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Irish Times
11 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.
The Print
2 days ago
- Business
- The Print
Indians ruled Gulf through Hormuz. They paid to ban public cow slaughter, built temples
The shockwave rippled through the Western Indian Ocean; the decades after saw the end of Hormuz's prominence, the development of Iran's first maritime policy, and the immigration of tens of thousands of Indian traders and investors into the Gulf and Iran. This is the story of how Hormuz shaped the history of India and the world. Since at least 1300 CE, Hormuz has been the hinge of Eurasian trade, where thousands of Indians, Arabs, Iranians, Mongols, and Turks made their fortunes. Goods poured through Hormuz, to and fro the Mediterranean, West and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and China. But in the 16 th century, the Portuguese adventurer Alfonso da Albuquerque took control of the port. Though an uneasy ceasefire between Israel and Iran continues, just two days ago, on 24 June, the Iranian parliament threatened the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. But this was not the first time that Hormuz, situated at the narrowest point of the Persian Gulf, has turned into a flashpoint between Iran and the West. Understanding the Gulf Just as the Gulf's geography offered opportunities throughout time, it also created challenges. Its character was utterly unique, nothing like our world of monolithic nation-states. Sam Dalrymple, historian and author of Shattered Lands: The Five Partitions of India, described Gulf towns to me as 'trading islands/oasis towns wedged between the sand sea and the salt sea. They make less sense as states and more as oases filled with traders.' Their population was never consistent: it waxed and waned with the trading seasons, which in turn depended on the monsoon. Outside these ports, weather conditions were extreme: storms, unseasonal winds, scorching heat and humidity. The Gulf's northern edge, shielded from the Iranian Plateau by a mountain range, allowed little room for coastal states to grow. On the south, the vast Arabian desert was home to small tribes that occasionally preyed on sea traffic. Hormuz rose to prominence because it was able to offer safe ground for international trade, without the risk of piracy. This wasn't what one would expect from looking at it. Barely a few kilometres across, sweltering Hormuz was encrusted in salt, with only one freshwater source. Its rulers solved this problem by importing water on barges from the shore. Markets were kept open all night to avoid the daytime heat. In The Persian Gulf: A Political and Economic History of Five Port Cities, historian Willem Floor further explains that the rulers of Hormuz imposed an embargo on timber, oars, coir, iron and steel, which prevented their rivals from building ships. They then took control of nearby ports, establishing a chokehold on the Gulf. Also read: What is Strait of Hormuz & why its closure by Iran could disrupt global energy trade The struggle over Hormuz Though Hormuz's rulers were Muslim, the island made no segregations on ethnic or religious lines. The second-largest ethnic group on the island were Indians, who conducted a roaring trade in horses in the 13th century CE. In 'India's Sea Trade with Iran in Medieval Times', historian Shireen Moosvi discusses the Somanatha-Veraval inscription, recording the construction of a mosque in Somnath in 1264 by the Hormuz merchant Nuruddin Firoz. The Sanskrit portion of the inscription describes the mosque as a dharma-sthanam, and mentions the direct involvement of Gujarat's ruling Chaulukya king and his officials in the grant. If this Hormuz merchant had such influence, writes Moosvi, 'Hormuz merchants must surely have formed an elite group of some importance… in the Chaulukya kingdom of Gujarat.' For the next century, Hormuz continued to flourish. According to Moosvi, Hormuz's networks extended as far as Uzbekistan and Turkey. Goods shipped from Hormuz reached, in relays, all the way to China. The Chinese admiral Zheng He brought his vast armada there multiple times in the 15th century, where he exchanged ceramics and silks for the luxuries of Western Eurasia. Strategic resources such as horses were shipped to India from Hormuz; in return, India provided necessities such as rice to the Gulf ports, as well as cloth, metals, woods, and spices. In his edited volume India and the Indian Ocean, 1500-1800, MN Pearson notes that exchanges overwhelmingly favoured India. Vast quantities of silver and salt were required to balance the trade. In the early 1500s, the Portuguese erupted into the Indian Ocean. From their galleons—artillery platforms designed for deep-sea and coastal voyaging—they attempted to take control of trade gateways in the Indian Ocean, including Hormuz. They stationed a permanent garrison on the island in 1515, but immediately ran into problems. At the same time, the Mughal Empire of the Indian subcontinent consolidated its reach into Afghanistan. Conquering Kandahar, the Mughals stabilised overland routes from India to Central Asia, further weakening the appeal of Hormuz. According to Floor, the Ottoman Empire, which controlled Iraq, attempted to get rid of the Portuguese in 1552 but failed. It would be an Iranian power which finally expelled them and restored some normalcy to the Gulf trade. But