The Many Partitions

A FEW YEARS AGO, Sam Dalrymple was working on a project exploring the partition experiences of Indians outside of Bengal and Punjab. He met a person from Tripura, and asked about their understanding of this seminal event. “They said, ‘Which partition’?” Dalrymple recalls on a video call from London. “And I was like, ‘What?’ They’re like, ‘Well, you know, we had the 1937 partition from Burma. We had 1947 India- Pakistan. Then in 1971 Bangladesh from Pakistan…’ and that got me thinking.”

In Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (Fourth Estate; 536 pages; ₹799) his majestic, riveting debut, Dalrymple, 28, tells the whole story of the splintering of the empire. From the creation of Burma to the dissolving of the princely states and the birth of Bangladesh; between 1931 and 1971, 12 separate nations were born.

Up until 1928, the Raj stretched from Aden in the west to Mandalay in the east—a quarter of the world’s population used the Indian rupee and held the same passport. But the dominant partition narrative has been of 1947; a massive and violent rupture that has eclipsed other cleavages.

“I think the memory of them was overridden by the traumas of 1947,” he says. “When India is building its national story in the wake of independence, it’s so completely rooted in the story of the India-Pakistan division, that the others get slightly sidelined.”

One of these five stories was particularly surprising. “Easily the most unexpected bit was the fact that one side of the Arabian Peninsula was ruled from Delhi as recently as the 1930s,” he says. “The fact that Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and southern Yemen were legally a part of India never gets brought up. The fact that there is a conceivable independent India that included Dubai,” —he pauses to chuckle incredulously— “I was like, what, that’s never, never, never, never mentioned.” Indian nationalists did not see the Arab states as part of their future new republic. “The other thing that I found fascinating was that the reason that Dubai etc are separated is because they are not part of the ancient geography of the Mahabharata.”

The seeds of Shattered Lands were sown with Project Dastaan, an endeavour started by Dalrymple and two university friends in 2018 to connect partition survivors with people and places on the other side of the border. With a grant from National Geographic, it evolved into a film documentary project. By 2020, Dalrymple had done the research and even had a script ready, but then Covid hit and filming became impossible. His father William Dalrymple had an idea. “He basically said, ‘Look, there’s probably a book there, why don’t you write a proposal?’ It was just a simple one-liner.”

As the son of a famous historian who’s written several popular books about medieval India, Dalrymple concedes that “there’s definitely pressure” in venturing into history writing. “At the same time, I feel quite confident,” he says. “I worked on partition for four years before even starting writing.” The periods father and son tackle are also different, and the son has an immediate and visceral childhood familiarity with India. “It’s the country where I’ve grown up and spent my whole life. So where else would I be able to write about?” he asks, matter-of-factly.

The family moved here when he was six years old. Dalrymple is Scottish-born and holds a British passport, but if you asked him where he’s from, he’d tell you Delhi. “For political reasons, because I can’t get a passport, I wouldn’t presume to say that I was Indian, but I feel like that’s where I’ve grown up my entire life. That’s where I see myself in years’ time, that’s the society that I most know.”

Dalrymple runs a popular Instagram account showcasing history and heritage in Delhi and from his travels. During our conversation he occasionally drops Hindi words; “kabutars”, “haan”, “shloka”. He speaks Hindi and Urdu, and might be able to piece together “snippets” of Bengali but wouldn’t put that on his resume.

That’s not the case for Persian and Sanskrit though, which he studied as an undergraduate at Oxford University. An obsession with the Upanishads and the Mahabharata drew him to Sanskrit. “I grew up on Amar Chitra Katha comics, basically, and that single handedly planted the seed,” he says. He read the Mahabharata collection at age seven for the first time and would go on to read it about 20 times. The fascination for Persian also began in Delhi but culminated on a family holiday to Afghanistan. “I was obsessed, and was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It’s so similar in so many ways, to India and yet so different at the same time. So, I started teaching myself Persian from the age of 16.”

Dalrymple never formally studied history, though he underwent oral history training before speaking to partition survivors. Aanchal Malhotra, a writer and oral historian, sat him and his colleagues down and told them, he recalls: “You guys really need to learn your shit, because otherwise you’re going to traumatise a bunch of 85-year-olds”. He later taught himself how to parse old government reports and learnt the ropes of archival research from historian friends.

Shattered Lands is a delight to read; apart from the compelling narration of political events, the book is full of small bizarre moments and peculiar characters; history with a side of humour. For instance, we hear of how the negotiations around Bangladeshi independence were undertaken in a bathroom, because one of the leaders was adamant he “wanted somewhere more private” than the drawing room. Then there’s a 1947 speech that Jinnah ends by saying “Pakistan Zindabad”, but, Dalrymple writes, “spoken with such a posh English drawl that many listeners were convinced he had said ‘Pakistan’s in the Bag’.” And a nugget about how “Bengalis were horrified when a Karachi crossword puzzle paired the clue ‘Plentiful in East Pakistan’ with the answer ‘Lice’.”

“It’s a very heavy subject matter, but there are anecdotes that I find just wonderfully ridiculous, that I very much tried to put front and centre,” he says.

Dalrymple doesn’t see himself as a historian primarily (“kind of a freelancer”)—he has dabbled in film, heritage non-profit work and travel writing. But his main income stream last year? His art history guided tours of Delhi.

Project Dastaan is no longer working on connecting partition survivors, but the films that came out of it—animated virtual-reality productions—are still being shown in museums and might continue to travel. Though it’s “early days” Dalrymple is thinking of other books; one of which could focus on Southeast Asia. He also has “several harebrained ideas” he says with a smile. “Me and my friend Anirudh [Kanisetti, the author] have plots to try and discover a lost city,” he says. “There’s a lost city of medieval India that we are determined to find somewhere in the Deccan.”

Asian historybooksIndia’s partitionSam DalrympleShattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia