"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport became, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." - Sam Dalrymple
"The story that I tell in the book is how this one Indian Empire passport becomes, by the 1970s, twelve independent passports." — Sam Dalrymple
We sat down with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, for UNAPOLOGETIC. His argument: the "Partition" most people know from 1947 was only one of five ruptures that broke apart the old British "Indian Empire" — a single administrative unit stretching from Aden in Yemen to the borders of Thailand — between 1937 and 1971, producing the twelve nation-states of today's South Asia and Arabian Gulf. This was a world where the Sultans of Oman were schooled in Rajasthan and grew up fluent in Urdu, where a Yemeni family's move to the Deccan gave the world haleem (Yemeni harees, remixed with Hyderabadi spice), and where Rangoon in 1933 briefly overtook New York as the world's busiest port of migration. Sam traces exactly how that world got torn apart, piece by piece.
We go deep into the personal story behind Pakistan's founding, from Muhammad Ali Jinnah's transformation after the death of his wife Ruttie, to Gandhi's early opposition to a "Greater India," through all five partitions in turn: Burma in 1937, the Arabian states, the Great Partition of 1947, the forced integration of princely states like Hyderabad and Kashmir, and finally the 1971 war that created Bangladesh. We also talk about the scale of the devastation, the myths that have grown up around it, and Sam's own Project Dastaan, reconnecting Partition survivors with the homes they lost.
UNAPOLOGETIC is hosted by Ashfaaq Carim.