A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.

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 more simply as the Raj.

It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas.

And then, in the space of 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.

Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.

Sam Dalrymple’s book is based on research that includes previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, including common people, Shattered Lands is an attempt to revisit a pivotal moment in the Indian subcontinent’s history. Ideally it should be remembered as a moment of independence from the British colonial power but increasingly, particularly, post-1984*, it is remembered as “Partition”. Whichever way it is seen, the fact remains that this is a time that has had a massive impact on the nations it spawned. If modern generations remembered it as a moment of independence, then the hope, joy and being self-reliant would be a legacy. Constantly remembering it as a moment of partition ( a truth understandably), continues to stoke the mills of hatred, othering, and communalism, across generations, instilling prejudices that are inherited but are now manifesting themselves in a monstrously virulent form. The judicious choice of words, particularly when put on paper, and how we choose to remember has a long term impact and should be selected with care. Nevertheless, Shattered Lands : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia is a must read. It is published by HarperCollins India.

Read an extract from the book that was published on Moneycontrol.

I interviewed him for TOI Bookmark**. There is always so much to learn from these conversations that we record for TOI Bookmark. Sam Dalrymple is a new voice that has burst upon the scene with his debut non-fiction Shattered Lands: : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is published by HarperCollins India. In less than a month of its release on 19 June 2025, it has created a stir globally.

This was the first audio podcast that Sam Dalrymple recorded for his book. We had a freewheeling conversation about his book, his research methodology and the early reception to his book.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

So, the story I wanted to tell is the story of how 100 years ago today India encompassed not just India and Pakistan as we know today but also encompassed twelve nation states. You have got Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. And the idea that this was just the whole of India for British administered purposes. You have very real consequences of all these people being given Indian passports and invited into the Indian Army etc. Such that in the 1920s, you have many Burmese politicians are Indian nationalists, as are Yemeni politicians. You have Yemenis considering themselves as Indians which is a thing that we have completely forgotten.

Here is the episode of TOI Bookmark on Spotify:

Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian, film-maker and multimedia producer. 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 his animated series, Lost Migrations, sold out at the British Film Institute the same year. His work has been published in the New York Times, Spectator and featured in TIME, The New Yorker and The Economist. He is a columnist for Architectural Digest and, in 2025, Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. Shattered Lands is his first book.

16 July 2025

*1984 is a significant year in modern Indian history as on 31 Oct 1984, the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her security guards. It resulted in the worst communal riots that many parts of the country, especially the capital Delhi had witnessed. Many Sikhs were killed. The violence was unimaginable. The flag marches. The silence. The pieces of burnt paper fluttering down quietly on to roof tops and terraces while one could hear mobs on the rampage in the distance. Everywhere that one looked, there was only smoke spiralling upwards to be seen. It was a mere thirty-seven years after Indian independence achieved on 15 August 1947. So, there were still many living who remembered the events of 1947. Coincidentally, at this time, the state television, Doordarshan, broadcast the TV adapatation of Bhisham Sahni’s classic Tamas. The concatenation of events was ghastly. At the time, in the camps set up for the victims fleeing the mobs or whose homes and families had been destroyed in the violence, suddenly memories of the trauma of partition came out. These were recorded by many, many organisations and individuals. It was very new. It was being documented for the first time. It made sense to do so. Probably no one realised the long term consequences of entrapping history to a word and the way it should be viewed in one sense at the cost of another instead of as a balanced perspective. Now, 1947 is mostly remembered as “Partition” and not “Independence”. Sad, but true.

** TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. Till date, I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Non-fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.