Shattered Lands book | connecting-the-dots

By historian Sam Dalrymple
Partition of India, which one, 1937, 1947, or 1971?

Partition divided communities

The partition overlooks the fact that almost all of the border communities would later rise up against their respective governments because this border divided them into two.

Nation-States not inevitable

The nation-states that we see on the map today were by no means inevitable. Each of the states has its own "closing doors" moments before, when anything is possible but after which suddenly history is set on a very specific track and there is no possibility of any other divergence.

Early 20th century Indian Empire

The early 20th-century political entity known as the Indian Empire is explored. A large region of Asia that actually included present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

Divided into 5 major political partitions

The region was later divided and reshaped into five major political partitions, forming the modern countries of South Asia and parts of the Middle East.
The partition resulted in twelve nation-states that emerged from what was once the British Indian Empire at five different moments.
Famously regarded as the Crown Jewel of the British Empire, the territories of the Indian Empire governed by the British Raj stretched from the Red Sea to South East Asia.

Yemen to Burma

The empire stretched from Yemen, the city of Aden, which was the westernmost city of the Bombay presidency, to the east to Burma and included within it a quarter of the world's population.

The birth of Pakistan

The very first use of the word Pakistan occurred as late as 1933, which was just a decade and a half before this country was magicked into existence.
As of 1947, in July, one month before independence, newspapers like the Daily Herald suspected that cities such as Shimla, Delhi, and Kolkata would all become a part of Pakistan and not India.

The story of Yemen being connected to Indian mainland

Under Bombay presidency

Yemen had been conquered by Britain and attached to India from a very early stage.
Aden became the western city of the British presidency.

Built by Parsi Industrialists from Gujarat

It was a city that was kind of built by Parsi industrialists from Gujarat alongside Arabic.
The second language of the city was Gujarati.
In the 1700s, coastal Gujarat was far more similar to the coastal Arabia than it was to its interior because they were made up of the same itinerant travelers who were trading across the sea.

Married to Hyderabad's Nizam family

The entire aristocracy was married into the Nizam of Hyderabad's family. So much of Yemen was actually ruled from Mahadipatnam on the outskirts of Hyderabad.
Halim is a Yemeni dish that was brought to the Deccan by one of these Yemeni aristocratic families, mixed with Dakhani spices from Telangana, and became the culinary masterpiece that we know and love today.

Cultural connectedness

In the 1960s the language of the Omani army was Urdu not Arabic.
The people of Eastern Yemen continue to patronize Hindustani classical music and can speak in Dakhani Urdu.
Many of the Sultans and Sheikhs of the GCC states were actually educated in places like Rajasthan.
Some of the northern states like Qatar and Kuwait were integrated into the British Raj much later so they had less of this Indian identity.

Muhammad Ali Luqman writes…

One of the founding fathers of Yemen, Muhammad Ali Luqman, writes all these articles on imagining a future India where the Arabian states remain a part of the country and Arab is an Indian ethnicity alongside Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati, etc.

The story of Burma

We often forget Burma's quite central place in the world a hundred years ago.

Dream Job in Burma in 1933

Many people, particularly Indians, were in search of a job who were sailing across the Bay of Bengal instead of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Burmese dream overtook the American dream in 1933.
Rangoon overtakes New York City as the largest immigration port in the world.
Because of this there is an increasing need for you to know either Bengali, Urdu, or Tamil if you want to get ahead in business in Rangoon, and not the Burmese language.

U Ottama, nationalist in Burma

U Ottama, the earliest nationalist figure in Burmese history, argues that Burma is an integral part of India.
As ever since the Buddha's followers carried Buddhism from Bihar to Burma through the Bengali world, the Naga world, into the Kachin world, and finally landed in the Burmese world, this continuum of culture occurs between the two very countries.