Shattered Lands
Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A Financial Times, NPR, and BBC History Best Book of the Year
A bold and sweeping history of modern South Asia, told through the five partitions that reshaped it.
As recently as 1928, a vast swath of Asia stretching from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand was bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the “Indian Empire” or, more simply, as the Raj. It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, home to a quarter of the world’s population. In the span of just fifty years, that empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving it into twelve modern nations, including not only India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but also Burma, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
In vivid and compulsively readable prose, Sam Dalrymple presents, for the first time, the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. It’s a story of maps being redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, bumbling politicians in London and idealist revolutionaries in Delhi, kings in remote palaces and ordinary citizens swept up in wars and mass migrations. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And it has left behind a legacy of exile and division.
It began in 1937, when Burma was carved out of India, to devastating result. The partition of the Arabian Peninsula started the same year with the separation of Aden and was completed in 1947 with the transfer of the Gulf States. Also in 1947 was the “Great Partition,” culminating in the largest forced migration in history and the creation of Pakistan, swiftly followed by the partition of Princely India. Finally, in 1971, the fledgling nation of Pakistan was itself torn apart, and Bangladesh was born.
Based on deep archival research, previously untranslated sources, and hundreds of interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic, and Burmese, Shattered Lands is an utterly gripping history that offers a new understanding of modern South Asia—one that brings to light the continuing legacy of empire.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Dalyrmple debuts with an immersive chronicle of the final days of the British Raj that explores how a region previously connected by trade and culture—including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and much of what is now considered the Middle East and Southeast Asia—ended up fractured into starkly divided countries, dashing the dream of a united "Asiatic federation" held by some independence movements. As the British withdrew, they established new borders that formalized major divisions of religion and ethnicity, cutting through minority communities and further exacerbating tensions; in particular, they supported Hindus over Muslims on racist grounds, favoring a Hindu-led Indian National Congress. Dalyrmple illustrates the Raj's administrative disarray ahead of the Great Partition, including many delays, with definitive plans released only after independence to "divert odium from the British." Firsthand accounts illustrate a whirlwind of political stumbles and scandals, ranging from the absurd, as when British troops abandoned an Arab state in modern-day Yemen by feigning dinner plans and a beach day, to the unsettling, such as the founder of the Indian National Army courting Nazi support. Most affecting are accounts from survivors of partition's chaotic violence, such as a Hindu student kept alive during the Great Calcutta Killings by Muslim neighbors who themselves "murdered an innocent passer-by in broad daylight." The result is a compassionate and gripping look at the far-reaching consequences and human costs of partition.
