Book name- SHATTERED LANDS: FIVE PARTITIONS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN ASIA
Author- Sam Dalrymple
Published by- Fourth Estate
Price- Rs 799
In Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple offers a sweeping, nuanced, and substantially researched account of how one of the largest empires in history, the British Empire, fractured into a dozen modern nation-states in just five decades. At a time when conversations about borders are increasingly fraught, Dalrymple reminds us that South Asia’s map is a recent and violent creation, born of political expediency, imperial arrogance, and staggering human cost.
We tend to remember 1947, the year of independence for India and Pakistan and the horror of Partition, as the moment the raj collapsed. But Dalrymple urges us to widen the frame. The empire, he points out, began breaking apart long before that cataclysmic summer, and it didn’t stop with Radcliffe’s hastily drawn lines. Between 1937 and 1971, twelve modern nations emerged from the ruins of what had once been a single imperial unit. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait were, as recently as 1928, “bound together” under British rule and the shadow of the Indian rupee. The raj, Dalrymple reminds us, was not just a subcontinental entity; rather it was a vast, transregional behemoth.
At its peak, the raj governed a quarter of the world’s population. And yet, ironically, much of it remained invisible. Official British maps deliberately left out its full scope, hiding inconvenient geographies. Arab lands that bordered the Ottoman Empire were excluded — “as a jealous sheikh veils his favourite wife” as one Royal Asian Society lecturer put it poetically — lest they spark diplomatic tensions in Istanbul. Burma, too, was cartographically excised despite being a full-fledged province of British India until 1937.
Dalrymple’s narrative begins with this first fracture: the separation of Burma in 1937. From there, he traces the slow and often chaotic unmaking of the empire, through the detachment of Aden and South Arabia, the violent Partition of 1947 and, finally, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, which cemented the region’s current borders. The result is a staggering chronicle of disintegration. This long-concealed history reveals a portrait not just of imperial collapse but of what it meant for millions of ordinary people swept up amid the chaos and mayhem of borders being redrawn and land disintegrated.
One of the strengths of Shattered Lands is its refusal to treat Partition as a singular event. Instead, Dalrymple presents it as a series of ruptures, what he calls “five partitions” that reverberated across the 20th century. While most history textbooks focus solely on the Radcliffe Line and the trauma it inflicted, Dalrymple asks us to reckon with the other lines drawn in boardrooms, battlefields, and palace courts, from Delhi and London to Muscat and Rangoon.
Despite the enormity of its scope, Shattered Lands is a delight to read. Dalrymple’s prose is sharp and evocative, laced with unexpected humour and populated by eccentric, often forgotten, characters. The book is filled with small, strange moments that break the monotony of a grand political narrative with histories punctuated by absurdities, personal anecdotes, and bureaucratic farce. At times, it reads like a political thriller; at other times, like a tragic farce of imperial hubris.
Importantly, Dalrymple does not only focus on the big men of history — the likes of Mountbatten, Nehru, Jinnah, and Aung San certainly appear — but also on the private lives behind political events, drawing from private memoirs, letters and interviews conducted in languages ranging from Konyak to Arabic.
Particularly noteworthy is how Dalrymple restores Burmese independence to the wider conversation about the disintegration of the raj. Too often treated as a separate story, Burma’s detachment in 1937 is shown here as a key moment in the empire’s unravelling — a forewarning of the fragmentation to come.
Shattered Lands is a brilliant and necessary intervention. In a world still grappling with the consequences of partitioned lands and colonial cartographies, Dalrymple forces us to reconsider the lines we’ve inherited. His debut work is vivid, unsettling, and immensely readable. Most importantly, it tells a story that we urgently need to remember: that borders are made, not born, and that what is made by power can be unmade by resistance, loss, and the passage of time.