Empire lines

When the British pulled the plug on direct rule in India, they unleashed chaos on the lives of tens of millions of people.

- BY MARK FRYER

Midnight, August 14, 1947 and hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent suddenly found themselves in a new nation: now-independent India, or the just-created Pakistan.

That much is familiar history. But the midnight deadline wasn't as decisive as it may seem: Britain's man on the ground, the Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had ordered that the exact borderline between the two nations be kept under wraps until a few days after partition, to “divert odium from the British”. So when the clock ticked past midnight, all those millions of people knew they were in a different country, but many didn't know just what country that was.

Mountbatten's decision seems to sum up the careless, chaotic way in which Britain shrugged off an empire that was once the jewel in its crown.

And what an empire. At its peak, the Indian Empire - the Raj as they called it back then - stretched all the way east from Aden (now in Yemen) to the southern tip of Burma some 6000km away in a straight line. Almost twice the size of modern India, it was home to four-fifths of the people in the British Empire.

Or, in author Sam Dalrymple's words, less than a century ago “a vast swathe of Asia - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait — were bound together under a single imperial banner”. A quarter of the world’s people lived there, using Indian rupees as their common currency and entitled to passports stamped “Indian Empire”.

This is the story of how that vast empire came apart, shattered by five partitions that created 12 nation states, and the often-tragic consequences that continue today.