5 Partitions which changed Asia

The past is never dead. It’s not even past, wrote William Faulkner. This is certainly true of India. And of the Partition of 1947, that, Banquo-like, stubbornly lingers uninvited. Sam Dalrymple, the newest historian on the block, has added four more in ‘Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia’ — fractures that continue to cast shadows.

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The book is a sweeping look at the break-up of the Raj. In 1928, when King George V addressed his Indian subjects on BBC — a moment that you will recognise if you’ve watched ‘The Crown’ — the ‘India’ he was referring to included present-day Yemen, Dubai, Burma and Nepal. The ‘informal’ protectorate was never officially recognised. Finer points about the sheer expanse of the Empire were kept “in top secrecy”, writes Sam. The Arab states bordering the Ottoman Empire were left out to “avoid aggravating Constantinople”. Lord Curzon remarked that Oman was “as much a native state of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kalat”.

The Indian passport was a visa-free dream and included Aden and Burma. The rupee was used as currency throughout this region. The book looks at the transformation of this one unit into 12 nation-states, a task so daunting that it requires ambition. Sam has it in spades.

His own journey down this road was also personal. His grandfather refused to visit them in New Delhi because of what he witnessed in 1947.

Sam describes the splitting of Burma in 1937 from India as the first fracture. The Simon Commission reiterated what the Montagu-Chelmsford Report pointed out: “Burma is not India. Its inclusion in India is a historical accident.” For North-East India, this mattered more than what followed a decade later.

The second was the partition of the Arabian Peninsula from India. “Were it not for this separation, most of the Arabian Peninsula, except for Saudi Arabia, might have become part of India or Pakistan after Independence,” writes Sam. It is an extraordinary historical detail that alters the way this region is perceived.

The third, of course, is the Great Divide of 1947. The fourth, Sam argues, is the partition of the princely states. His rationale: the shape of India, Pakistan and Burma was “actually determined by the decisions of the Indian princes rather than the British administrators”, as they chose to merge with the new countries or remain Independent.

The fifth is the creation of a new nation in 1971: Bangladesh. These five separations altered geography, the boundaries still being messy.

He tells the story of this “shattering” in 15 chapters, packing in the complexities of these events with minute details. In each split, the ramifications continue to loom large. It has a vast cast of characters: the usual suspects — Jawaharlal Nehru to Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah, Dickie Mountbatten, as well as Edwina — but also others who have never been viewed even as minor actors in the legacy of this break-up. Angami Zapu Phizo, the man who spearheaded the Naga liberation struggle, is one such example.

He fishes out stories that have fallen off the mindscape, for instance the manoeuvring of Gwadar into Pakistan. Once a fishing village, it now houses Pakistan’s key port, a Chinese gift. Gwadar was absorbed into Pakistan by Prime Minister Firoz Khan Noon with cunningness.

This deep-sea port was under the rule of the Sultan of Muscat and Oman till the mid-1950s. Gwadar had emerged as a smuggling base, writes Sam, where “cheap goods and even slaves” could be slipped across the “undefined border” into Pakistan. India wanted to lease the port from Oman, but Pakistan jumped into action. The ruler, Sultan Said bin Taimur, had studied at Mayo College, Ajmer, and was so Indianised that he was referred to as Babu.

Noon dug into his library and found that the Sultan of Kalat had given Gwadar to the Sultan of Oman as a ‘jagir’. As Kalat had been pushed into merging with Pakistan by Jinnah, sparking a rebellion that has continued in Balochistan, Noon believed that he could stake claim. So, after engineering an incident in Gwadar — where nine Pakistanis were killed — he got the Pakistani navy to effect a blockade. War was “imminent”, writes Sam. But Noon pushed Oman and the British into conceding it to Pakistan at a price. It marked a turning point for Arabia and South Asia.

“The final land border between the Indian and Arabian subcontinent had disappeared,” he writes. This takeover, as with Kalat, still festers as Baloch insurgents continue to attack Gwadar, claiming the land.

There are other not-so-well-known stories, like Qu’aiti State — Hyderabad’s former Arab vassal — that the British had treaty commitments with and refused to honour, forcing a young Sultan Amir Ghalib Amir Al Qu’aiti to become a refugee. The idea of a Hyderabadi Sultan ruling over eastern Yemen is “bizarre”, but that is because of “the deliberate erasure of these histories”, writes Sam. “Even in the British records, the connections are difficult to see,” he notes.

It is in unearthing these stories that Sam excels. There are also delicious nuggets of Yahya Khan flying into Dhaka for a last-ditch attempt at negotiations with Mujib in March 1971. Mujib welcomed him as a “guest of Bangladesh” and then said he wanted a more private location to talk. Yahya placed two chairs in the bathroom for over two hours to save Pakistan. No prizes for guessing, they failed. Or Edwina remarking to her friend — after watching Naga dancers at the Republic Day parade to display unity in diversity in 1960 — “Don’t they have beautiful bottoms”. This was a time when Naga alienation was at its peak.

Sam Dalrymple’s book, an instant bestseller, has been a long project in the making. And he writes in the Epilogue that the country where the historical amnesia about the Raj exists the most is Britain. This needs to change. The book is one step towards that.

— The writer is a literary critic