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Deccan Herald
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Shards of an empire
Sam Dalrymple's Shattered Lands is an epic account of the five partitions that divided the British Indian Empire into 12 nation-states, and the human drama which led to and resulted from these.
New Indian Express
13-07-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
The Empire writes back
Burmese politician who served as Prime Minister of British Burma during the colonial era before the Second World War played a big role in instilling the sense of oneness among Burmese people. And this he did by promoting discrimination against Indians. Sam writes, 'Saw declared it his government's 'sacred duty' to promote Buddhism's proper practice. He set about passing bills that were prejudiced against Indians, including making visas to Burma too expensive for most Indians. An interesting thing about Sam's writing is that it is cinematic. Picking up a book that covers complex history can get boring. Where's the lie? Especially if you've been in a reading slump. But with Shattered Lands, there is a very slim chance of that happening because you might have heard about Jinnah being popularly referred to as Quaid-e-Azam but not know much about his love for ham sandwiches. Sam mentions an incident where Jinnah's wife, Ruttie, drove to meet him at the town hall with packed ham sandwiches. Jinnah screams at her, saying, 'What have you done! If my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost chance of being elected?' Now, that reads straight out of a dramatic Bollywood script. Anecdotes like these make you want to keep going. Sam's research on the Raj's westernmost protected states—reconstituted today as Yemen and five of the seven Gulf states—is not as extensive. The reader is also bound to make comparisons with the in-depth research about the east. However, he digs up many forgotten histories from dusty archives. Sam mentions Muhammad Ali Luqman, a Gandhi-loving Arab journalist in Aden, who once thought that the city's 'connection with India was organic'. By the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, he'd become a staunch Yemeni nationalist, arguing that South Asian residents, who'd lived there for decades, should 'quit our country'.
The Hindu
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Interview with Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands
The genesis of Sam Dalrymple's latest book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, goes back to 2017, when he was still a student at the University of Oxford. He was chatting with two of his friends, one Indian and one Pakistani, about the Partition and how both their grandparents, after being displaced, longed to see their ancestral homes, a longing felt by millions of refugees like them. '[Over] seventy-five years after their birth, India and Pakistan still have no tourist agreement, and the millions of people displaced in the largest forced migrations in history are unable to go home,' writes the writer, filmmaker, and peace activist in the epilogue of Shattered Lands. The difficulties created by Partition and the long-running tensions between the two countries for the displaced families led to the creation of Project Dastaan, an initiative co-founded by Dalrymple, Sparsh Ahuja, Ameena Malak, and Saadia Gardezi in 2018, a year after the 70th anniversary of the tumultuous event. The project, which used virtual reality to reconnect displaced Partition survivors to their ancestral homes, involved sharing some of their stories, says the 28-year-old. Also, since 'there was a lot of talk in the air about the 75th anniversary of Partition coming up in 2022,' the plan was to turn Project Dastaan into a documentary, with a focus on trying to reconnect 75 families by the 75th anniversary using virtual reality. And then, 'tragically, COVID happened, and suddenly everything was wiped off the table since the project was very travel-intensive,' recounts Dalrymple. However, since he had spent a considerable amount of time working on the script for a documentary that was never made, he was filled with 'stories I wanted to tell,' he says. 'That became the seed of the book around April 2020.' But the book is more than just about the Partition that led to the creation of modern India and Pakistan. Shattered Lands chronicles how a single landmass, once known as the Indian Empire of the British Raj, splintered into multiple nations due to five major Partitions. Mahatma Gandhi, writes Dalrymple in the book, would be one of the last people to traverse the vast territory of the Empire, from Rangoon to Aden. 'As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia―India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait―were bound together under a single imperial banner.' Yet, 'less than five decades later, the same trip would cover 12 different nation states,' he says. Starting from the carving out of Burma and the Arabian Peninsula to what most South Asians refer to as the Partition, which led to the creation of Pakistan, the dissolution of the Princely States and finally, East Pakistan becoming Bangladesh, Shattered Lands traces the events from 1928 to 1971 in a narrative format, explains Dalrymple. In the book, he also argues that all the legacies of these Partitions linger, continuing to shape our world, whether it be the Kashmir issue, the Myanmar civil war, the unrest in India's Northeast or the reimagining of national identities. 'The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world,' he writes. 