As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia—India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait—were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the “Indian Empire,” or more simply as the British Raj. And then, in just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.
A new book the author Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, presents the unknown back story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. Sam is a historian and award-winning filmmaker who grew up in Delhi. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and he runs the history Substack @ travelsofsamwise.
To talk more about his new book, Sam joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Sam’s personal journey with the Partition of the subcontinent, the forgotten separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, and Delhi’s dismissiveness of its Gulf outposts. Plus, the two talk about the creation of Pakistan, the twin genocides of 1971, and the special resonance of the princely state of Junagadh in modern-day Gujarat.
Episode notes:
1. Sam Dalrymple, “The Gujarati Kingdom That Almost Joined Pakistan,” Travels of Samwise (Substack), July 5, 2025.
2. Nishad Sanzagiri, “Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple review – the many partitions of southern Asia,” The Guardian, July 1, 2025.
3. “Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.
4. Preeti Zacharia, “Interview with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands,” Hindu, July 8, 2025.
5. Sam Dalrymple, “The Lingering Shadow of India’s Painful Partition,” TIME, July 14, 2025.
Transcript
Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors
Milan Vaishnav: Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. 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, an entity known officially as the Indian Empire, or as quite often has been said, the British Raj. And then, in just 50 years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, new maps, and leaving behind a questionable legacy. A new book by the author Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, presents the unknown backstory of how the Indian empire was unmade. Sam is a historian and award-winning filmmaker who grew up in Delhi. He graduated from Oxford as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 partition. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and he runs the history Substack at Travels of Samwise. To talk more about his book, I'm pleased to welcome Sam to the podcast for the very first time. Sam, congrats very much on the book and thanks for taking the time.
Sam Dalrymple: Thank you for having me, it's wonderful to be here!
Milan Vaishnav: I want to start actually at the very end of the book with the epilog, when you have a bit of personal reflection about your own journey and your own with Partition, and you say that that journey began in 2017, which happened to be the 70th anniversary of the exit of the British Raj, and that you were having a conversation with friends in Oxford. I was wondering if you could kind of take us back to that time, it was now about eight years ago. Tell us about how those conversations at Oxford led to this book.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure. So I think there was this rather strange thing. So the 75th anniversary of Partition was coming up, or rather, the 70th anniversary had just passed, I think, actually. And so, you know, conversations about Partition were in the air. And we had this strange conversation with Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi friends, and myself, who's a kind of a Delhi-raised Scott with Anglo-Indian heritage. And we had this strange realization that this conversation couldn't really happen back in the subcontinent. We couldn't have Indians and Pakistanis chatting to each other with the ease that they could chat in Oxford. And there was a particularly strange moment when my friend Sparsh was chatting to my other friend Amina. Sparsh's family comes from a town in what's now Pakistan called Bela. And in 1947, in amidst the largest forced migration in human history that accompanied the division of India and Pakistan, his family were forced to leave Baila and haven't been able to go back ever since. And there's all these stories about having been saved by the villagers and being pushed out. And Sparsh had for years imagined this town to kind of be lost to his family, that, you know, it's impossible to ever go back. The India and Pakistan, 75 years later, still don't operate a tourist And yet... Amina, our Pakistani friend, could visit in just a two-hour drive from Lahore. And this strange realization that it wasn't lost a time, it was very much still there. And meanwhile, the town that Amina's family talked to is somehow lost to her family. Her family migrated in the other direction, from India to Pakistan. And her ancestral hometown of Hoshiarpur is likewise a very easily visitable town. But it's just this kind of border and these These are regimes that divide us. And so we created this project, Project Dastaan, to reconnect families across the India-Pakistan border without needing to pass visa requirements. We realized that the technology of virtual reality could allow 95-year-olds, 90-year olds, to cross that border virtually and revisit their old school, their old mandir, their old gurdwara, their old mosque, their house, whatever it might be that they want to see on the other side. I think that there's this strangeness about partition that, you know, India and Pakistan were just at war again, a few months ago back in I think it was April. These are two nuclear armed nations that are at loggerheads. And you know everyone talks about them as age old enemies. I think Trump said they've been India and Pakistan they've fighting over Kashmir for centuries. And the strange thing is that this whole generation just about. Still survives that remembers a time before this division even happened. We still have that generation who remember their best friends on the other side. And it's a kind of unique situation of a massive division where, you know, it's still possible to reconnect old childhood friends who live together but now belong to these separate nations in a way that's rather unique. One of the things
Milan Vaishnav: One of the things that I like so much about this book, and this is really, I think, the central conceit is that, you know, for those of us who study Indian subcontinent, right, obviously we're very familiar with partition. And we think a lot about the divisions that were created in 1947. And to a lesser extent, we think about the independence of Bangladesh and the separation of East and West Pakistan in 1971. But your argument goes well beyond that to say, look, it's not just an area that's had one or two partitions. There have been five important partitions that transformed Britain's kind of vast Indian empire into 12 nation states. And so I think maybe just as a kind of overview for our listeners, what are the five partitions of India as you see them? And then I want to spend a little bit of time kind of talking about each of them.