In “Shattered Lands,” historian Sam Dalrymple explores the early 20th-century political entity known as the Indian Empire — a large region of Asia that actually included present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma (Myanmar), Nepal, Bhutan, and several Gulf states (Yemen, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait).
Famously regarded as the “crown jewel” of the British Empire, the territories of the Indian Empire governed by the British Raj stretched from the Red Sea to Southeast Asia. The region was later divided and reshaped into five major political partitions, forming the modern countries of South Asia and parts of the Middle East. Shattered Lands explores the story behind this transformation.
In an interview with India Currents, Sam Dalrymple, a Scot who was raised in New Delhi, talked to Anjana Nagarajan-Butaney about what first drew him to the subject, and the surprising things he discovered while telling the story of the past.
Click on the link to listen to the interview.
This transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.
Anjana : Hi, Sam, lovely to meet you today. When people hear Partition, they think India and Pakistan —what’s the most widely believed myth about Partition that your research has challenged, and what surprised you most when you widened the lens to include Burma and the Gulf?
Sam: Well, I think the greatest myth is just this idea of undivided India consisting of just India and Pakistan. Many people also know that it included Bangladesh. But I think far fewer people realize that 100 years ago today, British India — the Raj, stretched from what’s now Yemen — the city of Aden was the western most city of the Bombay presidency and as far east as Burma — and included within it a quarter of the world’s population — the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Parsee populations on the planet. And there are not just 2, but 12 nation-states that have emerged from what was once Britain’s Indian empire, which were produced through not just one but five separate moments of Partition.
Anjana: What got you started on this journey to delve into this topic?
Sam: So I have grown up in Delhi. My family moved there around 2004, and I’ve kind of been based there ever since. But I think the shock of visiting Lahore for the first time, which was around 2016, was really the beginning of this whole journey.
I grew up in Delhi in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, when we suddenly had terror drills put alongside fire drills, and when India and Pakistani relationships were at their kind of lowest. And so to visit Pakistan for the first time and to find a city Lahore that is not just kind of quite similar to Delhi, but arguably more similar to Delhi than any other city I’d ever been to — more similar to Delhi than Jaipur or Lucknow is to Delhi – in social ways as well as historical ways and the food, etc — I think shocked me to my core.
In the last days of university, I co-founded a group called Project Dastaan that helped reconnect families divided by the partition with my co-founders, Sparsh(Ahuja) and Saadia(Gardezi), and Ameena (Malak). And it was around COVID that we were planning to do a documentary about this topic, but that got, you know, cut short because of COVID — crossing borders and interviewing 95-year-olds was both quite difficult in the COVID years. And so it became a book instead.
But I think the most important thing that led to this book was also this moment when we were trying to expand the discussions around partition to Northeastern India. And there was this man from Tripura in Northeastern India who I interviewed, and when I asked him about how Partition affected the Northeast, he responded with this line — which Partition are you talking about —1937, 47, or 71?
From the Delhi perspective, there is only one Partition. And yet, if you are living in the Northeast, multiple ruptures have created the region as we know it today. And I think it was that conversation which really changed so much of what I expected and maybe began to try and challenge this idea of a singular Partition with a capital P, and look at the multiple ruptures that have happened in South Asian history.
Anjana: Many national histories present the creation of modern states as inevitable. Your book suggests that chance, improvisation, and actually the personalities of people played a huge role. Would there have been enough similarity in culture and politics to keep the broadest idea of the Raj together?
Sam: I think that by the 1910s, by the early 20th century basically – very few nationalists were asking for the entire Raj to be maintained as a single colony. There were some people I found fascinating — memoirs of kind of you know Burmese Indian nationalists, or Indian nationalists living in what’s now Yemen who did argue for this entire region to be liberated from the British and maintain its breadth.
But even Gandhi, for example, argued that the contours of an independent India should be that of Bharatvarsh — this geography set out in the ancient epics and not you know what this random conglomeration of British conquered territory.