'India's Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold.' Edited extracts from an interview: You talk about 'historical amnesia' and how that impacts the way we remember our past and what we choose to forget. Can you expand on this? I think this holds true of state narratives, particularly in the subcontinent. The clearest example of this is the way that 1971 is treated in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In India, it is the third Indo-Pak War, and the whole liberation struggle of Bangladeshis gets somehow missed out. In Bangladesh, it is seen as a liberation war, with the foregrounding being a struggle of freedom from Pakistani rule, with the nuances of the parts of the population who still felt Pakistani often brushed over. And then within Pakistan, it's seen as the fall of Dhaka and the dismemberment of the nation, leaving aside the reasons why Bangladesh wanted to become independent. When you put it all together chronologically, it's clear what's happening here. However, each of the three countries has been able to form completely different narratives of the same series of events, foregrounding themselves often and leaving out the complete picture of what's going on in the whole subcontinent. We try to silo ourselves into these national stories. I try to talk about the 1971 War, not as the third Indo-Pak war, but as the first great South Asian war. It's the first and only war that's been fought in the subcontinent, which has involved Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis, on a total war scale…is a pan-subcontinental affair. While this is a work of narrative nonfiction, oral history occupies a substantial portion of the book. Can you talk about the criticality of oral history to the larger narrative? There's this general assumption, often, that oral testimonies are somehow less valuable than written testimonies, which, of course, isn't the case. The crucial thing is that with oral histories, you can get the stories that no one would ever write down—stories from those who weren't literate or thought their stories weren't dramatic enough for a memoir. If you do it at the right time, you can record a whole swathe of society whose stories would otherwise be left out of the history books. Also, there are details and imagery you can get from oral history that are often left out, like the colour of the car that someone was driving. So many of our questions were about what life was like before partition, trying to recreate that world. And you'd get accounts from northwestern Pakistan or stories from Balochistan about how festivals like Diwali or Holi were celebrated in these regions. They create a picture of a place that no government archive will ever be able to put together. Oral history forms a massive bedrock of this whole book, which has interviews in eight languages and all sorts of countries. But it gradually turned into narrative history when I began to try to write it. The ideal situation is when you've got oral testimony, government records, memoirs, etc., and you can piece together something amazing. How did your background as a filmmaker shape your approach to writing about characters like Nehru, Gandhi, and Jinnah with such nuance? In documentary and in good history writing, when introducing characters, you want to draw a pen portrait of them…quickly sketch out their character. In my experience, the best way to draw a pen portrait is to draw out the contradictions in any person. For instance, Nehru was a bit of a champagne socialist, who was not very revolutionary at all. Until the day he sees General Dyer, who was behind the Amritsar massacre, walking off a train in his pink-striped pyjamas, casually talking about wiping Amritsar off the face of the planet. And he is so horrified that it radicalises him. I saw that scene when trying to draw out Nehru's character. Seeing history in scenes is helpful, just in the same way that it is in a documentary. You can also apply the techniques of novel writing or feature films to both documentary and nonfiction. Take, for example, (Asif) Kapadia's film Amy, which uses found footage to create a documentary about Amy Winehouse's life. He's not inventing anything, but he's using the techniques of feature films to create drama, tension, and suspense. The same could be applied to history books. A good documentary and a good history book do the same thing. Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia Sam Dalrymple HarperCollins ₹799
Time of India
27-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Secrets from 1947: How Edwina Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel shaped Partition plan
Secrets from 1947: How Edwina Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel shaped Partition plan Team TOI Plus Jun 27, 2025, 13:05 IST IST In this gripping extract from historian Sam Dalrymple's 'Shattered Lands', the last days of the Raj come alive — through secret liaisons, high-stakes diplomacy, and bitter rivalries that shaped the final act of India's Partition Back in New Delhi, Mountbatten was aware of Nehru's influence over Britain's Labour government and he placed extra importance on this relationship, seeking out the Congressman the very same day as his audience with Bikaner and Bhopal. 'In Mountbatten's view Nehru was extremely frank and fair,' recorded [Allen] Campbell-Johnson [served as press attaché to Lord Mountbatten during his time as Viceroy of India]. At the end of the interview, as Nehru was about to take his leave, Mountbatten said to him, 'Mr Nehru, I want you to regard me not as the last Viceroy winding up the British Raj, but as the first to lead the way to the new India.' Nehru turned, looked intensely moved, smiled and then said, 'Now I know what they mean when they speak of your charm being so dangerous.'