Hormuz would never again be independent. Also read: Crude oil prices to freight rates: How Iran's chokehold on Strait of Hormuz impacts India Iranians and banias Up to this point, riven by internal strife, the Safavid dynasty of Iran had paid little attention to events in Hormuz—though they were technically its overlords. However, Shah Abbas I (r. 1587–1629), a contemporary of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, eventually consolidated power. He was alarmed by the loss of both Kandahar and Hormuz, crucial to Iran's trade with the steppe and the ocean. In 'The Gulf in the Seventeenth Century', historian Abdul Aziz M Awad describes how, in 1622, Abbas I used a mixture of threats and promises to convince the English East India Company to attack Hormuz on his behalf. This was successful, and the Portuguese stranglehold was broken. Simultaneously, Abbas recaptured Kandahar from the Mughals, reestablishing Iran as a major economic player. Abbas had learned from the mistakes of earlier Gulf rulers: Allowing foreign control over the Hormuz Island would make it impossible to challenge European sea power in the strait. And so, Abbas routed Gulf trade into a tiny mainland port called Gombroon, renamed Bandar Abbas (Abbas Port). He also encouraged the immigration of Indian merchants throughout Iran, in unprecedented numbers. According to Floor (Persian Gulf), about a third of all homes in Bandar Abbas belonged to Indians. There was a large temple, and Hindu processions were allowed; the Banias also paid the Persian authorities to ban public cow slaughter. Historian Scott Levi, in his paper 'The Indian Merchant Diaspora in Early Modern Central Asia and Iran', writes that 12,000 Indian merchants resided in Isfahan, the capital of Safavid Iran. These merchants traded primarily in cloth and luxury commodities, but used the proceeds for investments and moneylending. As such, they were favoured by Iranian authorities: they 'provided a considerable source of income for the treasury, facilitated taxation by extending a monetised economy into the countryside, and provided village craftsmen and farmers with an important source of investment capital and credit services.' This didn't automatically imply good relations between Safavid Iran and Mughal India. Trade in Hormuz fluctuated as both states competed, occasionally banning trade or rerouting it to other ports. By this point, in the 1600s, both these superpowers had something approaching a modern maritime policy, in which ports like Surat and Hormuz featured front and centre. At the beginning of this column, we saw how Gulf ports, especially Hormuz, had conducted their own business in the 1300s; by the 1600s, they had become chess pieces wielded by gunpowder empires. Yet, some patterns were deeper than the transient politics of states. Indian immigration to the Gulf continued. As the East India Company, and then the British Raj, expanded through the Gulf, their officials noted again and again the ubiquity of Indians. English government official Thomas Herbert, writing in 1627–30, claimed that they 'swarm throughout the Orient… pursuing trade in infinite numbers.' Indians in general, not just Banias, worked as shopkeepers, brokers, bankers, accountants, translators and secretaries. Indian craftsmen and labourers made up a huge proportion of the economy of Oman. Indian soldiers travelled via the Gulf to fight British battles in World War I. And, as Sam Dalrymple writes, it was possible in the early 20th century that Gulf states could have joined an Independent India. Even after the partitioning of the Indian Ocean world into nation-states, Indians continue to work and live in all echelons of Gulf society. The Strait of Hormuz once made Indian fortunes, both before and after the era of powerful states that looked to the sea. What will happen if tensions rise again, and it is closed? 'About 20 per cent of oil and natural gas consumed across the world flows through the Strait of Hormuz… Even if ships heading to India aren't blocked, a major disruption in Hormuz will likely cause energy prices to spike up and make it hard to insure vessels. In a time of economic uncertainty, the last thing India wants is an oil shock,' Aditya Ramanathan, Research Fellow at the Takshashila Institution, told me. The Gulf and the Indian seaboard are not, perhaps, as close as they once were. But they will always be interlocked. Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of 'Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire' and the award-winning 'Lords of the Deccan'. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha. This article is a part of the 'Thinking Medieval' series that takes a deep dive into India's medieval culture, politics, and history. (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Time of India
7 days ago
- Politics
- Time of India
We treat India-Pak hostility as inevitable but these divides formed within living memory