But I think, as you said, there is this extraordinary sense that so much of the borders that we now take for granted as some almost eternal divisions between populations are so modern, so recent. I think it’s extraordinary that the very first use of the word Pakistan occurred as late as 1933, which was just a decade and a half before this country was magicked into existence. And that as late as 1947 July — one month before independence — newspapers like the Daily Herald suspected that cities such as Shimla, Delhi, and Kolkata would all become part of Pakistan and not India.
So, you know, the nation-states that we see on the map today were by no means inevitable. And I think each of these states has these closing doors moments before, when anything is possible— but after which, suddenly history is set on a very specific track, and there’s no possibility of any other divergence.
Anjana Why would people in Yemen want to be part of the Indian Raj —I can understand Burma, there’s literally a border right there with India?
Sam: So Yemen had been conquered by Britain and attached to India from a very early stage. And there was this far more interlinkage culturally, I think, than we tend to realize today.
Aden became the westernmost city of the Bombay Presidency, and for over a century, it was the westernmost city of Bombay. It was a city that was kind of built by Parsee industrialists from Gujarat. Alongside Arabic, the second language of the city was Gujarati, and the entire aristocracy was married into the Nizam of Hyderabad’s family. So much of Yemen was actually ruled from Mehdipatnam on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
This is a history that’s largely forgotten today, but lingers on in our imagination, in dishes such as Haleem. Haleem is a Yemeni dish that was brought to the Deccan by one of these Yemeni aristocratic families, mixed with Dakhni spices from Telangana, and became the culinary masterpiece that we know and love today.
I think the linkages between India and Arabia have been largely forgotten, and yet, right into the 1960s, the language of the Omani army was Urdu, not Arabic, and you know, the bits of Eastern Yemen continue to patronize Hindustani classical music and can speak in Dakhni Urdu right into the 1960s.
Many of these sultans and sheikhs of the GCC states were actually educated in places like Mayo College, Rajasthan. And so these links go far deeper than I think we often realize.
Some of the northern states, Qatar and Kuwait in particular, were integrated into the Raj much later, and so they had less of this Indian identity.
But particularly in the city of Aden, there’s a series of these guys who later become the founding fathers of Yemen, particularly this guy, Muhammad Ali Luqman, who writes all these articles on imagining a future India where the Arabian states remain a part of the country, and where Arab is an Indian ethnicity alongside Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, etc.
I think there has been this migration over the Arabian Sea for 1000s of years, and in some sense, the imagined distinction of this coast and that coast is a far more recent time. If you were to look in the 1700s, coastal Gujarat was far more similar to coastal Arabia than it was to its interior, because they were made up of the same itinerant travelers who were trading across the sea.
Anjana: And it’s the same fascinating story in Burma — it’s people from Tamil Nadu and Bengal, who were working there and enmeshed in that culture too, right?
Sam: So Burma, I think — because of the way that the Burmese military has kind of destroyed its economy and taken it outside the international system for almost a century — we forget Burma’s quite central place in the world 100 years ago
There were more people, particularly Indians, sailing across the Bay of Bengal in search of jobs than there were sailing across the Atlantic Ocean. So the Burmese dream overtook the American dream in 1933 — Rangoon overtakes New York City as the largest emigration/immigration port in the world, one of the most diverse places in the world.
But it’s because of that that there is this backlash, as increasingly you need to know either Bengali, Urdu, or Tamil if you want to get ahead in business in Rangoon, and not the Burmese language.
That being said, it’s fascinating, but as late as the 1930s, most Burmese politicians are arguing against separation. It’s Hindu nationalists in North India who are arguing for its separation so that Bharatvarsh can be unified.
But you know, U Ottama, who is arguably the most important early nationalist figure in Burmese history — spends the latter half of his life arguing that Burma is an integral part of India and has been ever since the Buddha’s followers carried Buddhism from Bihar to Burma and that these lands —there is no moment when Indian civilization becomes Burmese civilization — it gradually goes from the Bengali world through the Naga world into Kachin world, and then finally, the Burmese world. This is a continuum of culture, these nationalists argued, and it’s only really in the late 1930s that this very different trajectory occurs between the two countries. I think, really, one of the most fascinating bits of the book.
