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Irish Times
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Shattered Lands. Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia: Wonderful telling of a sad history
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia Author : Sam Dalrymple ISBN-13 : 978-0008466817 Publisher : William Collins Guideline Price : £25 The very title of Sam Dalrymple's magnificent book underlines how vital a portrayal of the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century it provides. Many people will probably do a double take when seeing 'partition' in the plural in the subtitle, even more so as it refers to five of them. For most of us, the partition of India no doubt refers to the 1947 division of British-controlled India into the modern Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan . But there are other divisions that have cross-hatched what was once the world's largest imperial holding – the division, and perpetual provisional status, of Jammu and Kashmir between the two newly independent countries; the 1971 secession of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh; and also the separation of two other places whose history as part of the Indian Empire is mostly forgotten: Britain's Arabian territories, including Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Oman and Aden, which split on Britain's orders in 1931, and Burma, which became a separate crown colony six years later. Dalrymple's richly documented history provides an excellent refresher course for anybody in need of one. The better-known partition naturally looms largest in the book, one of the most dismaying humanitarian catastrophes of a bleak century, spurred by the rise of ethnonationalism, the gross incompetence and racist indifference of the colonial administration and crucially, the proximity to a global conflict that created a heavily militarised society, particularly in the Punjab, the historic home of the British Indian Army. Beginning with the Calcutta Riots of August 16th, 1946, the day the All-India Muslim League called a general strike to demand a separate Muslim homeland, India's Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered each other in what Dalrymple calls a 'mutual genocide'. The bloodshed resulted in the deaths of up to two million people and the displacement of between 12 and 20 million, culminating in 'population transfers' between India and Pakistan that are considered the biggest movement of humans in history. READ MORE Panicked populations, driven by fear, distrust and rampant misinformation, killed their neighbours and fellow citizens, often in out-of-body frenzies of violence that would, in some accounts Dalrymple cites, shock and traumatise even the perpetrators for the rest of their lives. 'Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette,' one contemporary account put it. There were many instances of Hindus and Sikhs protecting Muslim friends and strangers, and vice versa, but even these kindly acts would ultimately be powerless against the massive force of genocidal violence, leading people on both sides of the divide to migrate. These included the Hindu Urdu poet and satirist Fikr Taunsvi, who reluctantly left his beloved native Lahore for Delhi after his daughter was murdered by a neighbour. The uprooting of populations also diminished cultures, with the Delhi novelist Ahmed Ali lamenting the 'shrinking of his city's language' after partition. It was only the assassination of Gandhi by the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse in November 1949 that, Dalrymple says, 'shocked the two nations to their senses' and brought an end to the violence. But the book deals with a lot more than just the events of 1947–1949. Dalrymple begins his account with the bumptious visit of the Simon Commission to India in 1928. The commission was tasked with writing a constitution for British India and was led by Lord John Simon, selected because he had a 'virgin mind on Indian affairs'. It was a perfect exemplification of Britain's mishandling of India and the commission members were shocked to find they were not overly welcome in the colony, where anti-colonial sentiment was rife. One of those members was a young Clement Attlee, who would, two decades later as prime minister, preside over India's leaving the empire. The first cleavage, and the first signs of ethnic strife, occurred in Burma, where there were two big pogroms of Indians in the 1930s. Though it might seem strange to think of present-day Myanmar as being part of India, there was, even among progressive Burmese, support for remaining attached to it. [ Understanding the hidden history of Myanmar Opens in new window ] Burma would later become a front line of the second World War, occupied by the Japanese, with local nationalists, including Aung San, father of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi , collaborating with the occupiers in the hope of getting independence. The former congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose would do the same, establishing the Indian national army, which fought the Allies alongside the Japanese. The British looked warily on the indifference to the war effort of other Indian nationalists, imprisoning most of them, including Jawaharlal Nehru, for much of the war. Only the Muslim League leader, and later founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stayed out of prison on account of his support for the Allies. Still, the British knew independence would be inevitable when the war ended, as was acknowledged by the wartime viceroy Archibald Wavell. The Bengal famine, caused by a rise in the price of rice after Burmese imports disappeared, and exacerbated