Sam Dalrymple was set for a career in particle physics, until a family trip to Afghanistan to visit the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha rerouted him into history. He started a virtual reality project connecting Partition survivors which, in turn, inspired, his debut book ' Shattered Lands ' tracing the unravelling of the Indian empire. In an interview with Sunday Times, he talks about why our complex pasts shouldn't be ignored Several years ago, you co-founded Project Dastaan connecting those displaced by the 1947 Partition through virtual reality. Was it Dastaan that sparked off this deep dive into five partitions or something else? Dastaan was very much the origin of the book. In 2018, my college friends and I began reconnecting individuals displaced in the 1947 Partition of India, the largest forced migration in history, to their ancestral villages through VR. It was while researching the impact of Partition on Tripura and Northeast India for Dastaan that the book idea first came together. I was chatting with an academic in the region and when I asked about Partition, he said, 'Which one? Burma in 1937, Pakistan in 1947 or Bangladesh in 1971.' That conversation made me think about the multiple ruptures and borders that have carved their way through the subcontinent. The five partitions you write about are the separation of Burma, Arabia and Pakistan from India, the division of 500 princely states, and finally, the creation of Bangladesh. Why did you want to tell this story? by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 오스템 임플란트 받아가세요 임플란터 더 알아보기 Undo We live the consequences of these partitions every day. Just look at the recent war between India and Pakistan. Today, South Asia is one of the most bordered regions in the world, and you can actually see its borders from space. However, 100 years ago none of these borders were foreseen. Demands for 'independence' were widespread, but no one could have suspected that the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Burma would soon emerge from the wreckage of British India. Nor would anyone have imagined that tiny princely states like Bhutan and Dubai would last until the end of the century while massive states like Hyderabad would not. Your book challenges some widely held beliefs— like the idea that India's borders were drawn solely by Cyril Radcliffe. Could you tell us more about that? Cyril Radcliffe was famously charged with drawing the Partition border that would slice through British India. Jinnah had suggested his name because he had never been east of Paris and supposedly his obliviousness would make him impartial. This, of course, had deadly consequences. But what we often forget is that he only drew the lines dividing Punjab and Bengal. Both the LoC and the entire stretch of the India-Pakistan Border from the Arabian Sea to Sri Ganganagar — collectively 81% of the present India-Pakistan border fence — result from the decisions of seven local princes and have nothing to do with Radcliffe. Thirty-six per cent of the border with East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) was made by another ten. Had states like Jodhpur joined Pakistan, or had states like Bahawalpur joined India, the border would look very, very different. The chapter on the Arabian Peninsula ties a global moment — the British withdrawal from Aden (now in Yemen) — to a personal story about Dhirubhai Ambani. How did that shape the trajectory of Reliance? We often forget today that Aden was the Dubai of the 1960s. It was the great business hub of its time, and this remained the case right until 1967 when the British pulled out and the revolutionary NLF took over. Dhirubhai Ambani had worked in Aden until the late 1950s, and after the British evacuation from Aden, he found himself perfectly placed to hire his dispossessed colleagues and found use of 'a ready-made source of educated managers, accountants and salesmen, drilled to European standards'. He had just ended a business partnership with his cousin and gone solo, forming a new company called the Reliance Commercial Corporation. Reliance ballooned in the years after the fall of Aden, underpinned by a generation of Indian-origin Adenis versed in free market capitalism rather than Nehruvian socialism. Given that your book comes out against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions, what is the perspective you hope readers will take away? So often we treat the hostility between India and Pakistan as inevitable. Even President Trump chimed in, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that India and Pakistan had been fighting 'for a thousand years, probably longer than that.' But this really isn't the case. These divisions were formed within living memory — as were the divisions between India and Bangladesh, Burma and Yemen etc. Today, the region's borders have become so embedded in our subconscious that it is easy to forget there were other possibilities for a post-colonial South Asia. Several prominent nationalist figures including PM Nehru and Burma's founding father Aung San had once spoken of an 'Asiatic federation' in the 'not very, very distant future', a 'United Nations of South Asia' encompassing India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. Long after the British departed, many still hoped the new borders might prove temporary. Yet in every single one of these countries, govts have made sure to paper over the shared cross-border heritage of their peoples. The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India's partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold. Your dad, historian William Dalrymple , sparked a lot of debate recently saying that academics don't make their work as accessible as popular historians. Where do you stand on this? I don't think they have to stand in opposition at all. We obviously need both.