The Partition continues the assumption that this is a clean break, but overlooks the fact that almost all of the border communities would later rise up against their respective governments because of the fact that this border divided them in two. 1/3 of Nagas live in Burma. The Rohingya speak a dialect of Bangla and were persecuted because of that. You know, 1/3 of Mizos live in what’s now Burma. And so these are not distinct cultures for people who live on the Borderlands.
For people living in Delhi, it’s very easy to say — well, they’re entirely different. But for another, whose other half of their community lives on the other side of that border — it’s a very real division of a single culture, just as India and Pakistan divide Punjabis into two.
Anjana: Did your research reveal a different side of any leader whose story is typically taught in the classrooms, or moments where the historical record contradicted the dominant narrative we’ve all been taught?
Sam: I think both Gandhi and Jinnah were fascinatingly different — I think both of them, the way that the two men evolved, I found rather fascinating. Because in the 1910s, Jinnah is regarded as the primary ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity by Congresswoman Suraj Naidu, whilst (Jinnah) eventually leaves Congress because he thinks that Gandhi is bringing religion into politics. Forty years later, they could have done a swap over.
Suddenly, Gandhi is leading Hindu-Muslim unity marches, whereas Jinnah is calling for the creation of a Muslim majority state. And I found the way that the two men sort of cross paths in their political ideology and change very gradually but very purposefully in their careers, fascinating.
I think that in both India and Pakistan and indeed Bangladesh, these leaders are taught as if they always have a driving plan — as if Jinnah’s early ideas of Pakistan are the same as his ideas in late 1947 — as if Gandhi’s ideas in the 20s are the same as his ideas in the 40s.
And what I found fascinating about both is that their political ideas evolve to an extraordinarily massive degree over the course of 40 years. And I don’t think that the Gandhi and Jinnah of the 1910s are the same as the Gandhi and Jinnah of the 1940s.
Anjana: Do you think we’re entering a new era of borders and partitions globally, and what lessons do you think the collapse of the British Indian Empire matters the most for today’s geopolitical conflicts?
Sam: I think we’re living through a moment of resurgent nationalism. The promise of globalization that we’ve been living in for the last two decades is receding rapidly— this kind of supposedly rules-based order, and we are seeing the reaffirmation of these borders — the continued onslaught against the Rohingya minority — continued onslaughts of all sorts of minorities across the subcontinent.
Actually, we are seeing, you know, as well as obviously, the US-Mexico border being built physically. We are seeing one of the even larger border building projects currently being built in both Bangladesh and Myanmar, in terms of, you know, the breadth of the kilometers of fencing that have been built around the subcontinent.
The India-Pakistan border, which, of course, just brought us to the brink of all-out war between nuclear powers just last May in a terrifying war, is now visible from space. This line created to divide Hindus from Muslims is now a visible scar etched onto the surface of the globe — so lit up by fog lights and satellite command systems. It is the only wall visible from space. You can’t actually see the Great Wall of China from space, but you can see the India-Pakistan border from space.
And I think you know, what is extraordinary of course, is the way that people continue to resist these divisions. I think it’s extraordinary that when Indians and Pakistanis go abroad, aside from their governments and militaries — when Indians and Pakistanis go abroad, they almost immediately become best friends. They all go to the same parties, eat the same food, listen to the same music, and you know, the same can’t be said for other warring powers across the globe. Ukrainians and Russians do not do this. Israelis and Palestinians do not do this. This is unique to the subcontinent, and that gives me hope. But I think that we are living through a resurgent moment of nationalism.
Anjana: What do you think —if the British Empire in India hadn’t collapsed the way it did because of World War Two, etc, what alternate map of Asia might we see today?
Sam: So I think that the best example of this is that both Nehru and Aung San recognized that there were many nations within the subcontinent and beyond, each with their own sort of sense of self-determination. Even Jinnah saw this. And there was a lot of talk in the 1930s and even the early 1940s of a sort of United States of South Asia — that these countries would be recognized as separate nation states, but worked together, perhaps as a sort of proto European Union or something.
