching the more famous partition, the partition of 1947. I was interviewing people from the northeast, northeast India on the borders of Myanmar about how partition affected their regions. These were, you know, hill states that had been suddenly swamped with refugees fleeing what had now become East Pakistan. And I was surprised. When I asked people about how partition affected the region, they tended to say, oh, which partition are you talking about? And I said, what? And the answer was, oh, well, we had the 1937 partition of Burma from India, the 1947 partition of India from Pakistan, and then 1971 when East Pakistan became Bangladesh. And it was a way of framing the region's history that surprised me and got me thinking. Just a month or two later, Covid hit and I was suddenly stuck at home reading books. And this documentary that I'd been planning suddenly had to be put on indefinite pause. And so I began researching this book. And I think what surprised me was the idea that the separation of Burma from India could be perceived as a partition. The idea that, you know, the Burma very rarely features in ideas of what undivided India looked like. And yet the more that I looked into it, 100 years ago today, the Raj, as you said, stretched all the way from Aden in what's now Yemen all the way to Burma, including a quarter of the world's population in a single British colony. And so the story that I wanted to look at is how five moments of border making, five partitions transformed this gigantic sort of super colony into 12 nation states over five partitions, over five decades. And so, you know, at the beginning of this story, this entire region uses a single passport and, you know, is all defended by the Indian army and is governed by the Indian civil service or political Service. And just five decades later, you've got 12. You've got a sea of 12 nation states, most of whom are hostile to one another. And so that's the story that I really wanted to look at. How, you know, I think that the story of how the British were pushed out of the region has been the focus of a lot of scholarship in recent decades. But the origin of these very varied nationalisms has received a lot less focus.
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So at its largest extent, how big was British India? What did it mean for places like Aden and Burma to be part of, quote, unquote, British India when it came to governance when it came to trade links and cultural links, when it came to movement of people like how much, how much can we really talk about this part of the world as, you know, again as British India?
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So the Raj as it was known or the Indian Empire as it was known was this kind of very varied sort of colony. You had whole regions which were directly ruled as part of British India. Now this included the city of Aden in Yemen and much of Burma in a way that, you know, Jaipur and Hyderabad and these parts that form part of modern India actually weren't part of British India. They were sort of semi independent princely states. But according to the official definitions given by the Brits, it's the Interpretation act in the 1880s that defines any region under the suzerainty of the Viceroy as being part of India. And according to this definition, this entire region was part of it. Now of course the extent to which people in these regions felt Indian varied, but at least, you know, my book opens in the 1920s when there was a growing sense amongst many people in Burma and many Arabs in Aden that you know, they were becoming Indian in some sort of fundamental sense. You know, there's a, there's this guy called Luqman, Muhammad Ali Luqman in modern day what's now Yemen, later will become one of the founding fathers of Yemen. And in his younger years he perceives himself as Indian and sees Arabs as forming an Indian ethnicity in much the same way that today, you know, we're all happy. We're thinking of Bengalis, Punjabis, Tamils and Telugu's as different Indian ethnicities. For him, Arab is an Indian ethnicity. And yet in the course of his life you can see a gradual alienation. And you know, whilst he's initially sees the Indian National Congress as a vehicle for liberation for the people of modern day Yemen, he eventually turns against this idea and identifies more with Arab nationalism. Likewise in Burma. I think a lot of people reading the book have been quite surprised at the extent of the anti separation movement in Burma. I think a lot of people today imagine that the division of Burma from India was a sort of natural one and that there was always some sort of border waiting to come into existence. And yet at the time it was considered a very, very controversial idea to an extent that we've largely forgotten today. Now, you know, in places like Dubai, would people have considered themselves Indian? It depends. A lot of the aristocrats would have, whereas a lot of the, you know, the nomads in the interior of the desert would never have considered themselves Indian and would have seen themselves more as part of this kind of Khalegi identity, that sort of Gulf identity that, you know, with people feeling a lot closer to, say, Iran or to Iraq and Basa. But there's undoubtedly this growing sense in the 1920s that people are feeling more Indian than they did before and that, you know, having now been part of the Raj for about a hundred years at this point, you know, there is this sense that Indian identity is crystallizing across the region and not just in the places that make up the modern nation state of India today.
