The Unmaking of Empire

The standard school history syllabus teaches about the partition of India in 1947, which led to the creation of two nation-states accompanied by searing communal violence.

- Chittajit Mitra

The standard school history syllabus teaches about the partition of India in 1947, which led to the creation of two nation-states accompanied by searing communal violence. Even when we leave school, we retain this limited viewpoint as an absolute fact around which contemporary politics revolves in our country. In Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, Sam Dalrymple wants to take us through the more complex "how, what, when, and why" of the history of the subcontinent, contradicting the standard presumptions about that traumatic period of modern Indian history.

As Mr. Dalrymple presents it, Partition was never a singular moment in time but a long process. The author has structured the book into chapters in a way that demonstrates this progression of events. It starts with the arrival of the Simon Commission, a time that also cemented the probability of Partition in the region. It was also the period that saw a tumultuous time in Burma, leading to the biggest and most sustained revolt in the history of the post-1857 British Raj, which later led to the separation of that country from the Indian counterpart.