by Churchill 's callous racism, brought the impending break-up only closer. [ Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine Opens in new window ] Few of the chief architects of partition emerge with much credit. Nehru and Jinnah are portrayed as self-serving opportunists detached from the reality of life for ordinary Indians. Wavell's successor, Mountbatten, was, even among his contemporaries in India, widely viewed as incompetent although he was inexplicably left in charge of the process of handing over the colony, which was planned with an insanely irresponsible deadline of just 77 days. Even Gandhi, though not particularly venal in Dalrymple's nuanced telling, is far from the facile totem of saintliness he is viewed as in the West. [ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Opens in new window ] Still, Dalrymple gives them their due, acknowledging that partition was viewed at the time as a way to put an end to the ethnic violence already under way, even though it only ended up exacerbating it. He quotes John Keenan, an Anglo-Indian army officer of Irish descent, who surmises that the rush to get partition completed was due to fears on Nehru's part that the Tories would return to power in the UK and that Churchill would put a stop to decolonisation. India might even have been partitioned further: 584 princely states existed in India before 1947, with no constitutional link to the British empire. The best-known of these were Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Travancore, the latter of which made an ill-fated attempt at declaring independence in 1947. Almost all the princely states were subsumed into either India or Pakistan, with rare peripheral exceptions, such as Nepal and Bhutan, living on as independent states. There were also losers in the shake-up who failed to see their aspirations to independent homelands realised, such as the Naga and the Mizo, two Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups who live either side of the India-Myanmar border. Pakistan also continues to face insurgencies from separatists in its southwestern Balochistan province. The final partition occurred in 1971 when East Pakistan – following horrendous massacres by Pakistani forces that were an echo of the violence of the late 1940s, and a subsequent war with India – gained its independence as Bangladesh. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a non-contiguous state, its two entities 2,000km apart and speaking different languages, would struggle to last. The fact the Karachi government refused to make Bengali an official language, despite it being spoken by 55 per cent of the population, made things only more fractious. Even so, the violence when it came was no less shocking than 24 years previously. Though relinquishing the colonies was undoubtedly the right thing to do, the precipitous manner in which it was done was much to Britain's discredit, and was done as much out of economic expediency as anything else. With Britain financially crippled after the war, Attlee was determined to let go of India. Britain would similarly give up its Arabian holdings in 1971 when inflation at home made running them far too costly. Oil money meant decolonisation was relatively smooth in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the Trucial States (now the UAE) but Aden, which was plunged into civil war, fared less well. Though nationalists across the various countries will surely disagree, Dalrymple is in no doubt the partitions left all countries, on the subcontinent at least, worse off. Travel between the three countries, two of which are belligerent nuclear powers, is now heavily restricted and he notes that it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself. The economies of all three countries suffered, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh, which inherited little of the pre-partition structures or personnel of governance. The scope and verve of Shattered Lands makes it a wonderful read. Dalrymple, who grew up in Delhi, draws on a range of superb memoirs and testimonies of partition, including from the poet Taunsvi, the brigadier Keenan, and the Harvard graduate-turned-Bangladeshi freedom fighter Salahdin Imam, and also an impressive amount of documentation. He tells an extremely sad tale very well. Further reading From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin, 2013) Mishra's history of the responses of Asian intellectuals, from India, China and the Arab world, to colonialism is a landmark work that provides invaluable insight into the underpinnings of anti-colonial action, which have been often obscured in western narratives. The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) Farrell wrote of nothing but empire in his short but glorious career, which encompassed three novels. The Siege of Krishnapur brilliantly details the siege of a fictional British garrison town in India during the 1857 Mutiny. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1973, it lost out in the 2008 Best of the Booker, perhaps in an act of postcolonial poetic justice, to Midnight's Children. [ JG Farrell: plagued by disease Opens in new window ] Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Review, 2005) The Indian-American Suketu Mehta was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for this ambitiously sprawling nonfiction book about Mumbai, the city he lived in as a child before emigrating to the US. An important addition to city literature.
NHK
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- NHK
A singer's mission to bring peace, democracy to Myanmar
A singer-songwriter from Myanmar is giving help and inspiration to his compatriots who dream of peace and democracy in their homeland.