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So what actually, what actually led to the separation of, of Burma and of Southern Arabia? What led to the separation from the British Raj? And you mean, and you mentioned there really was an anti separation movement in Burma. Like why, why was there resistance to this idea of separation?
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So the first partition as it was known at the time, comes about for a variety of reasons, but I think rather surprisingly, a lot of it has to do with how Indian nationalists are conceiving of their future nation. A lot of the nationalist movement is run by Hindus in what's now North India. And the, the kind of map that the imagined nation that they're dreaming to establish is one that matches the geographical contours of Bharat Vaj. This, this, this Hindu holy land as laid out in the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. This is a region that roughly corresponds to I guess, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, but doesn't include Burma and doesn't include Arabia. And so, you know, in the early 1930s, you have Gandhi going to Rangoon in modern day Burma and telling people, you know, this is not Bharat Varsh. This, I cannot imagine this region being a part of India under, under Swaraj, under self rule. And so Gandhi's actively campaigning against these regions remaining part of India because they don't form part of this Hindu holy land of Bharat. Now for many, particularly non Hindus in, in, in Rangoon and Aden, you know, India is a British imperial construct and they're looking essentially to inherit the steel frame of the, of, of the in from the British and the borders given to them by the British. But they're not trying to change them, they're just trying to kind of democratize this entity that already exists. So there's a lot of back and forth and ultimately the Brits throw their weight behind the separationists because they increasingly see that, you know, Indian independence might be on the horizon. And if there's already a local indigenous movement for the separation of these regions, then potentially, you know, they can shave these regions off. And then if India becomes independent, then, you know, that won't extend to Arabia and Burma and that Brits will at least hold on to these regions. So it's a kind of funny mixture between nationalist sentiment and the policies of Whitehall in London which leads to this separation. And the crucial thing is that the separation of Burma and of Arabia does not coincide with their independence. They're gaining independence from India rather than from Britain. And that's how it's seen at the time. But you know, you can look at the newspapers from the time and they're very much using the word partition.
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So I want to move now to the lead up to Indian independence, you know, kind of in the years before the Second World War and then during the Second World War. I mean, this has been a topic that, that has been written about a lot. But something about your book is that your book kind of focuses maybe puts a bit more emphasis on, on Jenna's role as much as, you know, Nehru and Gandhi normal who get, who get put forward as kind of the main players here. You know, what made, like, what makes Jenna's role different from, I guess from the leaders of the Congress Party.
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I think that Jinnah is to this day the most misunderstood figure in the entire drama. And he plays a very central role. He's the person who, you know, dreams of a nation called Pakistan and then brings it through brute force into reality in a matter of a single decade. It's an extraordinary story. But what's extraordinary about him is that as a young man he is considered, you know, the greatest ambassador for Hindu Muslim unity. The idea that he will later go on to found the world's first Islamic republic is something that I don't think anyone from the 1920s could have foreseen. It's, I think it was Patrick French who, who put it, who said that, you know, in, in, in, in India, Jinnah's a kind of arch villain, cackling away in the laughter saying kind of, you know, I want to break India. Whilst in Pakistan, he's seen as this kind of flawless founder of the nation who's always depicted in demure Islamic dress. And the fact is that he's a very different figure from either of the national tellings of his life. He's a man who kind of, you know, smoked cigarette, regularly drank whiskey and gin and is supposed to have also loved pork and ham sandwiches. So he wasn't a particularly kind of law abiding Muslim by any means. And for the first half of his life, you Know, he has an interfaith marriage. He's regarded as the ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity. The person, and I think, to an extent, overlooked by India today, definitely, and Pakistan throughout the 1910s and 20s. He is considered the most important Congress leader. He's. He's considered the most important leader of Indian nationalism. And the story of his move away from that towards saying, no, we need to, you know, keep the rights of Muslims. And, And. And he. He's convinced that India's Muslims, although a third of the population and actually the largest Muslim population on the planet, he's worried that they are going to forever be under the thumb of basically the even larger Hindu majority. And initially he's proposing, you know, that reserved seats for Muslims in Indian Parliament, et cetera. But eventually he's pushed into this idea that we need to recognize Hindus and Muslims as separate nations. I think initially he imagines it as kind of separate nations within one unifying structure, a bit like Scotland and England today or different states in the United States. But, you know, in the course of the 1940s, everything begins to fall apart. And by 1947, he is the founder of the first Islamic Republic. It's an extraordinary change, and I think that his story is one that everyone finds unfamiliar because it's very rarely been told in its full entirety.
