Podcast: South Asia’s five tectonic partitions

While Sam Dalrymple was interviewing survivors of the Partition of India and Pakistan, he was struck by the response of one man from Tripura: “Which partition?” Was he talking about the events of 1937, 1947 or 1971?

The conversation helped inspire Dalrymple to explore a much longer history of border-making in the former British Indian Empire. In this episode of Past Imperfect, he discusses his book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.

Until 1937, India legally constituted a sweep of territory stretching from the Red Sea near Aden to the Burmese border with Thailand on the Isthmus of Kra. The Indian empire’s roster of princely states included Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the Shan states abutting China’s Yunnan province.

Only 34 years later, in 1971, this had splintered into 12 nation states.

How did this occur? Despite nationalist narratives, the modern map of South Asia was far from inevitable. Two themes stand out in Shattered Lands.

First, each of the five partitions of the British Indian Empire – of Burma, Arabia, Pakistan, princely India, and Bangladesh – was linked with one another.

Second, partition proposals encountered stiff opposition, sometimes from unexpected quarters. Many Burmese opposed separation from India, just as...

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