Shattered Lands: book review

Sam Dalrymple, following in his famous father William's footsteps, shows considerable promise with his first book of becoming another erudite yet highly readable historian. He is apparently a very proud young man too: though he has thanked his dad and mum for their valuable and constant support, not once have they been mentioned by name anywhere in the book or even in the blurbs! And he too believes that weaving together archival research with private correspondence and interviews with old people who can narrate gripping stories from personal experience makes the best kind of book when you are writing recent history.

Shattered Lands, a story of how, with the rather hasty dissolution of the vast British Empire through the middle of the 20th century, the Raj era 'India' underwent five partitions (yes, five, starting with the separation of Burma in 1937, then the Arab Protectorates governed from Bombay, then the Great Partition of 1947, followed by the messy integration of 550-odd princely states, mostly with India and a few with Pakistan, and finally, the breakup of Pakistan leading to the blood-soaked birth of Bangladesh in 1971) is truly a monumental and admirable work. I cannot do justice to it in a short review, so, as I wrote at the end of my little essay on William D's 2016 book Nine Lives, I shall instead urge the reader to read it. This essay, rather, would pick up for comment only a few things that particularly stirred my interest.

To start with, I had heard quite a bit about the great post-partition exodus from Burma (which the writer calls the Long March) from my own elders, so reading that part was like re-living history, though I did not know that the Burma chapter, too, was so violent and complicated - that, for one thing, the Rohingya problem is certainly not a recent phenomenon as so many of us used to imagine. And frankly, I didn't know that, had the dice rolled otherwise, countries like Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE might just have been part of India still, making us one of the biggest oil producing nations in the world (no harm in fantasizing)! As for the princely states' story, sad and tumultuous as it was, can it be lumped together with the 'partition' narratives? The author evidently feels some sympathy for the princes who gradually lost everything, including all that was rich and good about their olde-worlde culture, especially seeing that some of them had actually helped in diverse small ways to hasten the departure of the British and joined the newly independent countries with remarkable alacrity (barring a few like Junagadh, Travancore, Kashmir and Hyderabad) - but in my opinion they had lived an archaic and hugely parasitic lifestyle for too long, and they should feel lucky they were not treated like the old aristocracy in Russia and China. Many of their descendants seem to have done very well for themselves in business, politics, and the world of the arts and letters; few are begging for alms on railway platforms.

As for the last two partitions, a very great deal has been said and written about them since the day I read Freedom at Midnight, so it is to the writer's credit that I still found it engrossing: it will certainly be of great educational value to any reader below 40 who does not have a degree in south Asian history. What can I say of any moment? I was moved, yet again, to visualize all the loss and suffering and shame and grief and destitution and death brought wantonly upon so many tens of millions of people who had no hand in shaping their destinies - actually beggars the imagination - who were mere pawns on a chessboard, being shifted around by tired, greedy, venal, vengeful politicians and bureaucrats in a hurry, who revelled in playing God. And so much, sadly, depended on mere accident and whimsy (like Mountbatten's inexplicable haste to transfer power, and his later lament that had he known Jinnah would be dead within the year, he would have never gone ahead with the partition plan). 

All this happened because of the haphazard and rapid dissolution of the British Empire. I recently heard Jeffrey Sachs making the off the cuff remark somewhere that almost all the lingering problems around the world created over the last 300 years can be traced back to the interference of the British. But, given how fractious and complex and violent  an admixture of races, languages, religions, castes, communities and kingdoms this enormous territory from Aden to Singapore was, perhaps it was only the relatively even-handed rod and whip and love of order imposed by the British that briefly held it together in a kind of grudging peace - though that idea has been endlessly mocked and reviled for more than a century now? Maybe if the British had only been a little more farsighted, a little less bullheaded, a little more committed to the welfare of their subjects and slow but continuous devolution of power, an incredible amount of human suffering could have been avoided? (by the way, I stand corrected on one crucial matter: there were great famines in south Asia even after independence, the responsibility for which, unlike in 1943, simply cannot be laid at the door of the Raj). Maybe that is what the Moderates in the early Indian Congress had wanted all along, and precisely for this reason, besides the fear that the newly freed lands would quickly revert to the chaotic late-medieval darkness they had just begun to emerge from? This paragraph, by the way, is purely my personal reflection, not something hinted (except maybe subliminally) at by Dalrymple himself.