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So we come to the Second World War, which accelerates the timeline for independence, and then I think, in the immediate aftermath of the war, kind of the state that Britain finds itself in makes the timeline independence even faster. I mean, how does the war and its aftermath kind of speed up the already kind of rapid path to independence for both India and Pakistan?
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I think World War II changes everything in a way that I think, again, India and Pakistan slightly overlook. I think a lot of really good literature has come out in recent years on the role of India in World War II. And the fact that neither India or Pakistan or Bangladesh particularly want to talk about its World War II experiences, because, you know, in Britain, it's clear that, you know, we are fighting against Nazism and, you know, we're on the side of the angels, et cetera. Whereas from the Indian perspective, it was, do we fight for British imperialists or for Nazis? It's a much more complicated, you know, decision of who to fight for. And what you get is that a lot of the Congress Party refuses to fight for Britain unless Britain grants it independence and they can fight alongside together as allies, India and Britain arm in arm, but they refuse to fight for Britain as subjugates. And it's whilst Most of the Congress is in prison that you get the rise of the Muslim League suddenly Jinnah and his Pakistan demand. Jinnah is able to go on canvassing for votes for most of the war whilst most of his opposition is in prison. And it leads to a very different political map at the end, by the end of the war. Now, at the same time as this, I think, you know, by the end of the war, Britain is broke, London's been blitzed, Coventry's more or less been razed to the ground, and, you know, Britain's barely able to keep the lights off. And so there is increasing sense that, you know, Britain just doesn't have the money to keep things on the road in India. At the same time, you know, British soldiers and Indian soldiers have been at war for six years. And so the idea of, you know, putting down any rebellions in India just. Just seems like nonsense to most of the British public. Like, why would we want to get involved in another war? Let's just get rid of India altogether. And so there's suddenly a lot more of an appetite amongst the British public that if we need to give India its independence, then that's preferable to overseeing a potential civil war. And so the Brits suddenly want to. You know, India's been fighting for its independence for almost a. Almost a century at this point. But suddenly, very rapidly, the British public kind of gives in and it becomes an imminent possibility. And suddenly the question goes from. Rather than, you know, when can we have independence? It becomes a question of, okay, independence is coming now.
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Who.
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Who is representative of the Indian people and should it all remain united once Britain leaves?
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Right, right. And then, like, Monbatten shows up and he's like, what? Independence is happening in three months? Guys like, like, or however. However short it was. Yeah. And the whole thing just seems to come. Seems to come together extremely quickly, which, of course leads to a lot of problems.
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Yeah, no, I mean, Malbatton is basically given the job that he has to get Britain out as quickly as possible and with as few British casualties as possible. And that he does remarkably successfully. You know, there are very few British casualties in the course of 1947, and yet there is something like, you know, 10 to 12 million Indians and Pakistanis who are forced from their homes and 1 to 3 million deaths in the course of that year. Just none of them are British. Mountbatten's decision to speed things up has been questioned from a lot of sides. And I think, you know, some people see it as some divide and rule ploy. I don't I think it was partly due to the fact that Mountbatten just wanted to get home. He was convinced that he'd be adjudicating over a civil war very soon. I think that also there's the fact that by this point, Britain didn't even really control the Indian intelligence services anymore. That too had been Indianised and was actually run by Siddharth Patel from the Indian National Congress. And so Patel actually controls Mountbatten's access to intelligence all the way through his viceroyalty. And Mountbatten himself is very convinced that he's not being told the entire story. And so he very quickly makes the rationale that I'm just going to get. Get us out of India as quickly as possible and, you know, come what may.
