SHATTERED LANDS

Spirited history of the multiple divisions India has endured, just one of them the split with Pakistan.

The old chestnut that you can see the Great Wall of China from space is untrue, writes Scottish historian Dalrymple in his opening pages. However, he adds, “the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable,” running 2,000-odd miles and bristling with floodlights and landmines. This was not the case until the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Just a century ago, Dalrymple writes, the Indian Empire, or Raj, extended to the Arabian Peninsula to the west and eastward to Burma. Then came 1937, when a movement within India to create a Hindu state and another movement on the part of the majority Bamar people led to the creation of Burma. In 1947, the states of the Arabian Peninsula began to calve off, with Britain gradually ceding colonial control over the Persian Gulf states. Within India, separatist movements created de facto states based on religious affiliation. And in 1971, when Britain’s protectorate rule over the Persian Gulf ended, Bangladesh separated from Pakistan, bringing on a bloody civil war. Britain’s cession wasn’t benevolently inspired, Dalrymple notes; in 1971, a fiscal crisis at home meant that “Britain could no longer afford the annual £12 million that it spent on keeping its forces in the region.” Whatever the case, he adds, what had been a single superstate broke into 12 nations with very different agendas, despite the efforts of Burma’s first president and his Indian counterparts to forge a South Asian federation. That history has been forgotten, willfully, everywhere in the former Raj: “In every single one of these countries, governments have made sure to paper over the shared cross-border heritage of their peoples.” The result, this ably written history shows, is ethnic division, the suppression of minorities, war—and, yes, that border wall.

A book that sheds needed light on the complexities of South Asian geopolitics.