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure. So I think in order to understand this, we need to go back to what was the British Raj. I think people often imagine that the Brits went in and conquered areas based on nationality. You know, they conquered the Indian people. And of course, that wasn't the case. The East India Company was a mercantile company that conquered areas based on trade links. And when the East India company was nationalized by the crown in 1858. Anywhere that it had conquered legally became India. And so this included everywhere from Aden in modern Yemen to Rangoon in modern Burma, and then bizarrely not Sri Lanka, but you know, this vast stretch of territory that included much of the modern Gulf, almost all of modern South Asia, with the exception of Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Burma. And the The scale of it, 100 years ago today, is something that's not really... Widely understood, I think. So the five partitions, the first of these five partions is the partition of Burma in 1937. And this is what really gets the ball rolling. It feels a bit like Brexit to some extent, in that this is India's richest and largest province that has been overwhelmed by mass immigration during the era of the Raj, during its sudden economic rise. I think Rangoon overtakes New York City as the biggest immigration and emigration port in the world. So it's on par with New York in a way that we've completely forgotten. And so suddenly there's these debates about are we Indian, are we not? And it's quite a divisive subject. So it all begins with Burma's separation, quickly followed by the partition of Arabia from the Raj which happens over the course of a decade from 1937 to April 1947. And these two events could have been the central events of the 20th century. They're the reasons why, you know, Dubai and Kuwait and Burma aren't part of India today. But they would be completely overshadowed by what happened next because in August 1947, you have the Great Partition of India, which sees the division of British India. On religious lines and this leads to the largest forced migration in human history. 12 to 15 million people migrate in the course of a year and 1 to 3 million people never make it across to the other side. This is one of the central events in world history really up there with the world wars, the Holocaust, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Rwanda Genocide. These are events that everyone should be learning about in school and somehow outside outside of South Asia. I don't think it's got the prominence in the telling of global history, of the global 20th century, that it should have. The fourth partition that I talk about is the partition of princely India, and this is because about a third of the Raj was never directly ruled by the British. It was ruled by princely states, these semi-independent kingdoms. That had given their foreign policy and defense over to the Raj, the British Viceroy's, but were otherwise internally independent. These were states like Kashmir, Jaipur, Bahawalpur, Manipur and Hyderabad. And there were 565 of these states. Some vast, larger economies than Belgium's and larger physically than 35 UN nation states. Others, I think Vajanoness was the size of. You know, a country estate, and it was possible to get the entire population of the state to fit into one photograph because it was basically a glorified country estate. So these varied wildly, but the integration of these states with India, Pakistan and Burma would create about 80% of the modern India Pakistan border. It's not true that the British drew the whole border, the Brits drew the line between Bengal and Punjab. They divided individual provinces, but actually the vast majority of this border is created by aristocracy in a way that we've largely forgotten. And then the fifth partition that I talk about is the partition of Pakistan itself. So Pakistan is born from the Muslim majority regions of British India, but British India had Muslim majority regions in the East and West, and in 1971, 24 years after Pakistan's birth, The eastern wing would gain independence from Pakistan as the nation state of Bangladesh, and this would be the 12th nation state to emerge from what had once been the British Raj.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, what's so fascinating is that, you know, we've not really conceptualized the five partitions in the past. And you know while there's been some conversation about, you know of course the Burma being part of the empire, there's very little about the Gulf. In fact, until I read your book had never even thought about the British Raj in those terms, which was so incredibly sort of eye opening. I want to start with with Burma because, as you mentioned, that... Is chronologically comes first. And what I found very interesting was to read a little bit about what Mahatma Gandhi had to say about Burma within the context of what an independent India might look like. And he was in favor of the separation of Burma. And I just want to quote something that you write. You say, like many Hindus, Gandhi identified India with Bharat. The holy land of the ancient Mahabharata Hindu epic. Neither Burma nor Arabia featured in this epic. How widespread was this Gandhian view at the time, both inside and outside the Congress, that yes, Burma may be part of the empire, but it really doesn't have anything to do with India slash Bharat.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure i think this i think you've hit the nail on the head in what's so fascinating about 1920s India in that there are so many different visions for what happens after empire there's this huge coalition of anti-imperialists from every region of the Raj from Yemen to Burma um and yet you know if you asked them all what they're hoping for once the British leave they're all hoping for very different things and yes Gandhi and the Indian national congress Increasingly look in the course of the 1920s increasingly moved towards a nation state that matches the boundaries of the sacred land of Bharat. And this is an idea that goes back to, you know, 1000 BC, at least in the form of these ancient Sanskrit epics. And yet this region had never been bounded into a single political unit ever in history. You've got the Mughal Empire, you've got Ashoka's, so many empires throughout Indian history, but none of them have the contours of undivided India, as we call it. And it's only really Gandhi, who really puts that into the into the mass popular perception galvanizes political support for independence along these religious lines. Interestingly, this is one of the things that really begins to alienate Muslims like Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who previously just imagined inheriting all of the regions of the Raj together. He doesn't see why know, we should separate all these Muslim majority bits and all these Buddhist majority bits. So yeah, you've got a huge number of Muslims who want to essentially reforge the Mughal Empire, you've a bunch of Punjabis who want reforge to the Sikh Empire. And actually, you know, one of the fascinating things is that you read the correspondence from the 20s and it seems far more likely that you might get some of these princely states being independent. An independent Hyderabad, an independent Kashmir, an independent Balochistan. That seems far more likely an outcome than the situation that we have today. None of the nation states that we have today in this region are in a sense inevitable in 1929. And I think that's why I wanted to start the book there. Because it's a really interesting moment, when suddenly a lot of the ideas that we live with today begin to emerge. And it's remarkably late. When you when you read throughout, you know, correspondences in the 1910s and the 1920s, a lot of them are talking about dominion status and not independence at all. It's a whole different vocabulary that we're completely not used to, that is more looking towards, you know, what happened with the Roman Empire, where the Roman empire gradually became less less Italian, and I think by 212 A.D. Suddenly opened up citizenship to everyone so that the Roman Emperor could be North African or you've got Philip the Arab being the Emperor, et cetera, you know, and suddenly you've got French emperors. And I think that that is what actually a lot of the early nationalists like Nehru ji are pushing for. It's only later that they begin to look for creating new nationhood.
Milan Vaishnav: You know, and you have these fascinating characters like the Burmese leader Yu Sa, who I think was sworn in as premier in 1940. And one of the first things he does is to have a census enumeration in Burma. And this comes to basically the crux of the Rohingya issue, right? Because he instituted these new rules that essentially reclassified certain Muslim communities. As quote unquote Indian foreigners, including this group that called themselves the Rohingya, right? So this issue that we think of as such a contemporary issue today really has quite deep roots.
Sam Dalrymple: I think this is one of the things that I found fascinating with each of these partitions, you have unresolved problems. I think we're used to the idea that the Kashmir dispute has its kind of origins in the partition of India and Pakistan. We're far less used to the idea that the partition of Burma has led to the Rohingya genocide. Has led to Naga and Meso-separatism in Northeast India. Both of these communities are 50% in India, 50% in Burma. These are partitioned communities straddling an international border that they did not choose.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, the Naga subplot actually runs throughout this book and was one that I had not expected, right? But it comes up again and again. You know, you alluded to earlier just the kind of untold horrors of partition, the kind of displacement, violence, forced migration we saw in that period around 1947. Of course, there's also been a lot of work now on the 1971 war and some of the atrocities committed in Bangladesh. Much less attention on some of the horrors that happened in Burma. You write that although they were officially coded as riots, the violence that was unleashed on Indians who were living in Burma, was really just a form of ethnic cleansing, right? And you could see even then the signs that this country was headed onto a path. Towards one day becoming a kind of ethno-nationalist state, right? I mean, that's still an issue that the country is confronting at this moment. Tell us a little bit about the trigger for the reprisals against Indians in Burma and what sort of scale of violence are we really talking about?
Sam Dalrymple: Sure. So in the early 1930s, it's remarkable how much the question of should Burma remain part of India is one that divides Burmese society down the middle. And actually, you've got a general assumption that it's going to remain part of Indian. Burma's leading nationalist, Uottama, spends his career. Uh, trying to convince people that Burma is part of Indian civilization. There is no difference between these peoples, right? It's a world that we're completely unfamiliar with today. And, um, but what changes is the great depression. So what happens, the great oppression leads to the evisceration of the rural rice economy. And there's these Tamil bankers, the Chettiars, which if you've ever been to South India, Chettinad has these beautiful houses made from Burmese teak, this is because they were the bankers. Who gave loans that allowed the expansion of the agricultural frontier in Burma. And the entire rural economy relied on these guys' loans. Now, when everyone suddenly goes bankrupt at the same time, this system falls apart because they'd relied on basically using farmland as collateral. If no one can pay their debts, they seize the land. I think between 1931 and 1938, the Chettiars become saddled with a quarter of Burmese land. And this coincides with a rebellion against British rule in the rural interior of Burma, where the Brits send in the Indian army. So at the same time, you've got basically all these bankers seizing Burmese land and all these Indian soldiers being sent into quash a rebellion. And within this decade, you suddenly get public sentiment turning against Indians and suddenly seeing them as kind of co-colonialists in some sense, wrongly. And, you know, of course it's, but for the average Burmese person in the rural interior, it's these kind of Punjabi and Kashmiri soldiers who are the ones who are coming to shoot them.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to fast forward a little bit and take us to a different part of the empire, which is the Gulf. And, you know, it's just astounding, and I don't think this is well known, and I have to admit my own ignorance that up until March 1947, the states of the Persian Gulf were still administered by the Indian political service, right? It's a kind of astonishing fact. Even more astonishing is that, as you document, there was this of consensus, unanimity. Amongst kind of official Devon Delhi that, you know, the Persian Gulf really wasn't of much interest to the government of India, we can sort of let that go, right? In hindsight seems like such a crazy decision. Why was Delhi at the time so dismissive of what the Gulf states had to offer?
Sam Dalrymple: So the crucial thing is the oil hadn't really been discovered yet. There's been found in small quantities, but we're not living in the world that will emerge after World War II when oil is everything. And, you know, but between 1940s and the 1960s, you get Abu Dhabi going from a small desert town to one of the richest places in the world per capita, but at the moments of this, these debates about nationalism, it's still a very poor place. And so When the Brits are figuring out what's going to happen when they leave their Indian empire and handed over to, you know, Indian nationalists, there are conversations where they essentially offer to hand it over to the future Indian government as princely states just like the rest of them. You know, 565 of these princely States would become integrated into India, Pakistan and Burma. And yet these states of the Gulf, as well as Nepal and Bhutan, would manage to retain their independence into the present day. And this is the important thing. And so I think it's in the mid 1940s that the political legation in Tehran, who is working on the future of the Persian Gulf after Indian independence, writes a letter that's now been digitalized in the Qatar Digital Library that says, It was with surprising unanimity that government of India officials told us that they had absolutely no interest in governing the Persian Gulf after Britain's departure. They saw it as extra expense. They saw too much effort to govern these small, pearling villages on the other side of the Arabian Sea in exchange for basically nothing, but they would have to spend all of their money. And you know, for the Brits, it made sense because this was. Key fueling stations on routes to elsewhere in the British Empire. But if you're the future Indian government in 1946, the provisional government, you're not thinking about the Gulf. You're thinking there's internal chaos, there's partition riots going on everywhere. We don't want to have to spend huge sums of money in sending the Indian army across the sea.
Milan Vaishnav: You know, those of us who study and think about India, many of us kind of have this kind of ignorance or blind spot about this history. But I want to kind of ask the reverse question, which is when you spend time in the Gulf, to what extent is this period of Indian empire kind of part of public memory and something that people living there today grasp?
Sam Dalrymple: That's a very good question. I think in Yemen, it's much more widely known than elsewhere. You chat to most people from southern Yemen today and there is this awareness that, you know, Aden was the westernmost point of India, that Qu'aiti state in what's now eastern Yemen was essentially an appendage to Hyderabad state and was ruled by, you know, relatives of the Nizam of Hyderabad and spoke Dakhni, Urdu, as the court language. You look at photographs from 1920s Yemen, they're all wearing sherwanis, rather than, you know, thobes and the kind of Najdi headdresses that we now see across the region. But I think there's a lot more resistance to talking about this history in the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain. You get a lot of, you know exhibitions on, oh, look, we used to use the rupee and Oh, look, this is. Some images from Indian Army soldiers who used to come here. But there's this sort of approach to South Asia today, which is that South Asians come to the Gulf as migrant workers and there's a sort of condescension towards South Asians in the Gulf that has led to a kind of class reversal from what was there 100 years ago. And there's kind of There's a weirdness in talking about it today. You a lot of people are very happy to talk about being a protectorate of Britain, but there's a deep kind of unease with talking about Dubai as a as a protector of India, of British India, because this is the this is, the truth. It does not show up in lists of British protectorates. It shows up in list of British Indian protectorates, it was under the protection of the viceroys. It was not under the Protection of Whitehall in Westminster.
Milan Vaishnav: Before we get to the partition of India, come back to something that we touched upon when we were discussing Gandhi's views. In discussing the kind of shape and nature of post-47 India, you write that this idea of Bharat, much like Christendom, was an idea that goes well back in time, right, stretches back millennia. But it is an idea or a concept that had never referred to a kind of unified political unit. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the tension that existed between Bharat as an idea and Bharat, as a territorial expression, right? Because that in some sense is a kind of underlying part of this narrative when we're discussing the kind of shattering of this empire.
Sam Dalrymple: I think it's one of the most interesting and under-researched things. I mean, you know, it's a hugely important idea, an idea just as important as Pakistan in terms of 20th century nationalisms, and yet no one's really done proper work on the development of Bharat as a political unit. Everyone just assumes, yes, you, know, it's always existed. Bharat Go specifically back to the Mahabharata, which most scholars today data to around 1200 BC, although you know, sections of it may be much earlier than that. Ever since then, throughout medieval Indian literature, you've got this idea of Bharat, this land bounded by the sea to the south and the Himalayas to the north. I'm on the idea that this is some sort of unit. Even if it's never politically unified
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, it's just this idea, right, of like Diana X of a sacred geography, right?