Middle East Eye
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Shattered Lands: How Doha and Dubai could have joined India or Pakistan in 1947
A century ago a large part of the Arabian peninsula, including modern-day Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, was legally part of India. Today most people, including in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, have no idea about this, and many would find the idea ludicrous and absurd. But it was indeed the case, as historian Sam Dalrymple shows in his newly published book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is a remarkable fact that Dubai and Doha could easily have ended up as part of modern India or Pakistan. Very rarely can a book on history transform the public's understanding of an entire continent and region's past. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters But this could be such a rarity. Shattered Lands, Dalrymple's first book, is magisterial. In fact, I can confidently say it is groundbreaking. Drawing on evidence from myriad archives and private memoirs and interviews in several languages, Dalrymple has produced an outstanding debut. But better than that, it is a delight to read. Too many history books render extraordinary characters and events dull. Shattered Lands, out now, is published by Harper Collins. (Supplied) Dalrymple's energetic, electrifying prose is thus a breath of fresh air. Every paragraph is practically bursting with colour. The scope of the work is enormous. The premise is that as recently as 1928, 12 modern nations - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait - were "bound together" as part of Britain's Indian empire, the Raj. An entity of its own, the Raj housed a quarter of the world's population and was governed by the Indian rupee. Shattered Lands documents how, over half a century, this vast empire was torn apart. The book is vast in scope but particularly pertinent to Middle East Eye readers is the story of the Arabian Peninsula and how it was split off from India. Much of the British Raj was hidden. Official maps never depicted the whole empire. To avoid the ire of Istanbul, Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire were bizarrely left off maps "as a jealous sheikh veils his favourite wife", in the words of one Royal Asian Society lecturer. Oman, like Nepal in the east, was not officially part of the Indian empire, but it was governed as an informal protectorate by the viceroy of India and included in the list of Indian princely states, which were under indirect British rule. As Dalrymple writes: "The standard list of princely states even opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi, and Viceroy Lord Curzon himself argued that Oman should be considered 'as much a Native State of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kalat'." 'Central to the very idea of India' Muscat, Doha and Dubai were legally part of India under the Interpretation Act of 1889. The wealthy Gulf states today are thus some of the few Indian princely states that actually survived; the larger ones which went to India or Pakistan were doomed. Dalrymple tells us that "the Arabian and Burmese frontiers of the Raj were once central to the very idea of India, and several of the founding fathers of Yemen and Burma had even once conceived of themselves as Indian nationalists". Close ties between the Gulf and the subcontinent stretched back long before the onset of British rule: "For more than two millennia, South Asian communities and their cultures had spread across Asia into China, Afghanistan and Arabia." Persian or Arabian Gulf? A brief history Read More » But the British Empire took this to an unprecedented level. In the early 20th century many Arab elites were educated in Bombay and Aligarh in India, and wore Indian-style sherwanis. The partition of the Arabian peninsula from the Indian empire began in 1937 with the separation of Yemen. That same year it was also decided that India would "not be allowed to run the Persian Gulf" if it became independent. A decade later, in April 1947, the Gulf states were partitioned from India and ceased to be run by the Indian Political Service (staffed mainly by Indians). Indian soldiers were replaced by British ones, and India and Pakistan lost the (then largely undiscovered) vast oil wealth of Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE. As Dalrymple argues, this was "India's greatest lost opportunity". It was only decades later, in 1971, that Britain finally abolished its protectorates over the Gulf states. An age of nationalism One of the book's most fascinating sections examines the crucial role played by Hindu nationalism in the partition of the Arabian peninsula. Because many Indian nationalists fixated on the ancient Hindu holy land of Bharat as their historical reference point, they were uninterested in Burma and Arabia. This weakened Indian nationalism in those parts of the Raj and boosted alternative political visions. We are introduced at one point in the book to the young Arab journalist Muhammad Ali Luqman, who in Aden served as the Gujarati-Arabic translator for one Mahatma Gandhi when he visited before Aden's separation from India. Gandhi's supporters unfurled an Indian flag to "mad cheers by all those present". But many in Aden were turning against Indian nationalism. Shattered Lands is Sam Dalrymple's first book (Supplied) After its separation from India, the discovery of oil turned Aden into one of the world's most important ports. By the 1950s, it was a "vibrant city of businessmen and dreamers where cruise ships jostled alongside the old Arabian dhows and Yemeni Jews mingled with Gujarati Hindus and Somali Muslims". But monumental changes arose with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who became president of Egypt in 1954. 