‘Shattered Lands’: the perils of Partition
by
Sang-Hwa Lee
A man and his place of birth may undergo transformations of their nationality and citizenship without his being consulted, international border being changed any number of times. He is just a bit of flotsam in the whirlwind of politics. – The Chakma Raja Tridiv Roy
In 2017, on the 70th anniversary of Britain’s departure from the Indian subcontinent, young Sam Dalrymple was studying in Oxford, the idyllic city of dreaming spires, when his “own journey with Partition began”. He is himself a legacy of empire, having spent a happy childhood in Delhi and boasting a Mughal princess as one of his forebears on his father’s side, though for much of his life he enjoyed the youthful luxury of historical amnesia. But hearing his two friends, one Indian and one Pakistani, talking about their grandparents’ displacement in 1947 and inability to return to their ancestral homes across the border, a distinctly 21st-century idea was born. Why not create a bespoke, 360-degree virtual reality experience to reconnect Partition survivors with their childhood communities and villages? This became known as Project Dastaan (which means “story” in several languages of the subcontinent). It is also the basis of his remarkable debut work of history: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, £25).
While Project Dastaan was concerned with refugees of the 1947 “Great Partition” that led to the traumatic birth of India and Pakistan, Shattered Lands details the “Five Partitions” of the Indian Empire. Five? As Dalrymple explains, the Raj was actually much bigger than we commonly think – so much so that its true extent was hidden on imperial maps to avoid diplomatic upsets. It extended from the Persian Gulf to Mandalay.
Burma was the first to go in 1937, followed by Aden and the crescent of South Arabia; then came the “Great Partition” of India and the absorption of the princely states; and, finally, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971 gave us the modern map of South Asia. In total, twelve countries emerged from the ruins of the Raj over the course of just 50 years: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.
Today, each of these peddles a stirring national myth about the glorious inevitability of their nationhood. But Dalrymple, ever the conscientious historian, stresses the contingency of their independence. A key argument he repeatedly makes is that “as late as 1930 it had still been possible for anti-colonial activists in Aden, Rangoon, Lahore and Dacca to conceive of themselves as part of a future Indian nation”. This includes several prominent nationalist figures – the likes of Muhammad Ali Luqman, Sayadaw U Ottama, and even Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself (who initially rejected the idea of Pakistan as “some sort of Walt Disney dreamland, if not Wellsian nightmare”).
Britain is usually blamed for the violence that broke out after the 1947 Partition, with quasi-villainous white men callously redrawing the map of an entire subcontinent with irresponsible disregard for the human costs involved. Mountbatten’s decision to accelerate the British withdrawal undoubtedly hampered the efforts of Cyril Radcliffe, who had been tasked with determining the border between India and Pakistan despite having “never been east of Paris”. It is possible that with an extended timeline Radcliffe could have conducted a more thorough consultative process, and perhaps a phased migration with appropriate security provisions could have been arranged, reducing some of the confusion and carnage that followed. Even so, many historians doubt that large-scale violence could have been avoided entirely.
Yet Dalrymple is not in the business of excessively guilt-ridden handwringing and self-flagellation, certainly not at the expense of good history. While implicitly condemning the way everything was “haphazardly” put together, he also does something unusual and far more interesting: he restores agency to the colonised themselves. The princely states, he explains, were given the choice to “integrate” their states with one of the new neighbouring countries – a decision that was more often than not based on pragmatism rather than, as might be expected, the religion of the ruler. In the end, the Radcliffe line determined less than half of the India-Pakistan border (and less than 20% if modern-day Bangladesh is excluded). In stark contrast to the modern Middle East, where the colonial pen remains indelibly etched in unnaturally straight lines on the ground, “the borders of South Asia – usually understood as a legacy of the British – are as much the legacy of India’s princes”. It was not the British but Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, who decided that his Muslim-majority state would join India rather than Pakistan — a decision that has left a legacy of conflict between the two nations ever since.
The story is different when it comes to Burma, however, where Britain played a decisive role both in its partition from India and the determination of its borders. The Simon Commission, which was appointed in 1927 to recommend constitutional reforms for British India, appears to have “made up their minds before they even arrived” that Burma should be partitioned, given the “sense among many British officers that its people were racially distinct from the rest of India”. Although the anti-separationists won a landslide victory in the 1932 Burmese general election, Britain proceeded with the plan for partition regardless.
Strangely, everyone involved seemed “remarkably unfussed” about the exact delineation of the border, which had run through the Patkai Hills, a significant natural barrier in its own right, since the 19th century and been gradually adjusted by the British – everyone, that is, apart from the Naga tribes who inhabited those hills. Shielded from the increasingly nationalist political winds by the imposing mountain ranges, the imminent separation from India threatened to slice the Naga homeland in two. In 1956, Angami Zapu Phizo, a Bible salesman and insurance broker from one of the tribes, formally launched “Nagaland” as an independent state and later became involved in a regional proxy war by accepting Pakistani aid, though this all quickly fell apart with the secession of Bangladesh in 1971. The Nagas thus joined the Kurds, Palestinians, Sikhs, and Rohingya in seeing their hopes of nationhood swallowed up by powerful forces.