Sam Dalrymple: And I think it becomes particularly important in the years of the Mughal Empire, when I think it's under the Emperor Akbar, when after years of kind of temple desecrations by set various Islamic sultanates, temples are suddenly being rebuilt. And you've got scholars, Sanskrit scholars like Narayan Bhatt in Varanasi, who talks about wanting to kind of rebuild all of the temples of pirate and under the later. Maratha Empire, which is often seen as a kind of proto-Hindu nationalist empire, you get Marathas conquering vast swathes of South Asia and various Maratha figures attempting to rebuild desecrated Hindu sites. And so it's an idea that by the 18th century and by the 19th century also had this connotation of rebuilding what the Muslims destroyed. And So it's a... It's an idea that very much privileged, like, for some people, privileged Hindus and non-Muslims, and then there were other conceptions of it, like Gandhi's conception, who very much saw Muslims as now an integral part of the pirate. But it's only once, basically, there are these debates, I think it's in the 1890s. That you really get a demand for. The region that, you know, when we want India's independence from Britain, we don't want to go back to the Mughal Empire. We don't to go back the Maratha Empire. We want to forge something new. And this is the idea that we want to forge in a sense. And so like, you get you begin to get, I think it's particularly after in around the 1910s you get artists painting images of Bharat Mata. In Varanasi You get a temple to Bharatmata, to the mother goddess of Bharat, so that by the time that the great partition of 1947 comes about, this is seen as a defiling by many Hindus of a sacred goddess in a way that the separations of Arabia and Burma just didn't trigger that many strong emotions at all among the general Hindu population. Suddenly, by separating off, you know, Sindh and Punjab and Bengal. It was seen as somehow breaking the sacred institution in a way that for a lot of these same Hindu constituents, you know, Dubai and Rangoon had never been particularly central to their idea of what made India India.
Milan Vaishnav: Before we get to the kind of great partition, talking about this kind of idea of Bharat or idea of India, let me kind of ask you a little bit about the idea of Pakistan. You note that when it comes to Pakistani narratives, they often portray these 1946 provincial elections, which would play still under the British Raj, as the moment that the Muslims of India finally united and kind of put forth their claim or their demand for Pakistan. You also write that the Pakistan that people were voting for in 1946 was definitely not the same Pakistan that we are familiar with today. Take us back and tell us a little bit about what was that idea of Pakistan that India's Muslims were voting for more than 75 years ago.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure. This is, again, a really fascinating subject, because if you look at the first time that the word Pakistan is coined, it's by a Cambridge student called Ramath Ali Chaudhary, in 1933, and he's responding to the separation of Burma. And he has in the words of this pamphlet, it makes no sense to me why if Burma is to be separated from India, the Muslims of India must be forced into an Indian federation. And so he then calls for the separation of a region called Pakistan, which referred for him to the regions of Punjab, Punjabis, Afghans, Kashmiris, Sindhis and Balochis didn't refer to Bengalis. And it didn't reflect anyone else. But if you look at the maps that he produces, they're kind of these. I think Jinnah himself, the future founder of Pakistan, refers to this as a kind of Wellesian nightmare, if not a kindof Walt Disney and fantasy, because he's got the most outlandish maps. Of kind of, you know, this Pakistan includes half of South India. It includes the whole of Gujarat. It include random swathes. It included Delhi, it includes Kolkata. It's enormous. And this idea gradually changes. In 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who's previously been known as the great ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, demands the separation of the Muslim majority states or the creation of Muslim majority states from the Indian Union. What's interesting is how much there's his early view on Pakistan. Jinnah's early view of Pakistan seems to be based off the idea of the United Kingdom. So just like the United kingdom has England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as constituent parts of, you know, the United Kingdome. Jinner seems to have been looking for Pakistan too. Be recognized as a separate nation, but remain tied to the rest of India somehow. And when everyone's voting for Pakistan in the 1946 elections, there are all these quotes that I managed to find of constituents in Delhi and UP in North India voting for Pakistan because it never entered their head that Delhi and Lucknow would not be part of this new Muslim state. Of course they would. And it was actually, I think, Most crucially The Muslims in the Muslim majority regions were not scared of Hindu domination, and thus were not the Muslims who tended to vote for Pakistan. The people who voted for Pakistan tended to be minority Muslims in regions that never actually ended up being part of Pakistan.
Milan Vaishnav: So just one footnote on this. I mean, you know, you come to June 1946, you have a person like Jinnah who had really kind of, you build his kind of political career on this idea of this demand for a separate Muslim homeland. But then he basically accepts this idea of a federation. So you would have a kind of Pakistan name, but it's within the framework of this undivided country, right, to kind of loosely on the UK sort of model. But then you have Nehru and Gandhi intervening to say that the Northwest Frontier province, which the Congress dominated at that point, that would be excluded from any Pakistan region within the federation. And that what you call trivial amendment essentially upset the entire apple cart. For Jinnah, this was a huge betrayal. The entire cabinet mission plan collapsed. Why was it so important for the Congress at that time to keep what we now call as the North West Frontier Province, outside of the remit of a Pakistan.