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So India's independent. We have India and Pakistan. You kind of. Then the next, the next thing that happens, the next thing that kind of changes all these borders is kind of the very rapid and often coerced assimilation of all of these princely states throughout South Asia into either India or Pakistan. And we've had books on this topic on the show before we had Dethroned by John Zabriki, which goes into this detail a lot, but it's very messy and it's not particular, like, neither. I mean, mostly India doesn't come off particularly glamorous, glamorously in these negotiations, but Pakistan's also kind of leaning on people, too. But, like, how, how, how do India and Pakistan just, like, within a matter of years, have basically swallowed up all of these. All of these princely states.
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Yeah, it's. I mean, it's not just swallowing up, I think. Well, I call it. I call it the fourth of my five partitions, because 80% of the modern India Pakistan border was not drawn by Cyril Radcliffe. Cyril Radcliffe's this British lawyer who's tasked with dividing British India on the basis of Hindu and Muslim majority districts. And he divides Punjab and he divides Bengal. And, you know, I think it's 20% only of the modern India Pakistan border. The Punjab section is drawn by Silver Radcliffe, even though we call the entire border the Radcliffe line, actually 80% of it is determined by the decisions of these princely states, which is the princely states are given the option. You can join India, you can join Pakistan, you can join another state, or you can go independent entirely. And I think that there's a kind of almost forgotten fact that many states did remain independent. I mean, if you look at the list of princely states that's issued by the British government every year, it's called the Al Khabnama. And the Al Qabnama opens alphabetically with the princely state of Abu Dhabi and then goes on to mention Dubai and Bhutan and all these states which have survived into the 21st century. So it's not as surprising as I think we often pretend it is that many states did try to go independent and had to be gobbled up. The other thing is that the although British India was divided on the basis of religion, princely India was not. And almost all of the border states shopped around for the best deal they could get. They weren't making their decision on the basis of religion. So you get, for example, Hindu majority Jodhpur having extensive negotiations with the government of Pakistan to see what's on offer if it joins Pakistan. Likewise Jaisalmer, the lovely desert city in Rajasthan today. Now at exactly the same time, the state of Bhavalpur that now forms part of Pakistan actually spent months in negotiations with India, seeing what India might be able to offer it. And then of course, you've got the Khasi states in modern day Meghalaya that you know, are neither Hindu nor Muslim. And so they basically initially try to offer their accession to Pakistan, but Pakistan loses its assession. The accession papers never gets back to the Kasi states. And so three weeks later, the Kasi states accede to India instead. And thus today, you know, these Khasi states are part of the modern state of Meghalaya in India rather than as part of Bangladesh. So there's all sorts of different ways that that border could have gone. And it's important to return agency to these 30 odd princes who, you know, sat on the borderlands and made choices about where their country, where their states would join. And, you know, 20 states joined Burma. And we often forget that you have, you know, a lot of discussions on which states independence should be allowed. So, for example, Nepal and Bhutan and Sikkim, which does today form part of India, all negotiate for their independence to be recognized. And it is. But then that same independence is not granted to Kashmir because both India and Pakistan want Kashmir. And I think so many of the great conflicts in modern South Asia actually originate from the dramas around different princely states accessions to these countries. So, you know, the conflict in Kashmir is the classic one, but also the conflict in Balochistan, which is now part of Pakistan. But, you know, there you had a case where the state parliament voted to remain independent, but then eventually the Khan, the ruler, is pressured into joining Pakistan. And the question comes, do we trust parliament or do we trust the King the Khan. And, you know, that's the origin of the Baluchi independence movement that continues to this day. Likewise, in northeast India, you've got the state of Manipur. And likewise, the conflict there is rooted in the fact that the Maharaja of Manipur was pressured into joining India, some say at gunpoint, although it's questionable whether it was actually at gunpoint. But, you know, there's a sense of being pressured into the Indian Union or the Pakistani Union amongst many of these states. And therein lies the origins of so many of the region's conflicts.
