The partitions that made modern Asia

Some years ago, I took my mother to an exhibition in New Delhi about the “untold story” of India’s partition. The daughter of Sylheti refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who had built their lives anew in a remote valley on the eastern fringes of India, she hoped to see journeys like those made by her parents reflected in the items on display. Her face fell in disappointment, however: the exhibits were focused on the sundering of the northern and north-western provinces, as if the catastrophe of 1947 had left the rest of the Indian subcontinent intact.

I remember a giant map of undivided India put up on one of the walls, with black strings offered to some visitors to trace their families' routes of “migration” (not “displacement”). Every single string crisscrossed the border separating northern India and present-day Pakistan. The fact that the eastern part of the subcontinent had also been divided was utterly forgotten.

“A border,” the American poet Wendy Trevino wrote in 2018, “like race, is a cruel fiction.” The British Raj was, by that reckoning, a savage all-powerful novelist, accumulating and carving up territories at will over centuries. In Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple points out that even though “today most Brits seem convinced that immigration… started with the HMT Empire Windrush docking in London in 1948”, the East India Company annexed Bengal back in 1757, “50 years after the Act of Union with Scotland and nearly 50 years before the Act of Union with Ireland”.

Sam Dalrymple, son of the historian William Dalrymple, begins his account of the many splinterings of the subcontinent in 1928, when a commission headed by Lord John Simon travelled to Britain’s largest colony and recommended the separation of Burma, now Myanmar, from British India. But you could just as well begin in 1905, when the Indian viceroy, George Curzon, cynically split up Bengal along religious lines, or in 1886, when Burma was formally added to the Indian empire after the Third Anglo-Burmese War. Dalrymple counts 12 nation states in modern Asia that were once under the influence of the British Indian empire, but he leaves out Afghanistan, for long a buffer zone against imperial Russia, and the now breakaway African territory of Somaliland, which was administered by the Raj until 1898.

Contemporary accounts of the Indian partition – there seems to be one coming out every other year – can sometimes feel repetitive because of the familiar cast of characters: Lord Mountbatten, dubbed the “master of disaster” by his colleagues in the navy; Clement Attlee, the benevolent Labour PM; Mohandas Gandhi, the apostle of nonviolence and celibacy; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the pork-eating lawyer who became the founding father of the world’s first Islamic republic.

Dalrymple doesn’t quite avoid these cliches – Gandhi, Attlee and Jinnah are all introduced in the opening chapter – and when faced with conflicting “Indian” and “Pakistani” versions of an event, he sticks with the British establishment view. The tone is what I’d call “BBC-lite”, an imperious baritone that describes non-European cities as invariably “historic” or “sacred”, and strikes the expected note of awe at the sight of women in saris and burqas. You learn less about, say, the disparate treatment of East Pakistani and West Pakistani refugees in newly independent India, or the plight of Urdu-speaking Muhajir refugees who moved to Pakistan in 1947, than the gossip at Mountbatten’s garden parties. Over 75 years on, India and Pakistan both lay claim to the Himalayan state of Kashmir in its entirety. The dispute has transformed the region into arguably the most militarised zone in the world. Just last month, the two nuclear rivals fired drones and missiles at each other for four days, after 26 people were killed in a terrorist attack on the Indian side of Kashmir.

The book more than redeems itself by incorporating the lesser-known tale of Burmese independence into the larger story of British India. Today, the border between Myanmar and India feels an inevitability, but in the 1920s, Rangoon (now Yangon) was, in the words of a British labour officer, “second only to New York in importance as an immigration port”. Nearly half of the city’s population was Indian, and one of the country’s most influential politicians, a Buddhist monk named U Ottama, opposed the separation because, among other reasons, “India was the birthplace of Buddhism.” The Japanese invasion of Burma in 1941 might have triggered a calamitous exodus of Indians from the region, but Dalrymple convincingly shows that the decision to separate Burma led to multiple anti-Indian riots and ethnic cleansing in the 1930s.

Shattered Lands shines brightest in its retelling of the wartime years in the eastern peripheries of the Raj, when the shifting alliances of Burmese and Indian nationalists with the warring imperial powers made the “subcontinent’s political chessboard” doubly intricate. Dalrymple follows the fluctuating fortunes of Aung San, a Burmese student activist who escaped to Japan in 1940 to avoid arrest and secretly re-entered the country as the leader of an anti-British militia. He shrewdly switched sides when the tide began to turn against the Axis powers and, on the eve of independence from British rule, ended up becoming the de facto leader of the country. On 19 July 1947, during a cabinet meeting in Rangoon’s secretariat building, he was assassinated by a group of gunmen in army fatigues. Decades later, his youngest daughter Aung San Suu Kyi – who won the Nobel peace prize in 1991 but was later criticised for defending the persecution of Burma’s Muslim Rohingya minority – languishes in house arrest under the country’s brutal military regime.

Dalrymple’s research on the Raj’s westernmost protectorates – reconstituted today as Yemen and five of the seven Gulf states – is not as extensive, but he digs up many forgotten histories from dusty archives. We hear from 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”.

Then there is Sultan Ghalib, last monarch of Qu’aiti state, once the third-largest kingdom in the Arabian peninsula. Born in Hyderabad, India, he was studying for his admission to Oxford in 1966 when his father died and left him the throne. In less than a year, he was forced to abdicate when Yemeni nationalist forces overran the kingdom and the British made a secret deal with the rebels. Later, Ghalib moved to Saudi Arabia as a refugee, and was still stateless and unable to travel abroad when Dalrymple contacted him half a century later. “I’m really stuck, you know,” he tells the author, echoing the dilemma of the millions who were torn apart by the new borders that came up in post-colonial Asia. “I’m hoping for a solution.”

Photograph by Bettmann Archive

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple is published by William Collins (£25). Order your copy from observershop.co.uk to receive a 10% discount. Delivery charges may apply

• This article was amended on 24 June 2025. An earlier version described “black strings tracing the routes of a few prominent displaced families” at an exhibition in New Delhi. This was amended to make clear the string was offered to visitors to trace their families’ routes of migration.