Sam Dalrymple: I think it was for many reasons, I think the Congress, Congress's president at that time, for much of this time had been Moulana Azad. They, although increasingly a kind of Hindu dominated organization, still strove to be an organization for all Indians. And so there's definitely that point. But they also wanted to essentially weaken, weaken the bargaining power of Pakistan. They also personally hated Jinnah. And I think that a huge Far more than we expect of this time period comes down to the personal animosities between a small group of men, who all tended to be from the same parts of Gujarat and were all educated in the same small parts of London.
Milan Vaishnav: You know, every time you read about Mountbatten, you're just kind of astonished, right, that he ended up where he did, because, you know, it was in some ways a very unexpected final viceroy. But of course, he arrived in India at such a pivotal time, and he decides to abruptly announce to the press that the deadline for the transfer of power and the separation of India and Pakistan, would be moved forward almost a full year to August 15th, 1947. And when he's asked about this subsequently, he says the following, and I just wanna quote, the date I chose came out of the blue, Mountbatten later recalled, why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan's surrender. How could such an immense decision be taken with such little consideration? I mean, it seems like such obvious folly. But take us back to that time and what was going through Mountbatten's head when he decided to essentially, as Indians like to say, prepone this decision by one year.
Sam Dalrymple: I think that the key thing that we need to have in our minds is that the division of land, the partition of India did not cause the refugee crisis. It's already happening, there's already massacres. That begins in September 1946, after what's known as Direct Action Day. So Jinnah organizes a day for after the collapse of the cabinet mission, Jinnat organizes, a campaign to show the power of the Muslim League and the power Pakistan's demand, the day turns brutally violent. Mass murder in the streets of Kolkata. And by the time Mountbatten is brought in, Britain is broke. Britain is falling apart. It can barely keep the electricity on. And so to some extent, Mount Batton is sent out as the PR guy. He's sent out there to, you know, let Britain evacuate as quickly as possible with as few British casualties as possible. And make it seem like this was the plan all along, when actually Britain's in an incredibly weak position. And he is this rather extraordinary, charming Hollywood style figure who doesn't really know that much of what he's doing. He's very clever. He is personally very charming. He constantly comes up with rather brilliant ideas. But the key moment of folly from Mountbatten is attempting to just move it forward from June 1948 to August 1947. I think Shaheed Hamid, who was the secretary to the chief of the army, I think, said, 77 days, there's no precedent in history for creating a new country in 77 days. When the Brits had decided to Burma off, they've done so. Over the course of the next kind of eight years, bureaucrats have been working, you know, on how to go about this. And here suddenly they have to do it in a few, in a few days. And I think that Mountbatten was coming from it, from the perspective of just kind of shock everyone into action. And, you know, we've had so many cabinet missions, and we had the, you know, some other mission and yet more kind of, you know, political, we have been trying to get these guys to come to some sort of conclusion for years, let's just tell them, you've got to do now. But of course, this leads to deadly effect.
Milan Vaishnav: I want to talk a little bit about the integration of the princely states, because that, as you call it, partition in which princely States have to decide whether to go their own way, whether to join India, Pakistan, Burma is, I think, one of the most extraordinary under told stories of the 20th century. And there have now been quite a number of interesting books on the subject. I want to ask you about a specific place that's very close to my heart, which is the Prince's State of Junagadh. It's the place where my father is from. And so, I grew up hearing stories of this place, and it features very prominently in one of the early chapters of Ram Guha's book, India After Gandhi. I just want to quote something that you say about it, which was that Junagadh was not a famous princely state. It had neither the romance of Kashmir nor the opulent wealth of Hyderabad, yet it loomed large in the imagination of many of the tallest leaders of the Congress Party. Tell us a little bit about this place of Junagar and why did it have such a special resonance for people like Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure, so the short answer is that Junagahd's state constituted about an eighth of modern Gujarat. So this was, it was the vast majority of a region known as Katiwar. And this, both Gandhi, and Sardar Patel, who was the kind of congress strongman, all came from within about a hundred kilometers of this town. Now, the reason that this town became so controversial is that as British India is being divided along religious lines as a result of Mountbatten's decision, the princely states are given a different option. It's left up to the maharajas, Nawabs, Nizams, Sheikhs, Sultans, etc. To choose which country they want to join. By and large, this means that the Muslim-majority ruler of Bahawalpur joins Pakistan, the Hindu-majority ruler of Indore joins India. But this is not the case everywhere, and Junagar is a prime example of where it was a Hindu majority state ruled by Muslim Nawab. And it had access to the sea, which meant that technically it could have, you know, become an island of Pakistani sovereignty on the Indian coastline. You know, you just have to look at, for example, Malaysia, where you've got the Malay Peninsula, but you also have, you know a part of Borneo being part of modern-day Malaysia. And so I think that there was this idea that the Nawab of Junergarh really could have chosen either side. And initially he's thinking of joining India and then eventually he's persuaded by one Shahnawaz Bhutto, who's the ancestor of the Bhutto dynasty that, you know, Benazir Bhutto and all of these figures in Pakistani history later on, Shahnawas is the kind of first of this dynasty and he persuades this Nawab, you should join Pakistan instead. And this, this kickstarts the debate in India and Pakistan over does the people or the state have the right to choose which country to join. Or does the ruler have the right to choose? And this really is the is the debate that will lead to the modern Kashmir dispute. You know, so much of Kashmir is the opposite issue. It's a it's a Hindu ruling over a Muslim majority state with vast minorities of Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists. But, you know, in Kashmir's case, Pakistan's claim to Kashmir rests on the fact that this is a Muslim majority region and given, you know, were they given the choice of a democratic vote, they may have joined Pakistan. Whereas, you know, India's claim rests on the Maharaja, the Hindu Maharaja having given over his letter of accession to India.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, I want to pause on this for a second, because you have a fabulous substack entry that we will link to called The Gujarati Kingdom that Almost Joined Pakistan, subtitled The Kingdom of the Dog Nawab. And so the legend or the lore of Junagar, right, is that you had this Nawab who you were just discussing, who was dog obsessed. And as the story has been told and passed down, he spent quite a good chunk of the town or the state's fortunes marrying his two favorite dogs. You dwell on this. It's a story I've always been obsessed with. And actually, the story isn't quite what we've been led to believe. Tell us what actually is the case about the Nawab's dogs.