I think one of the more intriguing things about Jinnah is that his early idea of Pakistan, before Direct Action Day — I think that he envisaged a Pakistan-India relationship more similar to Scotland and England — separate nations, but unified within a singular nation state — not the hard, firm border that we see today. I think it’s prescient that he never sold his house in Bombay. He thought he’d retire there, and his daughter actually remained there. The Bhuttos — Zulfikar Ali Bhutto remained in India until, I think, the early 1950s and many you know Dalit leaders remained in what became Bangladesh until the early 1950s. There’s this assumption that the border would not be as hard as it became.
Anjana: That leads to my personal question. My husband is Sindhi —his parents were young children when they were refugees who came by ship from Karachi to Bombay, lived in camps, then eventually moved to Delhi. For many Hindu Sindhis, there is no homeland to return to. What have you heard from that community and their experiences while you’ve been doing your Dastaan project, and others that help us rethink borders and belonging?
Sam: I think Sindhis are just one of numerous communities that have been displaced and whose identity is rapidly diminishing as a result of that. Of course, Sindh still exists — there are still Hindus there, but the vast majority of Sindhi Hindus are now losing their language as they assimilate into other Marathi, Gujarati, or Hindi speaking communities, mainly in Gujarat and Maharashtra, but also elsewhere.
I think that this is just one of numerous examples of this. I know a lot of friends from Saraiki speaking bits of Pakistan who migrated to India talk about similar things. I know a lot of Pakistani friends whose family spoke Magdhi or other Bihari dialects, or perhaps Tamil Muslims who migrated to Pakistan, whose languages are increasingly lost. And of course, back in Tamil Nadu, there is still a small Muslim population, but the culture of the Tamil Muslim world is rapidly diminishing.
I think the Sindhi community is arguably the largest of these communities that has been decimated as they are forced to assimilate into the new Indian nation-states. And of course, you know, there are still Jhulelal temples dotted across modern India, but even the rituals there occasionally find themselves under fire from more standardized versions of Hinduism that are less associated with the specific Gods associated with Sindh.
Anjana: You grew up in Delhi, but have Scottish roots, and did that outsider- insider perspective help you shape how you thought about this? How do you think that played out?
Sam: I think absolutely because I don’t know where I belong. I’ve never lived in Scotland, which is where I’m from, and I think that general thing of rootlessness, but also kind of quest for belonging, is something that I grew up in my own, very much more privileged way, of course, than any Partition family.
But I think that growing up in Delhi certainly played a huge role. As I mentioned, the very origin of this is that Delhi was my home for 22 years, and then I visited Lahore, and was shocked to find a very familiar landscape.
And I think the fact of growing up in Delhi makes the Partition a very everyday story. I mean, Delhi is a city of Partition refugees. It’s impossible to throw a stone without finding some Partition family. I’d say over three-quarters, if not four-fifths, of my friends in Delhi would have some sort of Partition story from somewhere in the subcontinent. Be it from, you know, what became Bangladesh, what became West Punjab – what became Peshawar or Karachi, Multan —even some Balluchi Hindus—you know, Pind Balluch, for example, is one of the great restaurants in Delhi.
I think that it is a city defined by this central trauma but it’s spoken kind of hush hush and one of the fascinating things also about doing this book was how many friends who sort of volunteered their stories— which often end up in the book, and the way that I often suddenly understood my friend’s own family histories much better as a result.
Anjana: What’s next for you?
Sam: That is the question. This book has just come out. It just came out a month ago in the States and about 10 months ago in the UK and India.
There’s definitely another history book—I’ve been particularly looking, looking a bit more at South India recently, and some of the relationships between Tamil Nadu and Southeast Asia. I don’t want to go further than that because I’ve not written any proposals. Still early days, but there’s some interesting stories – still in the 20th century, but that I’m keen to look at. So let’s see.
Anjana: That’s awesome. I’m Tamil – so that would be really interesting for me to read too. Thank you so much for your time.