What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition

Spectator

8 hours ago

We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It's a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten's possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru ever again.
But there is a wider, and fascinating, history which has itself been partitioned off and ignored. We forget that more than a quarter of the world's population was ruled by the Viceroy from New Delhi, in a zone that spread from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand – an empire within an empire, which included Burma, parts of Yemen and Gulf states such as Dubai.
The division of this single and much larger British 'Indian Empire' created almost all of the conflicts that plague Asia today. These include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, the ongoing insurgencies in Baluchistan and north-east India, the Iranian revolution, the rise of the Taliban and the Rohingya genocide. It was high time that these wider divisions should have been examined in detail, and Sam Dalrymple does so in some style. Shattered Lands has a huge range, and the material is deftly handled to describe how a single, sprawling dominion, using the Indian rupee throughout, became 12 modern nations.
Burma (as it then was) is particularly fascinating, as Dalrymple upends the common assumption that somehow there was a natural frontier between that country and India which was just waiting to be restored. Far from it. When the Simon Commission arrived in 1928 – with the young Clement Attlee as a junior member 20 years before he oversaw actual Indian independence – it was tasked with making proposals about the colonies' futures. It found that the idea of separating off Burma met with huge opposition – from the Burmese themselves, many of whom were concerned that without India their thriving economy would fail. The most senior politician, U Ottama, a disciple of Gandhi, argued that Burma was an integral part of the Indian nation.
Gandhi himself was more equivocal – not least because he was already drawn to the idea of recreating Bharat, the Hindu Holy Land of the ancient Mahabarata epic. This was to make him a far more divisive figure in India than the West often allows; and neither Burma nor Arab states such as Dubai could be any part of that.
Nor, of course, could a significant Muslim presence. Dalrymple is excellent on how Gandhi ('cosplaying as a sadhu') and his follower Nehru exploited the fact that for personal reasons the Muslim leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah took his eye off an inswinger ball at a crucial moment; and how the 'Nehru Report' could suggest dispensing with separate electorates for Muslims or reserved seats in parliament, a crucial requirement for a more unified nation.
Those personal reasons are also moving. The tall, patrician figure of Jinnah, known for his reserve and serious approach as a barrister and politician, fell deeply in love in 1918, aged 42, with Ruttie Petit, the 18-year-old daughter of a Parsi baronet. Sir Dinshaw Petit was not amused and put Jinnah in the dock, alleging abduction. The case failed; but so did the marriage, and Ruttie soon became a sad, drug-dependent casualty who died, aged 29, leaving Jinnah a shadow of his former self.
Jinnah, not Gandhi, comes across in this account as the politician most concerned at an early stage to have a secular India where the two majority faiths could live together; and a larger India to include Burma, so as to further leaven a multi-faith state.
Dalrymple tells the subsequent story of the Japanese invasion of Burma (woefully unforeseen by the British) and the exodus by its Indian inhabitants. There is a brilliant mix of narrative history with moving personal accounts of those who took part in what was a long, gruelling march through the jungle.
If there is one common theme that emerges from his description of the further partitions that followed, it is the cack-handed and casual way many British colonial officers drew border lines on the map for 'administrative convenience'. These arbitrary divisions were to cause generational conflicts – including in Afghanistan, with the division of the Pathans from Pakistan, and the current conflicts in Myanmar with the Rohingya.
What is it about the British temperament that made us so capable of running an empire but so hopeless when it came to dividing it? A lack of emotional intelligence and empathy? Our habit of compromise might be admirable for day-to-day administration but is less useful for the building of new nations, when what was needed were clean lines not fudged ones. The shards left from such clumsy partitions in southern Asia are still drawing blood.
This is a book full of what-ifs and how it could all have gone a different way. At one point just before 'the Great Partition', the tantalising idea of a federal India emerged, supported by Jinnah. This would have been on the model of the United Kingdom, in which Pakistan and India would have coexisted; and would have done so alongside other states, such as the Gulf ones. At the time considered deserts and of no value, these would later have wielded such oil riches as to make 'United India' a dominant economic power in the world. Instead, Mountbatten pressed the button on full partition and allowed only ten weeks to prepare for it ('Everyone will be shocked into action'), with disastrous consequences: at least a million deaths, at a conservative estimate, in the Punjab alone.
Dalrymple delivers his account at pace and with a keen eye for the telling detail. The ambition for what is his first book is impressive, and there is an admirably inclusive set of maps for those who don't know their Srinagars from their Sri Lankas. It's quite something for an author to claim that he has conducted his interviews in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. This is a book that combines scholarship with a flair for narrative story-telling of the highest order. And the story of India's 'other partitions' has remained untold for too long.