The Independent
19-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Aung San Suu Kyi's supporters strive to set world record to honor her 80th birthday
Thousands of supporters of Myanmar's jailed former leader Aung San Suu Kyi celebrated her 80th birthday Thursday by attempting to set a world record for the most birthday greeting videos, while others took to the streets in demonstrations against the military government that ousted her. Kalo Say Htoo, an organizer of the birthday video campaign, said the original goal was to collect 80,000 greeting videos to honor Suu Kyi and achieve a recognized Guinness World Record. The number of videos collected surpassed 103,000 on Thursday, tripling the current record of 32,207 achieved in 2017, organizers said. Suu Kyi was arrested in February 2021 when the military seized power from her democratically elected government. She was convicted on more than a dozen charges for offenses that her supporters say were concocted to keep her out of politics. She remains regarded by many in Myanmar as the country's legitimate leader while serving a 27-year prison term. Kim Aris, Suu Kyi's son living in London, said in a statement on Facebook Thursday that the campaign is a powerful testament to his mother's global support. 'It's my hope this achievement brings urgent attention to her plight and that of the people of Burma,' said Aris, using the country's former name. 'Her voice may be silenced, but her flame will never be extinguished.' Aris planned to run 80 kilometers (49.7 miles) to honor his mother's birthday, while encouraging others to show support with the numerical theme, such as walking for 80 minutes or making 80 recipes. More than 6,800 civilians are estimated to have been killed by security forces during a widespread armed struggle against military rule that began after generals seized power from Suu Kyi's elected government, according to figures compiled by nongovernmental organizations. Pro-democracy street protests in Suu Kyi's honor were held Thursday in areas that are not under military control including northern Kachin state, the central regions of Mandalay, Sagaing and Magway and in Tanintharyi in the South. Photos on social media showed demonstrators carrying flowers, birthday cakes and posters of Suu Kyi, as well as banners reading 'Happy Birthday' and urging supporters to strive for "the liberation of the entire nation, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.' The military government's supporters posted calls for the arrest of protesters. Several Western embassies posted pictures and illustrations on social media of red roses, with some issuing statements calling for Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners to be released. The Suu Foundation, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, and the law firm Zimeray & Finelle said in a joint statement Thursday that Suu Kyi was thought to have suffered an injury to her left arm during the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that hit the country in March.
Associated Press
19-06-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Aung San Suu Kyi's supporters strive to set world record to honor her 80th birthday
BANGKOK (AP) — Thousands of supporters of Myanmar's jailed former leader Aung San Suu Kyi celebrated her 80th birthday Thursday by attempting to set a world record for the most birthday greeting videos, while others took to the streets in demonstrations against the military government that ousted her. Kalo Say Htoo, an organizer of the birthday video campaign, said the original goal was to collect 80,000 greeting videos to honor Suu Kyi and achieve a recognized Guinness World Record. The number of videos collected surpassed 103,000 on Thursday, tripling the current record of 32,207 achieved in 2017, organizers said. Suu Kyi was arrested in February 2021 when the military seized power from her democratically elected government. She was convicted on more than a dozen charges for offenses that her supporters say were concocted to keep her out of politics. She remains regarded by many in Myanmar as the country's legitimate leader while serving a 27-year prison term. Kim Aris, Suu Kyi's son living in London, said in a statement on Facebook Thursday that the campaign is a powerful testament to his mother's global support. 'It's my hope this achievement brings urgent attention to her plight and that of the people of Burma,' said Aris, using the country's former name. 'Her voice may be silenced, but her flame will never be extinguished.' Aris planned to run 80 kilometers (49.7 miles) to honor his mother's birthday, while encouraging others to show support with the numerical theme, such as walking for 80 minutes or making 80 recipes. More than 6,800 civilians are estimated to have been killed by security forces during a widespread armed struggle against military rule that began after generals seized power from Suu Kyi's elected government, according to figures compiled by nongovernmental organizations. Pro-democracy street protests in Suu Kyi's honor were held Thursday in areas that are not under military control including northern Kachin state, the central regions of Mandalay, Sagaing and Magway and in Tanintharyi in the South. Photos on social media showed demonstrators carrying flowers, birthday cakes and posters of Suu Kyi, as well as banners reading 'Happy Birthday' and urging supporters to strive for 'the liberation of the entire nation, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.' The military government's supporters posted calls for the arrest of protesters. Several Western embassies posted pictures and illustrations on social media of red roses, with some issuing statements calling for Suu Kyi and all other political prisoners to be released. The Suu Foundation, a nonprofit humanitarian organization, and the law firm Zimeray & Finelle said in a joint statement Thursday that Suu Kyi was thought to have suffered an injury to her left arm during the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that hit the country in March.
The Independent
18-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Concerns for imprisoned leader heightened by leaked logs
Leaked prison logs from early 2024 have provided rare insight into the tightly controlled life of Aung San Suu Kyi, the ousted Myanmar leader, who is spending her fourth year in solitary confinement. The logs detail her daily routine, including waking at 4.30am, over an hour of meditation and prayer, three modest meals, and several hours reading English and French novels. Ms Suu Kyi was detained after the military overthrew her elected government in a 2021 coup and she was handed a 27-year prison sentence on charges widely condemned as politically motivated. Concerns about her wellbeing are heightened by the logs, which indicate she receives only basic medical care and has faced room temperatures reaching 31C. Ahead of her 80th birthday on 19 June, her son Kim Aris has launched a campaign to collect 80,000 messages for her.
