Reading the book’s title, one immediately thinks of the Partition of 1947. Since the subtitle mentions ‘partition’ in the plural, one might further think that it additionally deals with the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 at most. This is where Sam Dalrymple’s book stands apart—he not only challenges the popular but limited understanding of the ‘Indian Empire,’ but also painstakingly narrates the stories of the different partitions that unmade the British Raj and, in turn, shaped the Asia we know today.
Dalrymple’s starting point is the Indian Empire of the 1920s. Contrary to common perception, this was not a territory limited to present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; instead, it stretched from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Modern-day Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait were all associated with the Indian Empire, either as part of British India or as princely states.
Yet within fifty years, five partitions unravelled the British Raj, carving out states once unimaginable. Shattered Lands tells the story, politics, and human cost behind these five partitions—the separation of Burma and then the Arabian Peninsula from the Indian Empire, the India-Pakistan partition, the subsequent partition of Princely India, and the separation of East and West Pakistan. ‘The collapse of the Indian Empire has remarkably never been told as a single story,’ Dalrymple writes, setting out the ambitious scope of his work.
An engaging and meticulously researched history of Asia follows, built on deep archival research, extensive secondary literature, and private interviews. Dalrymple provides deeper insights and, at times, entirely new perspectives on historical events, seamlessly weaving personal stories into the broader narrative. For instance, he links worsening racial relations in post-separation Burma and the 1943 Bengal famine to economist Amartya Sen’s lived experiences, lending the account both substance and sensitivity.
Despite Dalrymple’s best attempts at balanced coverage of each partition, the section on the 1947 Partition stands out as the most compelling. Rich in detail, it is also where the most poignant stories appear. One learns that, witnessing communal violence, Hindu poet Fikr Taunsvi wished he could place Jinnah and Nehru in ordinary people’s shoes to see if they would still demand Pakistan and Hindustan. Or that, after enduring the horrors of Partition, including the murder of his daughter by his neighbour, Taunsvi decided to move to India, prompting his friend Sahir Ludhianvi to say: ‘I apologise on behalf of all Islam, for you could not live here.’ Stories like these are a testament to Dalrymple’s skill as a historian and storyteller, and to the immense research and labour invested in Shattered Lands. The book emerges not only as a history of a continent, empire, borders, and political elites, but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a history of the people.