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So I want to ask about one of these events that I didn't know very much about before reading the book, because I've read. I read about partition, I read about the Bangladesh war, but what I didn't know very much about was, was how places like Yemen became basically spun out of the British Empire. So, so how did that happen? I mean, how did places like Aden, like, like Yemen become independent?
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So it's, it's rather fascinating. So, obviously in the 1930s, you know, in the beginning of the 1930s, the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and North Yemen, are all part of India. You've got directly ruled British India that extends to the city of Aden and little islands like Perim Island. But the majority of that region are princely states, just like Jaipur, Hyderabad, Kashmir, etc. And the separation of the Arabian States begins in 1937, the same day, April Fool's Day, 1937, the same. Same day that Burma is separated off Aden and the states of modern day Yemen are separated off and handed over to the Colonial office. And in April 1947, months before Indian independence, the Persian Gulf states are also separated off. So were they to remain as part of India, it's feasible that they would today be provinces of either India or Pakistan. And there's all sorts of interesting quotes about. I think it's the British Legation in Tehran who writes, it was with surprising unanimity that the officials of the government of India told us that the Persian Gulf was of absolutely no interest to the government of India. So the Brits essentially offer the region to the government of India. But the government of India sees these as, you know, difficult and expensive protectorates that it would have to spend money on. Of course, oil hasn't been discovered yet, and in some, in some way, this is the greatest missed opportunity for the governments of India and Pakistan. But anyway, so after Indian independence and Pakistani independence, the Gulf states and the Yemeni states essentially remain part of the British Empire. They remain protectorates and it's, it's, it's known as the Arabian Raj. So the Raj, there's a, there's a line by one of these Belsk scholars who says, you know, just as Goa was the tail end of Portuguese India, this little, this little tiny bit of Portuguese India that had remained into the 20th century. So we must imagine the Gulf state is essentially the last bit of the Raj that was still running right until the 60s. What changes is the rise of Arab nationalism and the rise of oil wealth and increasingly the region gets pulled into the kind of proxy wars between Britain and Egypt's NASA who and in the course of the 60s you get revolutionaries basically trying to overthrow these monarchies which is perceived of as British puppets and take over the region and create new Arab nationalist states. So that succeeds essentially in modern day Yemen where I think it's kind of 20 odd states are essentially unified by a bunch of republican Arab nationalists and all of these sheikhs and sultans are forced to flee or killed by these. And they then establish what they call south yemen out of 20 different states. But then in the east the GCC states basically managed to unify their policies towards these revolutionaries and push back the tide of revolution. So you know, these revolutionaries like the NLF and Flow AG and all these, there's a bunch of different, an acronyms of ever increasing number of letters but these states very much these revolutionaries rather aimed to spread their, their, their revolution all the way from Aden to Kuwait was the line. So including you know, Yemen, Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Bahrain, all the way north to Kuwait. But the monarchy of the eastern Arabian Peninsula basically managed to push back the tide of revolution. And so those states remain to this day where you know, Yemen today, you know the princely states that once existed there, Lahej and Qaiadi state and all the rest of them have largely been forgotten today outside of the region. Whereas once, you know, I mean if you went to the early 1960s, Aden was a far more important city than Dubai was and you know, Kaiti state was far more important than Qatar in terms of global economy, et cetera. But in the course of the 1960s that completely shifts. And so in 1971, the same year as Bangladesh will gain independence, the Brits finally pull out of this entire region and particularly the states of the Trucial states as they were known, form a federation which is the modern day UAE in order to hold back the tide of revolution and, and coordinate a joint response to the threat of revolution. And that's the state that obviously survives to this day.
