A review of the book 'Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia' written by Sam Dalrymple.
What if 1947 was only one of five partitions? In this episode, we review Sam Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Dalrymple argues that the British Indian Empire, once stretching from Aden to Burma, broke apart through a chain of separations: Burma, Aden and the Gulf, India and Pakistan, the princely states, and finally Bangladesh in 1971. We look at what the book gets right, where its framing is open to challenge, and whether it changes how we should think about the borders of modern Asia.
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Coming up: A review of the book 'Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia' written by Sam Dalrymple.
Namaste Friends. My name is 'Shinil Subramanian Payamal' and you are listening to the Historylogy podcast.
Before I proceed, a full disclosure: This book was bought with my own money and not been provided to me by the author or publisher.
Little bit about the author:
Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning filmmaker. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar, and also studied at the University of Isfahan and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. He has worked across South and Central Asia, including stints with Turquoise Mountain in Kabul, and with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hunza and Lahore.
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 writing has appeared in the New York Times and The Spectator, and his work has been 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’. He runs the history Substack page @travelsofsamwise. Shattered Lands is his first book.
Let me read a brief description of the book:
QUOTE
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 in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb 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 stunning narrative is based on deep archival research, 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, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.
UNQUOTE
This, Sam Dalrymple’s debut book, published by HarperCollins in 2025, offers a sweeping, deeply human examination of how the vast expanse of the British Indian Empire—stretching from the Middle East to Southeast Asia—fractured into twelve distinct modern nation-states.
The five partitions, as Dalrymple defines them, are:
1. 1937: Separation of Burma as a separate crown colony.
2. 1937–1947: Detachment of Aden and the Gulf territories.
3. 1947: The “Great Partition” creating India and Pakistan (with the largest forced migration in history).
4. 1947: The integration or division of hundreds of princely states (including Hyderabad, Kashmir, and others).
5. 1971: The secession of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh.
Dalrymple combines rigorous archival research with vibrant prose, bringing to life both high-level political players and ordinary individuals caught in the crossfire of mass migrations.
The book has around 17 maps showing the Indian Empire in 1921, British India, 1921, The Indian Empire in April, 1937, The Arabian Raj, 1962, etc…
The book also has four wonderful colour plate sections showing: the ruling princes of India, a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Gandhi in Burma, a new recruit of the Indian army, the Japanese conquest of Rangoon, Nehru and Edwina in Simla, May 1947, Direct Action Day in Calcutta, etc…
Final Verdict:
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia is an excellent entry point for readers seeking to understand how the map of modern South and West Asia was made—and why so many of its borders and conflicts remain live. For anyone interested in the intertwined histories of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and the Gulf, it is essential, engaging reading.
Ultimately, the most important question raised by the history of partition is not simply why lands were divided, but what happened to the people who had to live with those decisions. That question makes Shattered Lands a subject worth engaging with.
I give this book 4/5.
The book is currently available in ALL the formats on both, Amazon India and Amazon USA. I have given the respective buy links in the show notes. Please check them out for the latest prices.
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