In a more devious and shameful episode, Dalrymple describes how Britain betrayed Sultan Ghalib by abandoning the Qu’aiti State and handing it over to the Marxist revolutionary (but anti-Egyptian) National Liberation Front during its hurried withdrawal from southern Arabia in 1967. Nineteen other princely states were similarly discarded and these were all constituted into the People’s Republic of South Yemen. The surviving rulers of the Gulf tried to convince the British to stay and honour their treaty obligations, but were sent a clear message when Denis Healey, the then Defence Secretary, went live on the BBC to say he had no intention of being a “white slaver for the Arab sheikhs”. Seeing the writing on the wall, the Trucial States (a group of sheikhdoms along the southern coast that entered into a series of truces and later treaties with Britain) merged into the United Arab Emirates in December 1971 – a few months after Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman formally declared their independence.
Shattered Lands has been hailed as a fair and nuanced take on empire that avoids the facile “balance sheet” approach. Dalrymple’s handling of the Bengal famine is a case in point. While he acknowledges Churchill’s “racism towards Indians” and his “central role in the tragedy”, insofar as his War Cabinet continued to ship Bengali rice overseas, he is careful to describe this as a “callous example of colonial apathy” as opposed to deliberate genocide. He also attributes “a significant portion of responsibility” to the elected government of Bengal, pointing out that provinces like Madras had faced similar conditions but alleviated the situation by opening public food kitchens. Vinayak Savarkar of the Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist political organisation, is likewise criticised for aggravating the crisis by demanding Hindus boycott government efforts to buy up the rice.
But in many ways the book is actually less about imperialism than nationalism – and here Dalrymple is more conclusive. There is little acknowledgement of any positive aspects of the anticolonial movements of national liberation. Instead, countless pages vividly chronicle the endless suffering, bloodshed, and displacement of millions as they flee from one hell to another. The reader easily loses track of which group has crossed over which border to avoid slaughter by which people for which reason. Not only does this unintentionally reflect the chaos and mayhem on the ground, but the sweeping God’s eye view of the meaningless butchery below also induces a sense of paralysing horror and helplessness.
In Burma, whipped up by the racist xenophobia of the Hitler fanboy and leading Burmese politician Galon U Saw, an inflammatory pamphlet that depicted a Muslim claiming Islam’s superiority to Buddhism exploded in an infernal pogrom directed against all Indians, who were treated as interchangeable with Muslims. Yet just a few years later, Indian would kill Indian for the sin of being born into the wrong faith and finding themselves on the wrong side of an artificial border not even a year old.
During the 1971 war, loyalist militias in East Pakistan comprising mainly Bihari Muslims targeted innocent Bengali Muslims on the grounds that they were “Hindus posing as Muslims”. With the fall of Hyderabad to Indian forces in September 1948, tens of thousands of Arabs were rounded up and readied for deportation, ending the once formidable princely state’s centuries-long ties with the Gulf region. In a doleful mirror image, the large Indian and Pakistani population was exiled from Arabia after the collapse of the Qu’aiti Sultanate almost twenty years later.
Dalrymple argues that Hindu nationalism was a key driving force in the earlier partitions of Burma and the Arabian Peninsula, positing an independent India that resembled the ancient Hindu holy land of Bharat, “an idea that stretched back millennia, but one that had never referred to a unified political unit”.
Sometimes, though, he risks overstating the integrity of the Raj. Even if the Arabian protectorates were legally part of “India” under the Interpretation Act of 1889 and some anti-colonialist leaders in Yemen once conceived of themselves as “Indian” nationalists, it seems a stretch to say that “without this minor administrative transfer [of South Arabia from the Indian Political Service], it is likely that the states of the Persian Gulf Residency would have become part of either India or Pakistan after independence, as happened to every other princely state in the subcontinent”. After all, virulent ethno-religious nationalism was engulfing the subcontinent, not to mention the concomitant development of Arab nationalism, which was given a further boost by the discovery of oil wealth and, of course, the rise of Nasser in the early 1950s.
There is also the banal but crucial fact of geography and distance: unlike the other princely states, the Persian Gulf was separated from British India by a great body of water. The sale of Gwadar (at the time only a small fishing village and minor trading post that had been under Omani rule since 1783) to Pakistan in 1957 marked the disappearance of the final land border between the Indian and Arabian subcontinents.
Another quibble relates to Dalrymple’s implicit aversion to nationalism and celebration of globalisation, which give him an overly romanticised view of empire and of princely states as hubs of tolerant cosmopolitanism. Perhaps as a result, he occasionally makes a few ahistorical points that slide into factual errors. See, for example:
Today most Brits seem convinced that immigration is a relatively new phenomenon that started with the HMT Empire Windrush docking in London in 1948. But of course, Bengal was annexed by the British East India Company in 1757, just fifty years after the Act of Union with Scotland… The region of modern Bangladesh was once crucial to the very formation of Great Britain.
Yet there was negligible inward migration into the UK from the Empire before 1948 when the British Nationality Act was passed. Nor can annexation be regarded as in any way the same as a constitutional act of union. This is also why it is misleading to claim that “between 1931 and 1971 Britain went from being the largest Muslim power in the world to having a tiny Muslim minority” (for all Churchill’s boast that Britain was “the greatest Mohammedan power in the world”). Britain was indeed the imperial overlord of mostly Muslim subjects of the Crown. Britain itself, however, was unquestionably a Christian country.
Lamenting the dull homogenisation of once-vibrantly diverse cities like Aden, Dacca, Rangoon, Karachi, and Hyderabad, the book ends on an ominous note: “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.” But in writing such a splendid work of popular history, based on deep archival research as well as previously untranslated private memoirs and interviews, Dalrymple has already provided the antidote to such ugly, narrow-minded nationalism: an understanding of the past in all its moral complexity; a reflection on the multiplicity of identity; and an appreciation of the contingency of so much of what we take for granted. We are all just bits of flotsam in the whirlwind of politics.
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