The Empire That Fell in Pieces

When the British dismantled what they called the Indian empire, they shattered it repeatedly, unevenly and often inadvertently. ‘Partition’ is usually remembered as a single cataclysm in 1947 - the vivisection of British India into India and Pakistan. Yet, as Sam Dalrymple reminds readers in his ambitious and meticulously crafted ‘Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia’, that rupture was only one act in a longer imperial unravelling. Between 1937 and 1971, the empire splintered five times, ultimately giving rise to a dozen modern states. Each break brought trauma, dispossession, political improvisation and the kind of border-making whose consequences outlived the flag that once flew above them.

Dalrymple begins with what he calls the “forgotten partition”: the detachment of Burma from India in 1937. For the ethnic Bamar majority, this separation fulfilled a long-held desire to extricate their politics from the gravitational pull of the Indian National Congress. For Hindu nationalists on the subcontinent, it also appealed to a vision of “Bharat” purged of non-Hindu territories. Dalrymple shows that neither side anticipated the social shock that followed.

Burma’s severance set off famine, shredded its labour markets (he notes how hundreds of thousands of Indian workers suddenly found themselves stranded) and sowed the seeds of insurgencies that still simmer. Nor was separation popular among all Burmese: a surprising number of nationalist leaders, he writes, imagined their future firmly tethered to India.

A second partition, even less remembered, began that same year. Aden and the Gulf states, long administered as appendages of British India, were hived off, formally completing their transfer in April 1947. In imperial paperwork, this seemed an administrative tightening. In practice, it marked the beginning of the Arabian peninsula’s geopolitical divergence from the subcontinent, altering the arc of labour migration, energy politics and the strategic calculations of London and New Delhi alike.

Then came the third and most violent rupture: the birth of Pakistan through the division of the Muslim-majority districts of India’s east and west. Dalrymple neither romanticises nor sanitises the devastation. He returns readers to the grisly mechanics of mass flight, revenge killings and communal triumphalism that accompanied hurriedly drawn boundaries. Mountbatten’s decision to advance the transfer of power by a full year by compressing administrative preparation for the world’s largest forced migration into roughly 70 days, emerges as a case study in imperial haste with disastrous consequences.

But the mapmaking did not end there. The fourth partition unfolded in the princely states, strange sovereignties that dotted the subcontinent. Their rulers were invited to choose between India and Pakistan, or to gamble on independence. Dalrymple retells these episodes with flair. Junagadh, a Hindu-majority kingdom with a Muslim ruler, briefly acceded to Pakistan on the advice of its Diwan, Shahnawaz Bhutto. India responded with what Dalrymple terms “a mixture of diplomacy and arm-twisting,” culminating in a plebiscite that brought Junagadh into the Indian Union. Kashmir, its demographic inversion of Junagadh reversed, with a Muslim-majority populace under a Hindu ruler, became the most explosive of these dilemmas. Elsewhere, the dreams of smaller national groups, from Nagas on both sides of the India–Burma frontier to Baluch sardars, were briskly dismissed.

The fifth and final fracture came in 1971, when Pakistan, riven by civil war and linguistic nationalism, split into two. Bangladesh emerged from the ruins of West Pakistan’s military repression. That same year, Britain withdrew its remaining protectorates from the Gulf: the last princely remnants of an empire long lost.

Dalrymple’s achievement lies not merely in chronicling these partitions but in revealing their cumulative logic. Every new border produced fresh minorities, fresh grievances and fresh claims to historical entitlement. The subcontinent’s communal tensions trace their lineage to decisions made at imperial desks, often with little knowledge of the lands they were meant to reorder.

What elevates the book is Dalrymple’s narrative verve and scholarly maturity - qualities striking in a writer not yet thirty. His prose is racy without being glib, and his command of archival detail is formidable. Anecdotes glide across the pages: Burmese politicians who feared losing their ‘Indianness,’ Indian migrants trudging on foot from Rangoon, princely courtiers juggling impossible choices, and the bureaucrats who believed a civilisation could be reorganised on a timetable.

In presenting the Indian empire’s disintegration as a sequence rather than a singular event, Dalrymple reframes a familiar story. He invites readers to see the modern map of South and West Asia not as the inevitable product of ancient identities but as the residue of hurried decisions, imperial hubris and the tragic arithmetic of partition.

(The writer is a Mumbai based educator. Views personal.)