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?
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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.
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