Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it. As recently as 1928 a vast swathe of AsiaIndia Pakistan Bangladesh Burma Nepal Bhutan Yemen Oman the UAE Qatar Bahrain and Kuwaitwere bound together under a single imperial banner an entity known officially as the Indian Empire or more simply as the Raj. It was the British Empire''s crown jewel a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia home to a quarter of the world''s population and encompassing the largest Hindu Muslim Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee were issued passports stamped Indian Empire and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas. And then in the space of just fifty years the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart carving out new nations redrawing maps and leaving behind a legacy of war exile and division. Shattered Lands for the first time presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir Baluchistan and Northeast India and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances of borders carved with ink and fire. And above all it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made. Sam Dalrymple''s stunning narrative is based on deep archival research previously untranslated private memoirs and interviews in English Hindi Urdu Bengali Punjabi Konyak Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations Shattered Lands is vivid compelling thought-provoking history at its best.