'A dangerous environment for non-Arabs' Nasser's brand of Arab nationalism spread like wildfire across the region. "In quick succession states all over the Arabian Raj formally tied citizenship to 'a fair knowledge of Arabic' and being 'Arabs belonging to an Arab Country'," Dalrymple writes. "In the process the once cosmopolitan Indian Ocean society would gradually be replaced by arbitrary new national identities." And nearly everywhere South Asians "found themselves on the wrong side of the citizenship line and were forced to sell their properties". 'So ended the idea that 'Arab' could be an Indian ethnicity like Bengali or Punjabi - one that had been common for centuries' - Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple By this point, Luqman, once an Indian nationalist, was campaigning for a "Greater Yemen". The Aden Trade Union, meanwhile, announced it aimed to create "a hostile and dangerous environment for non-Arabs". Anti-Indian sentiment was also fuelled by the consequences of the fall of Hyderabad, India's largest princely state - which was widely recognised as a centre of the Islamic world. Hyderabad had a population of tens of thousands of Arabs. Indian soldiers rounded them up and detained them when the state was annexed by the fledgling Indian nation in September 1948. In the end many left and a few thousand were deported. "So ended the idea that 'Arab' could be an Indian ethnicity like Bengali or Punjabi - one that had been common for centuries," Dalrymple writes. Imperialism was often a brutal and oppressive affair, but it could also be cosmopolitan and multicultural. Nationalism could be just as brutal - and regularly very bloody. Much that was complex and attractive was destroyed in the violent convulsions of decolonisation. The Qu'aiti sultanate Under the rule of the nizam, the richest man in the world and the patron of the deposed Ottoman caliph, Hyderabad had effectively governed the Qu'aiti sultanate - the third-largest state in the Arabian peninsula - as a vassal. This gave rise to a rich cultural fusion which produced, among other things, the famous dish of haleem - a Hyderabadi variation on the Arabian dish harees that is famous today. One of the most remarkable figures Dalrymple interviewed for Shattered Lands is Sultan Ghalib al-Qu'aiti, the charming and scholarly former ruler of the sultanate, whose mother was the nizam of Hyderabad's niece. The seventh nizam of Hyderabad (centre) with some members of the ruling family of the Qu'aiti sultanate in around 1940 (Wikimedia Commons) In 1966, he became ruler of the Hadhramaut region of southern Yemen at the age of 18. Enormously popular with his people, Sultan Ghalib worked with manual labourers three times a week to convey "the true meaning of socialism in conformity with the teachings of Islam". But in 1967 the young ruler was betrayed by the British and overthrown in a coup by the National Liberation Front, an Arab nationalist militia, which declared the socialist republic of South Yemen. After he was deposed, he went to Oxford and Cambridge and became a distinguished historian. To this day, however, Sultan Ghalib remains tragically stateless. 'Unimaginable class reversal' Another fascinating fact Dalrymple documents is that Omani sultans owned the port of Gwadar on the Pakistani coastline until the mid-1950s (a Baluchi khan had given Gwadar to an Omani prince in 1783). The Omani Sultan Said bin Taimur was educated as an Indian prince in Ajmer, and was so Indian in his tastes and sensibilities that the British consul-general called him "Babu". Revealed: Why there is an abandoned Ottoman tomb in remote India Read More » The sultan even discriminated against Arabs in his own polity, denying them education and government positions. Unsurprisingly, he was spectacularly unpopular and was ultimately replaced by his reformist son, Sultan Qaboos. Qaboos bucked the Arab nationalist trend by declaring "many communities from across the Indian Ocean as indigenous tribes". He even declared Kanak Khimji, a Gujarati merchant, to be a sheikh with responsibility for Oman's 200,000 Hindus - the first Hindu sheikh in Arab history. Few non-fiction books are worth reading cover to cover, but Shattered Lands is a rare exception. Outside of some academic circles, the history of the Arabian Raj has been largely forgotten. Dalrymple's book should make waves in the Gulf, which today hosts a massive South Asian population - mostly poor migrant labourers, in what Dalrymple calls an "unimaginable class reversal". But the book will also shatter historical orthodoxies in the subcontinent itself. Shattered Lands is a triumph - and I strongly suspect Dalrymple has much more up his sleeve.
