Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
As recently as 1928, a vast swath of Asia stretching from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand was bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the “Indian Empire” or, more simply, as the Raj. It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, home to a quarter of the world’s population. In the span of just fifty years, that empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving it into twelve modern nations, including not only India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, but also Burma, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
In vivid and compulsively readable prose, Sam Dalrymple presents, for the first time, the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. It’s a story of maps being redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, bumbling politicians in London and idealist revolutionaries in Delhi, kings in remote palaces and ordinary citizens swept up in wars and mass migrations. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And it has left behind a legacy of exile and division.
It began in 1937, when Burma was carved out of India, to devastating result. The partition of the Arabian Peninsula started the same year with the separation of Aden and was completed in 1947 with the transfer of the Gulf States. Also in 1947 was the “Great Partition,” culminating in the largest forced migration in history and the creation of Pakistan, swiftly followed by the partition of Princely India. Finally, in 1971, the fledgling nation of Pakistan was itself torn apart, and Bangladesh was born.
Based on deep archival research, previously untranslated sources, and hundreds of interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic, and Burmese, Shattered Lands is an utterly gripping history that offers a new understanding of modern South Asia―one that brings to light the continuing legacy of empire.
About the Speaker:
Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning filmmaker. He graduated from Oxford University as a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit and also studied at the University of Isfahan and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. He has worked across South and Central Asia, including with Turquoise Mountain in Kabul and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hunza and Lahore. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 and received the inaugural XR History Award from the Körber-Stiftung Foundation. His animated series Lost Migrations sold out at the BFI the same year. Dastaan’s work has been exhibited at leading institutions, including the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and the Partition Museum, with support from the British Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, and the Ford Foundation. Dalrymple’s writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Spectator, and his work has been featured in TIME, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He is a columnist for Architectural Digest, and in 2025, Travel + Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative.’ He runs the history Substack, @travelsofsamwise. His debut book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, was a #1 bestseller in India and was named one of ‘the best history books to read in 2025’ by The Week. It has been translated into three languages, shortlisted for the 2025 Eastern Eye Award for History, and longlisted for the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman 2025 for Best Debut.
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The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
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