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We've now reached kind of the final partition covered in your book, which is the war in East Pakistan, which becomes then the Bangladesh's war of independence. Maybe just briefly, how did Pakistan kind of manage to tear itself apart? I mean, it does seem kind of unworkable having West Pakistan, East Pakistan, have most of the people live in East Pakistan, but all the political powers in the West Pakistan. It just seems entirely. It seemed like it would have been pretty unworkable to begin with, but. But how actually does do these two bits of Pakistan split apart?
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So the, the reason that Bangladesh was part of Pakistan at all was because, you know, the idea of partition was that you were going to carve out the Muslim majority regions of the subcontinent. And there were Muslim majority regions in the east and the west of the subcontinent. And so these two regions become part of a single new country. And although they're divided by thousands of miles, I think that there was a hope in the 1950s that they would be able to come together and forge a single new nation. And as you mentioned, there was a larger population in the east, but most of the military recruitment happened in the West. And that's the crucial thing because actually the first decade, it's often forgotten how close the two wings come to kind of merging into a single national culture. Four out of the first eight prime ministers of Pakistan were Bengalis from East Pakistan. But everything begins to change after the military takes over Pakistan in the 1960, the first military coup. And now with the military running Pakistan, suddenly you have the, the and most recruitment happening in the West. I think it's only 1% military came from the East. And so it's the military coup, in a sense, that makes East Pakistan feel like a colony because suddenly there are no East Pakistanis in government. Suddenly the majority of the Pakistani, of the Pakistani population has been pushed out of governance of the country. And so this begins. What will become the, you know, Bengali nationalism essentially. And it all culminates with the first, the first general election that the country has seen in 1970, culminates with the victory of a Bengali nationalist called Mujibur Rehman, who himself in 1947, had been a very big Pakistani nationalist. He'd actually fought on the streets for the establishment of Pakistan, but now he's turned against that state and had actually, you know, he'd contacted Indian intelligence services several times a decade earlier. Now the Pakistani government, because of his earlier interactions with Indian intelligence, refuses to hand over power and they stage a military crackdown on his party and Begin just basically kind of shooting anyone with association with his political movement. And this will culminate in one of the worst conflicts that the 20th century saw. The statistics remain notoriously unreliable. But 1/12 of the Pakistani population becomes a refugee in India and anywhere between kind of, you know, so I think it's between 30,000 and 3 million civilian casualties in the course of a single year. So the Pakistani army goes, you know, and shoots up college students in Dhaka University with associations to the political party that's just won the election. It goes. I think there's. It goes and just shoots any Bengali officers in the army. And there's a. There's a line from a. A war crimes committee run by the government of Pakistan which finds that, you know, one Pakistani commander just flicked his fingers and killed an entire group of Bengali soldiers. So huge brutalities and eventually Bengali politicians and soldiers and students begin to coalesce under the banner of the Mukti Bahini, which is kind of Bengali liberation movement that again, eventually finds funding from the Indian government and will go on to eventually establish the nation state of Bangladesh.
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A
So in much of this interview, we, We've kind of talked about the, the big picture stuff, you know, the movement of, of borders and, you know, state leaders and stuff. But, you know, the 47th partition is known for its great human cost. You mentioned that, that the war in Bangladesh was extremely bloody. And I think all these other partitions, even, even the less prominent ones and even the, the ones that maybe in London just looked like kind of moving things around on a map. Like, even the, the Burma partitions kind of had its own. Led to its own movement of people. I mean, what was some of the human costs of all of these different partitions? What did this whole region's society look like kind of at the end of all of this movement and forced movement of people?