Sam Dalrymple: Sure. So as you said, the story is that he's constantly marrying dogs every time a dog dies. They play Chopin's Funeral March in the streets of Junagur and there's a procession as the dead dog is carried through the streets. One wedding was meant to have taken a quarter of the state's wealth to marry a Labrador called Bobby from Britain to a kind of a Gujarati dog called Roshanara and they were married by Hindu priests and paraded around on elephants. It was just too good to be true. It was a story that I've also been obsessed with ever since I first read about it eight years ago. And the more I researched it, the more it seemed to be everyone mentions it and no one has really done good research on Juniper. I mean, there's there are about five good academics who've really done work and compare that to the kind of 2000 who've done work on Kashmir or Hyderabad. And so I think there's Professor Ankit and there's Professor Pradaman Kachur, who are two scholars, the only two scholars that I found who've done any work on this whatsoever. And maybe also Divya Bhanusin. But it turns out so I went to Jhunagar, managed to find a Whippet race course. So he was obviously, you know, a big Whippett racing enthusiast. The kennels still survive in the palace as well, the dog kennels. But, you know, there doesn't seem to be evidence anywhere in the actual record until the 1950s of these crazy dog weddings. And it seems to come from V. P. Menon, who's one of the Indian nationalist key figures of the story, who writes this memoir of helping to unify India, and he mentions this story. What actually seems to have happened is that this was a dog obsessed He did have all these whippets and kind of you know dogs that he bought from all over all over the world he only had about 30 of them or something, not the 800 that we're led to believe. And when this famous dog marriage was actually much more to do with a local tradition where to remove the evil eye before a prince's wedding, you had to marry two dogs before the prince got married. And so during the ceremony, two dogs had been married by Hindu priests before then the prince and the princess were married. Now... In later retellings of this story, in order to essentially dismiss the Nawab's decision to join Pakistan as a kind of absurd feudal, kind of ridiculous characters, ridiculous decision. Later generations of Indian nationalists have made him to seem ever more of an absurd character, when actually he's rather fascinating. And he is the reason that the Asiatic The government of India's emblem is the Ashoka Lions. Which lions only survive in India thanks to this man. He also had one of the few states in India with free primary education and universal electricity etc. So he was actually one of the more progressive rulers. But this story about his dogs has gone viral. What I do think is he was an incredibly short-sighted individual whose decision to try and join Pakistan would have really worked. I think that he was a bad politician. But I don't think he was as ridiculous a figure. You know, when you read most of these books about him, he's this figure from Orientalist make believe, right? And actually, he's far more interesting.
Milan Vaishnav: Thank you for accompanying me down this particular rabbit hole. I want to come to the fifth and final partition, which has to do with the 71 War and the creation of Bangladesh. In talking about this partition, you note that scholars who are now studying 1971 talk not of one but two genocides. There was one against Bengalis and there was another aimed at the Urdu-speaking Biharis. Who had migrated to East Pakistan after partition. And I think a lot of our listeners will be familiar with the first, but not at all, or much less familiar with a second. Tell us a little bit about the violence that was perpetrated against this, Urdu-speaking Bihari community.