Hindustan Times
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Sam Dalrymple: 'The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition'
This book is about the five partitions of the Indian Empire, which stretched from Aden in the west to Burma in the east to now 12 nations in three geographic regions. At the time, you write, even Britain downplayed its size. Nepal and Oman were never officially recognized. Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire and Himalayan states near Tibet were left off the maps. But these were all run by the Indian political service, defended by the Indian army, their currency was the Indian rupee. So how did the British manage to hide them? And what did the Indian Empire actually look like? Sam Dalrymple, author, Shattered Lands (Courtesy HarperCollins) So, for example, a 1909 map [Political Divisions of the Indian Empire by The Indian Gazetteer] shows Burma as British India, and Nepal and Bhutan as princely states — they're in yellow exactly like Jaipur and Hyderabad are — but hides Arabia. A 1909 map of Aden by The Indian Gazetteer recognizes much of southern Yemen as dominated by princely states. A rare Indian Empire map from 1930 includes Aden but not the Gulf states. The British were always quite reticent to talk about what they were doing in the Arabian states, partially because very few people actually lived there. These were the poorest states in the Raj. Oil hadn't been discovered yet, and so, largely, it was small settlements on the coast. The Brits were only involving themselves in the cities and making sure that the sheikhs were abiding by them. The person who integrated the sheikhs of the Gulf into the Indian empire was Lord Curzon. Lord Curzon went on a Durbar trip to Sharjah [in 1903] and invited the sheikhs and gave them all gun salutes, and created a Persian Gulf residency, on the model of the Hyderabad residency or the Jaipur residency. So, subsequently you had the list of princely states beginning alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. There's a map of the Arabian peninsula in the Gazetteer issued to Indian civil servants, and if you placed it beside the India maps, it gave you a full picture of the size of the Indian Empire from Aden to Rangoon. The public never got to see its full scale though. The Ottoman Empire officially claimed the Arabian peninsula and the British wanted to avoid aggravating Constantinople, so they always kept the Arabian Raj off official maps of India. Likewise, Britain's presence in Nepal and Bhutan — they didn't want to scare China or Tibet. But officially under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these were India. And everyone was eligible for an Indian passport... At the Round Table Conference on Burma in 1931, Burmese leaders were against separation from India. In Aden at the same time, some saw 'the connection with India as organic.' The city's many Gujarati and Parsi residents thought Aden 'was an integral part of the Indian nation'. In the 1940s, the Nawab of Bhopal wanted the princely states to, instead of acceding to India or Pakistan, be unified as a third dominion called 'Rajastan'. The Nagas wanted a separate Christian state under the Commonwealth nation. Kalat [in present-day Balochistan], then the third largest princely state in the Raj, wanted to be independent. What were, at the time, considered the most plausible partitions? I think what's remarkable is how late the idea of independence comes up. It took them until 1929 to ask for it. What they'd all been asking for until then is for the interconnectivity of the empire to remain but for equal opportunity within the empire. The model was the Roman Empire, which, around 200 AD, became completely racially equal — so Philip the Arab could become the Roman emperor and then you've got people from Tunisia or Egypt or Syria or France suddenly ruling the Roman Empire. So, for early nationalists, it would have included everything from Aden to Burma as one giant country probably governed along a system like the United States of America, which was another country that had gained independence from Britain in the past. Once it became clear that independence was happening, you had hundreds of different ideas of what different states could look like and virtually no one could have imagined what we actually got. Gandhi wanted independence for basically Bharatvarsha. He wanted to carve out a nation state that resembled Bharat of Mahabharata fame. We're so used to this idea of undivided India that we forget until as late as the 1920s, it had never been attempted before to have all of it ruled on one country. Even Ashoka and the Mughals had never ruled over the whole of the subcontinent. There had always been a bit of Tamil Nadu or a bit of Kerala that had been independent. Or it had included Afghanistan as well or something. There were various other ideas of kind of uniting all the Muslim areas. There were ideas of Burmese nationalists. There was a very early idea of a Dravidian state that has Hindustan and India as two separate bits. The idea that we grow up with in Delhi schools is the idea that Gandhi had of this eternal Bharat. The fact that there were hundreds of other visions or just near misses is forgotten. 