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C
Well, I mean, each individual refugee crisis that. I think there are three or four major refugee crises in the course of the book, and each one is staggering in scale. So, you know, the refugees from Burma to India after the first partition were at the time one of the largest recorded migrations in history. It had been in about 366,000 men, women and children. Now, compare that to the migration of Hindus and Muslims in 1947, which was roughly 12 million people. So it's just an enormously larger scale. And I think that, you know, today you ask people from India, oh, you know, like cobalt partition, and often south Indians say, oh, that affected north India, but it didn't really affect us down here in the south. And nothing could be further from the truth because the number of people displaced in the course of Hyderabad's attempt to remain independent. For example, the number of people displaced over the borders of Hyderabad and forced to flee to Pakistan is three times the number of refugees generated by the Palestinian nakba the same year. So it's an enormous scale of people. And then, of course, As I mentioned, 10 million refugees generated in the course of 1971. So each of these has had a profound impact in shaping the furies and animosities of South Asia today. And I think you can see it in the geopolitics. India and Pakistan have nuclear arsenals pointing to one another as a result of these conflicts. And, you know, it's not a surprise today that the larger, you know, you can't see the Great Wall of China from space today, but you can see the India Pakistan border from space because it is so brightly lit up with fog lights and satellite command systems and, you know, is meters thick and the most heavily guarded borders in the world. Compare that to the India Bangladesh border, which is the longest border wall in the world. You know, each of these partitions would lead these wounds that continue to bleed conflict into the present. And I think so many of the conflicts of the world from, you know, the conflict of a Kashmir, the Rohingya genocide, the Gulf War conflicts in Balochistan or Northeast India, each of these has their roots in the partitions that I talk about in the book.
- [41:08]
A
You know, how avoidable were some of these divisions. You know, it does seem in, in reading, reading your book, that there was, you know, a lot of miscommunications, a lot of grudges. A lot of it seemed like they would come very, very close to a deal and then someone would get pissed off about something and the whole thing would fall apart. I. I guess, like, is, is there a world where these various different leaders could have worked something out or in the end or would do you see these partitions as being somewhat inevitable?
- [41:44]
C
Yeah, no. So I don't see any of them as inevitable. And the date that I chose to open the book, which is in the late 1920s, just under 100 years ago today. The reason I chose that date is I think it's the kind of end of the moment when none of these partitions is inevitable. Once you reach the 1930s, then, you know, Burmese separation begins to progress, become inevitable. But as late as 1929, it is still completely conceivable that this entire region would remain united even if it eventually gained independence from Britain. So I think that, yes, like, right until, you know, I think nations like nationalism often seems inevitable to the people who live in the nations that we're talking about. Um, and yet it's amazing how late so many of the ideas, so many of these nationalisms developed just to bring Pakistan up, for example. And, you know, it's very odd to realize that it's only a decade and a half before Pakistani independence that the name Pakistan is used for the first time in history. No one's ever thought of having a nation like that. And Jinnah, who becomes the founding father of only comes round to the idea seven years before its eventual independence. Now, as late as one year before its independence, Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, is willing for Pakistan to be a federal unit within a united India. He's not necessarily looking for a separate nation state. And yet by about, I'd say, you know, August 1946, one year before partition actually happens. That's when it becomes inevitable. But there was a complete open field where it didn't necessarily have to go this way. And I think that one of the things that I try to emphasize in the book is the fact that none of these were inevitable. There is a strange world where Dubai was part of an independent India and where, if you look at the records from the 1920s, I think most like this region could have been divided up. But I think more people were worried about South Indian separatism in the 1920s than they were about Muslim separatism from the Raj. And that's, to me, what's extraordinary is how the sorts of things that we now, you know, like, I think so much of the history of this region is done with the hindsight that Pakistan will eventually emerge, Bangladesh will eventually emerge, etc. And we don't often stop to think of how actually the states that most people would have assumed would gain independence from the 1920s would be Hyderabad state and Kashmir state. And, you know, today we often look at Kashmir, for example, and say, oh, you know, should it have joined India or should it have joined Pakistan? And very few people look at the fact that for most of the 1920s, the politics of Kashmir state looked far more towards the Soviet Union than it did to either Karachi or Delhi.