Given the still very strong Anglo-American hegemony on scholarship, coupled with the ignorance and/or unconcern of the subcontinent's post independence rulers, too little is known across the world, even by educated people, about the titanic upheavals and traumas repeatedly suffered by the two-fifths of the human population that inhabits this part of the globe, whose after effects still continue to confuse and vitiate our contemporary political reality powerfully. As I read about the man whose citizenship was forcibly changed three times, dark forebodings about our present government's maniacal urge to get rid of all 'infiltrators' kept troubling my mind. Let me mention just one more thing about which I had heard but little in all these years: that the Bangladesh war was not just over language just as it was not over religion; that modern Bangladesh has insisted on officially forgetting and suppressing the fact that several non-Bengali languages still somehow survive in that country (Rakhine and  Kokborok and Chakma and even Chatgaiyya, which is not considered Bengali!), and that, contrary to popular mythology, the Mukti Bahini guerrillas did not exactly cover themselves with glory during the war of liberation - the horrible atrocities committed by the Pakistani army and their Razakars upon non-combatants were only much bigger in scale, that's all. No wonder so much long-simmering anger against the beneficiaries of the liberation has been coming to the surface in recent times... last but not the least, I found it most pitiable to read that so many people, arbitrarily separated by new and sudden borders, have found themselves to be permanently stateless, not just poor labourers, petty shopkeepers and marginal farmers but here and there a minor royal as well.

Having heaped so much praise, I hope I have earned the right to do a little bit of nitpicking. Too much sympathy has been shown for the likes of Jinnah and Patel, I think, given that they eventually acted so undemocratically, arbitrarily, covertly and violently, against so many of their supposedly 'own' people. And why should it be insinuated that the facts that actually very few British Indian soldiers joined the Azad Hind Fauz and that some of them turned renegades and criminals in later years show up Subhas Bose's inspirational power and leadership quality in a poor light? Wasn't he all along fighting almost impossible odds? And then there are howlers and typos scattered across 430-plus pages which could have easily been corrected with a little more careful editing. A man called Halvidar (not Havildar) Singh? The state of Dungarpur spelt Durgarpur? A temple in south India whose accumulated wealth, estimated at $22 billion, is thousands of times richer than the Vatican?! How do you describe a spring morning in the Kashmir Valley when the Pakistani irregulars were about to attack unless you were there yourself, or you cite some reliable source? How is a British Intelligence file 'secret' if you have been given access to it in order to write a book for public consumption? How do you make a statement like 'Indian intelligence had been working with East Bengali nationalists for a decade at this point' (29 April 1971, when the Indian Army was given direct orders to help the Mukti Bahini) - page 379 - without quoting an authentic official statement? And lastly, I wouldn't be as shocked as the partition researcher who, while talking to a teenaged cold drink seller in Dhaka, realized that he knew nothing about the partition(s) or even the Mukti Juddho and found it odd that an Indian could speak in Bengali: I guess you can find millions of young Indians, too, who know nothing about our history from, say, 1905 to 1971, and so will happily believe whatever poisonous garbage they are fed by the current rulers. As the wag said, 'The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history', and that 'history is only a fable that is generally agreed upon'. Also, alas, I can bet my shirt that such people would never read a book like this anyway.

This little bit of criticism is not meant to deride or devalue Dalrymple's work, only to suggest how it could be improved, and thereby made more reliable and valuable. I wish the author every success with his future endeavours, and shall look forward to reading his next book.

Many thanks, Rajdeep and Aveek, for urging me to read this book.

P.S.: A very angrily critical review can be found here.

[Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, by Sam Dalrymple, Harper Collins 2025]