536pp, ₹799; HarperCollins Did Gandhi set the tone for what India now looks like? It wasn't him specifically. The idea that set it up was in the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. You suddenly had nationalists producing images of Bharat Mata, and the Congress latched on to it. But the depiction of independent India as Bharat Mata alienated the Burmese and the Arabs. These partitions occurred within the last hundred years and still exist in living memory. The 'Long March' of about 600,000 Indian refugees from Burma, 80,000 of whom die... How well are these stories documented — and were they hard to access? The origin story of this book was from a conversation with someone in Tripura who I was asking about Partition for our Project Dastaan [an initiative co-founded by Dalrymple in 2018 to reconnect people displaced by Partition]. And they said 'Which partition? ... Because there was the 1937 one from Burma, 1947 from India. And then Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 and we got another influx for refugees.' And I, having studied Partition for three years, had never considered that. Each of these 12 countries has brushed over its past. Unlike Partition where lots of people are still alive, the 'Long March' was six years earlier so we've lost six more years and it's very late to get these stories out. I've only got a couple of people who I was able to interview in person. A Sikh family from north London — of the character Uttam Singh from the book, his grandkids — had reached out to me on Instagram and said they had a Partition story. I told them about what I was doing with the book and they said 'Oh, we were in Punjab for Partition, but actually before 1941 we were all in Burma.' And then they opened this trunk and they had an untranslated diary, photographs, and everything. I think that the key one though is Yemen — it lost most of its papers in the communist takeover of South Yemen. Many of the archives there were burnt. And all of these Arab states have been very harsh with their citizenship laws — about who gets to be Kuwaiti or from Dubai... and they don't particularly want to run over this history, especially in the present day. But the big story there got discovered by professor James Onley, who was the director of research at the Qatar National Library. He was commissioned by the sheikh of Qatar, who wanted to create a Qatari digital library, to find documents relating to Qatari history. And there was nothing in Qatar on what its life was before the 1950s and '60s. He eventually stumbled upon the fact that everything is sitting in the Bombay archives. It's not in London, it's not in Qatar, it's all in Bombay. He wrote a big book that's a classic called The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (2007). You've used a lot of personal correspondences and diaries for your research — starting from letters written by John Simon [of the Simon Commission] to his mother describing his travels, or the ones between Sarojini Naidu and her daughter Padmaja, Asha Sahay who was a foot soldier of the INA, Uttam Singh... Tell me more about finding private papers and working with such personal research material. There were some particularly interesting ones. Two of the wildest interviews and private papers I had was Ghalib Al-Qu'aiti, the Yemeni Sultan, who's descended from the Nizam of Hyderabad. I ended up meeting him and he's living stateless in Jeddah; he's not allowed to leave the country and the Brits are refusing to give him a passport. He'd attempted to write his own autobiography but never got it published... he had all these letters and private papers that no one's really ever used before. The other one was Feroz Khan Noon, the seventh prime minister of Pakistan, who was removed when martial law was first imposed in 1957. His family live in Lahore and the family archives just haven't been utilized. And then the other one was actually my godmother Brigid Keenan who, as a young girl saw the last Brits disappearing through the Gateway of India and whose father was in the PBF, the Punjab Boundary Force. He was an Irishman who is one of the few people who volunteers to try and keep the peace... and I found his letters, which were just sitting in a house in Somerset. What was your most surprising discovery? That the Persian Gulf remained a part of the Indian Empire till 1947. That one muddled me. And it was weirdly difficult to find any papers on — so much of it is online, but it's difficult to find anyone talking about it. The thing that we've got to remember is that the Gulf was the lowest ranking princely states in the Indian empire. Not even worthy of one gun salute, you write. They weren't invited! The Sultan of Oman is the exception, and Qu'aiti State, the guys in Eastern Yemen. Oman had 21 [gun salutes] Qu'aiti State had 10, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi had zero. They all were invited to go to Mayo College, etcetera as princes. I think that's going be the big surprise for Indian readers – the fact that there was a world where the united oil wealth of the entire Gulf could have gone to either India, or let's not forget, Pakistan. These were Muslim-majority states, they could have joined Pakistan instead and probably would have. Many cities, thriving centres of culture and trade, suffered tragic declines in this time. What were some of the biggest casualties? I don't think we should be nostalgic about the 1930s. Each of these countries has gained things and lost things. This was a time of