- [44:49]
A
So how much of this, I guess, how much of these old connections between these various parts of the former British Raj do you think you can still see today? You know, even. Even amid these, like, tight national borders? Like, how many of these of these connections do you think are still visible or still in living memory? I mean, I think of the very close economic connections between the Gulf and South Asia. That's kind of a different thing. But, you know, and that's. But that's still based off of, you know, centuries of historical links between these two different regions. But I guess, like, where can you still see, like, the evidence of this once, like, giant British and like, of this giant British India? Where do you still see that evidence today?
- [45:43]
C
I think it comes up in the most unexpected places. You can visit Kolkata today. For example, if you go to Eden Gardens near the great Stadium, you'll see a Burmese pagoda taken from Prome during the Raj. And it's sitting there just down the road from, you know, one of the largest mosques in South Asia. And so, you know, you get these constant reminders of the scale. I think there is no more evocative thing than, you know, anyone I know from Delhi who's ever gone to visit Lahore in what's now Pakistan is constantly shocked that this is a city more like Delhi than any other. It's far more like Delhi than, say, you know, Agra or Jaipur or any of the other cities of North India are. They are twin cities in some sense. And I think we're still living with a generation who remembers just about these connections. So, you know, one of the, One of the tragedies I think is that I think it's Anam Zakaria, the Pakistani oral historian, who wrote that of all the. All the people that she interviewed, it's always the younger generation that's got more animosity towards their neighbors, towards, you know, Indians or Pakistanis, because they are the ones who didn't know what it was like before this country had become the other. You know, like the elder generation, although they've lived through these traumatic partitions, they remember a time before these partitions had impinged upon the landscape. And so there's more of a sense of understanding towards the other side. And I think you can look at that. You know, one of the things that surprises me is even as late as the 1971 war, you still have. After the war is over, I think it's India's General Nagra who's interviewed by the observer. They ask, oh, have you met the Pakistani surrendered General Niaz yet? And he kind of sadly replies, oh, yes, we knew each other at college. It's so tragic what's happened since, you know, they'd last seen each other 20, 30 years ago. So I think within people's memories, within people's, you know, the food people cook, there's always these traces of connections to the other side. You know, one of the biggest restaurants in Delhi is Pind Baluchi. Baluchi, named after Baluchistan, across the border in Pakistan. And, you know, you can go to Hyderabad and you can visit Karachi Bakery. Likewise, there's so many streets in Pakistan or Bangladesh that still betray these connections. And it just takes a small walk around downtown Yangon, erstwhile Rangoon in Burma, and you'll find, you know, the old Bengal bank or the old Sindh Navigation Company headquarters. And, you know, you can just see these connections in the heritage that's left over in the food that people eat. I think you can go to bits of Gujarat today and, you know, people will still be eating Khao Swey because of their time living in Burma. And so it's often in food, in architecture, in family memory, that these relationships are still remembered.
- [48:56]
A
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Five Partitions in the Making of Modern Asia. Sam, I have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
- [49:18]
C
Thank you. So people can follow me online at Travels of Samwise. I do a weekly substack on various historical architecture. I also do a thing for Architectural Digest that comes out every month or two. And then what's next? I think there's a possibility of another comparative work on partition, potentially to do with the breakup of French Indochina. But I think more immediate future. There's a lost city somewhere in India's Deccan region that me and my friend Anirudh think we're desperately trying to locate. And so you may see more of that in the near future efforts to locate the lost medieval capital.
- [50:08]
A
So you can follow me, Nicholas Gordon, on Twitter ickrigordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O N. You can go to asianreviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter at bookreviewsasia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more author interviews at the New books network and newbooksnetwork.com we're on all of your podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends to support us entering those running in around and about Asia. Stay tuned for more news and who's coming up on the show. But before then, Sam, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
- [50:44]
C
Thank you for having me.