Sam Dalrymple: So, words in, when talking about 71, I think it's much more raw than the events of 1947. It's much more recent, it was just 50 years ago or so, and people are still alive who made the key decisions. The long and short of 71 is that a Bengali nationalist political party won the Pakistani elections. The army, for various reasons that I go into in the book, refused to let this Bengali party take over and rule independent Pakistan and instead sent the army in to arrest the leader and shoot many of the followers of the Awami League. Now, this very rapidly led to mass slaughter in places like Taka University. There is one line in a commission report, commissioned by the you know, one with one flick of a general's fingers, an entire battalion of Bengali soldiers was killed. So huge numbers of people were killed just on the basis that they were Bengali and particularly Bengali Hindus. This is a the massacre of Bengaly Hindus is one of the things that leads to the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India, which had more or less been dormant after Gandhi's assassination by a Hindu nationalist. But after. Um you know after the mass murder of of of hindus in bangladesh in 71 you get people like narendra modi the current prime minister joining the rss as a direct result of news of what's going on in bangladesh now at the same time the um as bengali uh politicians and soldiers and students begin to coalesce around what's known as the Mukti Bahini, the Bangladeshi Liberation Army, who begin fighting after this massacre for an independent Bangladesh. They begin to target anyone associated with the Pakistan Army, but this leads to huge numbers of Biharis. Basically, anyone who That Urdu was assumed to be in cahoots with the Pakistani army. And thus it leads to a whole second ethnic persecution, which, you know, after 1971, the enormous Bihari population in Bangladesh was largely rendered stateless and remained so until about 2008. So this is a huge, and huge numbers of people were massacred in the course of about the kind of four months after the war ended. Huge numbers of Biharis were forced from their homes pushed into refugee camps. Um, and many of them remain there to this day. So there is this, um, kind of brutal, um. Ethnic war happening on all sides. The key thing that I think it's very important to remember though, is that on one side of this, this battle, there was, um you know, a state military, um, with everything that comes with that. There was a, you know a state and organized, um kind of thing happening. From the Pakistani army, whereas the persecution from the Bangladeshi side happened largely Bye! A state in the making. And it wasn't necessarily as top down. And I think that's very important to remember that whilst there is violence on all sides, one was led by a state and one was not.
Milan Vaishnav: Sam, I want to bring this conversation to an end by kind of asking you to reflect a bit on the kind of larger lessons from your book. At one point, you say that, you know, very few of the voices who tout the notion of undivided India really understand that their idea of undivided India was actually constructed by explicitly dividing the Indian Empire, right, which is a bit of an ironic twist. What is it that you would like people who are living in India or in the subcontinent today to really take away from this work that you've done?
Sam Dalrymple: I think that the key message in some sense is how contingent all these national borders really are, how utterly random they are. I think you need to look no further than Northeast India, which is largely Tibetan-Burman speaking. They speak languages closely related to Burmese languages. Today, Northeast India is an appendage to the rest of India, connected only by a small section known as the chicken's neck and places like Tripura that were once closely economically tied with South Asia's largest port at Chittagong, suddenly became completely cut off from the global economy, and you know, turned into this utter backwater with a kind of fully collapsed economy. None of the borders that we now see were in any way inevitable. And when we see South Asia constantly at war with itself, you know persecuting minorities you know, sponsoring attacks over borders to each other's neighbors. It's important to remember how within our grandparents' lifetimes, within the lifetims of people who are still around today, none of these borders existed. And none of these groups were considered minorities. And you know these so much or so many of the conflicts that we see now are based in events, contingent events that happened in the course of a few years over the 20th century. And when we hear Trump talking about Indians and Pakistanis have been war over Kashmir for thousands of years, you could equally hear anyone from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh today saying that Hindus and Muslims have been at war for thousands years when we also know that not to be true. We could hear Burmese nationalists saying that the kind of, you know, the Burmense and other ethnic minorities in the region have been at war with each other for thousands of years. None of these hatreds are natural or inevitable. And there is still so much possibility of reconciliation. We still live in a time where these people are alive today. And I think this is what Project Asthan taught me, is this strangeness of the fact that we would cross these international borders with this absurd technology that shouldn't be necessary for people to see their old homes and old friends again, you know? We the fact that it required a team of 20 college students from Oxford to reconnect a bunch of uncles and aunties who live just, you know, 100 kilometers from each other, but now on the other end of the most fortified border and on planet Earth, it's important to mention that, you know, the India Pakistan border today is the only wall in world history that's been visible from space. We grew up with this lie that you can see the Great Wall of China from space, you can't but you can say the India Pakistan border. Space because that's how militarized it is. The longest wall in the world is the India-Bangladesh border and the longest wall currently being built is the Indian-Burma border. This is now one of the most fortified regions in the World and yet within living memory not one of these borders existed and not one these borders was even foreseeable. And that's I think the key message that I want to leave people. The scars that are now etched onto the landscape. It doesn't need to be this way.
Milan Vaishnav: I mean, it reminds me of maybe apocryphal, I'm not sure, quote that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has attributed to him that he looked forward to the day when it'd be possible to have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul, right? And so I think that's very much in the spirit of what you've just said, Sam. My guest on the show this week is Sam Dalrymple. He's an historian and award-winning filmmaker. He is the author of the brand new book, Shattered Lands, Five Partitions, and the Making of Modern Asia. Here's what The Guardian had to say about his new book. At a time of widespread historical amnesia, when revisionist governments across South Asia are remaking textbooks and erasing inconvenient truths, this book reminds us how recent, contested, and fragile these dividing lines are. Sam, congratulations on a terrific achievement. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Sam Dalrymple: Thank you.