high imperialism and very racially segmented societies that worked on the basis of exclusion. One of the places that's changed the most and suffered the most in this time would probably be Hyderabad, which was this centre of courtly wonder and baroque palaces. So much has been lost, so many great libraries, collections of art — Hyderabad should be the number one tourist destination in the country and would have been in the 1930s. Jaipur and Jodhpur and Udaipur and all the places we visit today were nothing compared to Hyderabad. Half of it was bulldozed, destroyed and ghettoized in the wake of the events of the 1940s. But I feel like it's a complicated legacy. This was also a place of great brutality, probably the most socially hierarchical place in the entire subcontinent with bonded labour ruining the lives of most the population. Today, through the lens of modern politics, we often look at it as a Hindu-Muslim thing with the Nizam as a Muslim, but I think if we look at it through the lens of class, we see that this was the site of, in the 1950s, South Asia's biggest communist movement and communist revolution. The Indian Army was still fighting communists in the Telangana countryside three years after it went into the place. Burma lost something immense. It was the most multicultural region in Asia, and today it's driven by ethnic factionalism, mass murder and civil war. But at the same time, Rangoon in the 1930s was also not necessarily a completely open place. It was driven heavily by class and race. Aden was a very diverse cosmopolitan place filled with traders from across the Indian ocean. It was one-third Indian, one-third Somali, one-third Arab, about ten percent Jews. Like Rangoon, it is the one that's fallen the most from one of the great ports of the world to a southern Yemeni city that's now riven by ethnic and religious civil war. The culture of Lahore is mourned immensely. But there were quite justifiable reasons many Muslims felt like they needed separation. Urvashi Butalia and Aanchal Malhotra have both talked a lot about this. People in Lahore who lived through Partition, who miss their friends, but also will tell you about how Hindus were never able to eat in the same room as their Muslim best friends. You write about the alliance between India and Pakistan after Partition. How did it come about and what went wrong? Of the two books that really discovered this, one is Pallavi Raghavan's Animosity at Bay (2019), which is an alternative history of the relationship of India and Pakistan. After the ceasefire in 1949 over Kashmir, both countries were quite happy to leave it to the UN and move on creating a new future, particularly in the wake of the Liaquat–Nehru Pact. And so Jinnah's tomb was built by an Indian Muslim. His daughter lived in Bombay her whole life without much issue. There were whole communities with half a family living on one side and the other half on the other side of the border. The other book is Avinash Paliwal's who was the first to used declassified intelligence files from the Northeast, and he's completely rewritten everything that we thought — because until that point, we'd been relying on memoirs and oral histories and news reports, often which got things wrong. Bizarrely, the thing that breaks apart the India-Pakistan relationship is India sending the army into Goa [in 1961] to annex it from the Portuguese. And that whilst everyone in India and half the world saw this as a final moment of decolonization, the Pakistani leadership, which had a year earlier put a military pact with India on the table, saw it as India suddenly muscling up its army, taking on European powers militarily, and essentially as a new Indian expansionism — that India would have this irredentist thing of trying to claim back lost territory. So the Pakistani leadership was terrified and started funding Naga separatists the same year. Within a year, India started funding the Pashtuns and Bengali separatists. And it became a tit for tat. But from 1949 to 1960, the whole of the 1950s, there was another way, many what-ifs that could have happened. And I think that more research really needs to be done to figure out the details of what went wrong. The 1965 war is actually the one that broke down the complete relationship: enemy property acts come in, all transport across the borders stopped, the beginning of a border wall is built up. How was the Northeast affected by Partition? The Northeast was probably the most affected by Partition. It's the reason that the Northeast is now a strange appendage on the right of India. Tripura was 20 kms from Chittagong, South Asia's largest port, and suddenly became landlocked by 2,000 kms in an area with no roads. The economy completely crumbled, and the indigenous population was overwhelmed by Bengalis flooding into the country. Half of the conflict, with the exception of Arunachal Pradesh, all of the others — the AFSPA agitation, the insurgencies in Tripura, Mizoram and Nagaland — have roots in Partition. Many of the ethnic conflicts in the Northeast — when you grow up in Delhi, at least — seemed so complicated. But the moment you think about how everything has to do with borders cutting through communities, and with regions being overwhelmed by new migrants, suddenly all of its politics became clear overnight. That fog lifted. Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.
