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 many East Bengalis clung to the idea of Pakistan as late as 1971. The borders of modern South Asia emerged through a process of fierce negotiation, political chance, and a number of missed opportunities.

Burma stands out as perhaps the most emblematic case. In the early 1930s, Rangoon was a thriving and cosmopolitan entrepot, attracting more migrants than contemporary New York. Gujarati and Tamil were spoken alongside Burmese. When the British government proposed creating Burma as a separate crown colony, many Burmese political leaders launched a vigorous protest.

Most prominent amongst them was U Ottama, better known as Mahatma Ottama, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a member of the Indian National Congress. Ottama went so far as to become the president of the Hindu Mahasabha so as to campaign against separation.

It is remarkable how quickly sentiment changed in Burma. The Great Depression helped stimulate a frenzy of anti-Indian xenophobia, especially as Chettiar merchants expropriated Burmese land. “The rhetoric of separationists had revolved around fears of Indian immigrants stealing honest Burmese jobs and Chettiar land seizures seemed a damning proof of the point,” Dalrymple argues.

Some Burmese politicians, observing the changing headwinds, now built careers out of antipathy towards Indians. In the late 1930s, U Saw, who helped fan the flames of anti-Indian pogroms, cultivated ties with Japanese imperialists and won admiration from Nazi propagandists. In power as Burma’s prime minister, he reclassified Rohingyas as Indian foreigners, setting the stage for decades of violent ethnic conflict and the pogroms of the 2010s.

Burma was a harbinger of what was to come. The new India-Burma border snaked through the Patkai Hills, dividing communities like the Nagas – and thus inflaming new conflicts. The fait accompli of hiving Burma off of British India, meanwhile, would be constantly referenced in demands for Pakistan: Rahmat Ali Chaudhary, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and BR Ambedkar all commented about how the logic of division could be repeated in the future.

Amidst the reams of material written about the endgame of empire and Partition, Dalrymple brings a new perspective by looking at the bigger picture. The Long March of 1942, where Indians trekked by foot to escape Japanese-occupied Burma, was the first incident of partition-induced mass migration. And, as Jinnah, Vallabhbhai Patel, V. P. Menon, and Louis Mountbatten used carrots and sticks to coax princely states into accession to India or Pakistan, the fates of princely states in Arabia and Burma also hung in the balance.

Mountbatten ultimately relinquished Indian control of Gulf states early in his viceroyalty. “Without this minor administrative transfer,” Dalrymple tantalizingly speculates, “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.”

Dalrymple’s account of the 1947 Partition is particularly devastating. No major leader – not even Jawaharlal Nehru – comes out of his reading entirely unscathed. Mountbatten might have made the fatal mistake of drastically shortening the timeline for independence, ensuring chaos and confusion in Punjab and Bengal. Jinnah might have been scandalously unaffected by the communal violence unleashed through events like Direct Action Day.

But Congress leaders were hardly free from blame: Vallabhbhai Patel controlled the Indian intelligence services and displayed a partiality towards the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, while Nehru ultimately signed off on the violent integration of Hyderabad into India.

The 1940s, Dalrymple makes clear, was a moment bursting with fantasies about dividing India. Some Indian princes, like the nawab of Bhopal, flirted with the idea of a “Rajastan” that could federate Indian princely states. Other parties suggested declaring Calcutta a “free city,” on the model of interwar Danzig, with access to both India and Pakistan – or even making it the capital of a unified and independent Bengal.

During this time, which writer Saadat Hasan Manto perhaps correctly diagnosed as a collective lapse into madness, it was not inevitable that a relatively minor entity like Bhutan or Dubai would emerge independent while Hyderabad, a major military and economic power, would disappear off the map.

Shattered Lands eschews all nationalist narratives – and this is why it deserves to be read. At the conclusion of this episode, Dalrymple and I discuss how modern nationalisms erased centuries of cosmopolitan connections across the Indian Ocean, and how South Asia’s violent history of partitions serves as a warning in our own era of hypernationalism and receding globalisation.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.