Time of India
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
We treat India-Pak hostility as inevitable but these divides formed within living memory
Sam Dalrymple was set for a career in particle physics, until a family trip to Afghanistan to visit the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha rerouted him into history. He started a virtual reality project connecting Partition survivors which, in turn, inspired, his debut book ' Shattered Lands ' tracing the unravelling of the Indian empire. In an interview with Sunday Times, he talks about why our complex pasts shouldn't be ignored Several years ago, you co-founded Project Dastaan connecting those displaced by the 1947 Partition through virtual reality. Was it Dastaan that sparked off this deep dive into five partitions or something else? Dastaan was very much the origin of the book. In 2018, my college friends and I began reconnecting individuals displaced in the 1947 Partition of India, the largest forced migration in history, to their ancestral villages through VR. It was while researching the impact of Partition on Tripura and Northeast India for Dastaan that the book idea first came together. I was chatting with an academic in the region and when I asked about Partition, he said, 'Which one? Burma in 1937, Pakistan in 1947 or Bangladesh in 1971.' That conversation made me think about the multiple ruptures and borders that have carved their way through the subcontinent. The five partitions you write about are the separation of Burma, Arabia and Pakistan from India, the division of 500 princely states, and finally, the creation of Bangladesh. Why did you want to tell this story? by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 오스템 임플란트 받아가세요 임플란터 더 알아보기 Undo We live the consequences of these partitions every day. Just look at the recent war between India and Pakistan. Today, South Asia is one of the most bordered regions in the world, and you can actually see its borders from space. However, 100 years ago none of these borders were foreseen. Demands for 'independence' were widespread, but no one could have suspected that the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Burma would soon emerge from the wreckage of British India. Nor would anyone have imagined that tiny princely states like Bhutan and Dubai would last until the end of the century while massive states like Hyderabad would not. Your book challenges some widely held beliefs— like the idea that India's borders were drawn solely by Cyril Radcliffe. Could you tell us more about that? Cyril Radcliffe was famously charged with drawing the Partition border that would slice through British India. Jinnah had suggested his name because he had never been east of Paris and supposedly his obliviousness would make him impartial. This, of course, had deadly consequences. But what we often forget is that he only drew the lines dividing Punjab and Bengal. Both the LoC and the entire stretch of the India-Pakistan Border from the Arabian Sea to Sri Ganganagar — collectively 81% of the present India-Pakistan border fence — result from the decisions of seven local princes and have nothing to do with Radcliffe. Thirty-six per cent of the border with East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) was made by another ten. Had states like Jodhpur joined Pakistan, or had states like Bahawalpur joined India, the border would look very, very different. The chapter on the Arabian Peninsula ties a global moment — the British withdrawal from Aden (now in Yemen) — to a personal story about Dhirubhai Ambani. How did that shape the trajectory of Reliance? We often forget today that Aden was the Dubai of the 1960s. It was the great business hub of its time, and this remained the case right until 1967 when the British pulled out and the revolutionary NLF took over. Dhirubhai Ambani had worked in Aden until the late 1950s, and after the British evacuation from Aden, he found himself perfectly placed to hire his dispossessed colleagues and found use of 'a ready-made source of educated managers, accountants and salesmen, drilled to European standards'. He had just ended a business partnership with his cousin and gone solo, forming a new company called the Reliance Commercial Corporation. Reliance ballooned in the years after the fall of Aden, underpinned by a generation of Indian-origin Adenis versed in free market capitalism rather than Nehruvian socialism. Given that your book comes out against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions, what is the perspective you hope readers will take away? So often we treat the hostility between India and Pakistan as inevitable. Even President Trump chimed in, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that India and Pakistan had been fighting 'for a thousand years, probably longer than that.' But this really isn't the case. These divisions were formed within living memory — as were the divisions between India and Bangladesh, Burma and Yemen etc. Today, the region's borders have become so embedded in our subconscious that it is easy to forget there were other possibilities for a post-colonial South Asia. Several prominent nationalist figures including PM Nehru and Burma's founding father Aung San had once spoken of an 'Asiatic federation' in the 'not very, very distant future', a 'United Nations of South Asia' encompassing India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. Long after the British departed, many still hoped the new borders might prove temporary. Yet in every single one of these countries, govts have made sure to paper over the shared cross-border heritage of their peoples. The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India's partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold. Your dad, historian William Dalrymple , sparked a lot of debate recently saying that academics don't make their work as accessible as popular historians. Where do you stand on this? I don't think they have to stand in opposition at all. We obviously need both.
