Shattered Lands

Title: Shattered Lands – Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
Author: Sam Dalrymple
Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789369894628
Pages: 520

Hindu nationalists flaunt the map of an undivided India - Akhand Bharat - that existed in the ancient period where Indian culture prospered and illuminated the culturally benighted frontier lands. This territory usually consisted of the modern nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and of course, India too. This diagram is only a plot of the cultural spread of India, but critics accuse it to be evidence of hegemonic designs on the part of Hindu nationalists quite forgetting that this map is or were not a political one. India’s soft power united this varied landscape rather than a central administration, bureaucracy or military. In truth, all the people who look at the map know in their hearts that such a political union never existed in the past and most likely would not come into being in the future. At this point, it may appear as something out of the blue to learn that such a political union, or an approximation to it, really existed till 1937 which was divided five time and the final partition occurred as late as 1971 to make the map that we see today. At that time, Afghanistan still did not belong to India, but Burma, South Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait did. This book tells the story of five partitions of the British Indian Empire that most people don’t know about – apart from the partition of India in 1947 and that of Pakistan in 1971 (to make room for Bangladesh). Sam Dalrymple is the son of William Dalrymple, but the biographic note on the book curiously omit this information. Instead, it goes on with a lengthy introduction such as he was a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning film maker. This is his first book. Even though Sam does not flaunt his pedigree, he follows his father in spirit and exhibits an anti-Hindu and anti-Indian bias which is a shade darker than William’s. This generalisation is a sweeping one that does not include his latest book, ‘The Golden Road’.

The author starts with debunking the urban legend that the Great Wall of China was the only man-made structure visible from outer space. It is not, he asserts, but adds that the India-Pakistan border is, especially at night. A wall of separation, which didn’t exist a few decades before, came up overnight and has become a noted feature of the earth, as proof that one’s nationality need not be of one’s conscious choice. Till 1928, a vast swathe of Asia, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, were bound together under a single imperial banner known officially as the Indian Empire or as the Raj. Its people used the Indian Rupee and were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’. All the protectorates in Arabia were legally part of India under the Interpretation Act of 1889. The list of Indian princely states even opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. The British were determined not to let the Arab territory administered by an independent Indian nation. As a result, they separated the Arab states on Apr 1, 1947, just four months before independence. Dalrymple claims that it was India’s greatest lost opportunity, willingly giving up the combined oil wealth of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. The sheikhs were some of the poorest rulers because oil industry was still in its infancy and they were not entitled to any gun salutes. However, the era was not only that of partition but of integration too. Over 550 princely states vanished from the map through the pioneering efforts of V.P. Menon and Sardar Patel. India had increased by almost two-thirds and Pakistan’s landmass doubled. There is no other revolution in history that ended so many monarchies in so short a span of time and without liquidating the monarchs.

The book consistently exhibits an anti-Hindu bias which sometimes spill over to anti-India hatred. Dalrymple alleges that Hindu nationalism was a key driving force in the earlier partitions separating Burma and Arabia (p.7) on the flimsy assumption that these regions do not belong to the Akhand Bharat imagined by them. This seems not to be true as a few pages later (p.18), he informs that Simon commissioners found Rangoon restive with a strong demand to separate from India. In fact, just before Simon reached there, he wrote to his mother that ‘Burma is not really India at all’. Even Gandhi was for separation because in 1927 he categorically stated that ‘I have no doubt in my mind that Burma cannot form part of India under Swaraj’ (p.21). The second Round Table Conference, which included Gandhi, decided to separate Burma on Apr 1, 1937. A prominent section of the Burmese society wanted to stay with India. A Buddhist monk affectionately called Mahatma Ottama opposed Burmese separation. He became the president of the Hindu Maha Sabha in 1935. This was the first time a Buddhist ever held that position. However, anti-Indian riots in Burma in 1930 and afterwards killed hundreds. The author further claims that the decision to separate Burma was not taken with any long-term planning. The government overlooked the fact that 15 percent of India’s rice had come from Burma which was blocked by Japanese occupation in World War II. Famine spread in Bengal and the government stood watching in heartless indifference. Millions died of starvation but the British government was not providing any relief (p.111). The author assigns only partial responsibility to them as the provincial government was run by Indians from 1937 onwards. Censorship prevented any news of it coming out. At the end of two years after the famine began, the death toll touched two million. The book shows how the British put paid to any chance of making India grander. A few days after Burma was separated, the decision to free Aden and other Arabian states were taken. The aim was that Indians would not be allowed to run the Persian Gulf in the event of independence. Perhaps the British had subconsciously felt in 1937 that India’s freedom was not far away.

Sam Dalrymple’s abomination of Hindu organisations which spills over into a dislike of India as a whole, is incomprehensible as he is a permanent resident of Delhi and Indians form the bulk of his readership. As such, a very jaundiced version of the events leading to and arising out of the Partition is given in the book which offers nothing new except the anti-India tirades. In 1946, the Muslim League obtained 87 percent of the Muslim vote on the issue of Pakistan’s creation. It was a referendum for Pakistan and Indian Muslims eagerly came out to support creating a Muslim nation by dividing India. Ironically, the most fervent support had come from Muslims in the provinces which stayed in India. However, these Muslims did not migrate to Pakistan when that county was formed, but continued their residence in India. The author's clear anti-Hindu prejudice comes out in the open in reports on Partition-related violence. He virtually claims that Hindus started the violence on Direct Action Day in Kolkata. On the other side, looters raiding Hindu shops were said to be ‘stocking up before the feared second famine’ (p.151). He accuses the RSS of training young men in Lahore in ‘using bombs and pistols’ (p.154). This is alleged to have prompted Jinnah to expand the Muslim League National Guards a hundredfold for the defence of Muslims. Even the religious violence is portrayed as simple excesses by Hindu organisations. He repeats some incidents of Muslims saving their Hindu neighbours during riots in East and West Pakistan while the brutality of violence is the prime focus when India is concerned. In Hyderabad, the author dismisses the Razakars’ brutal anti-Hindu violence as exaggerations (p.265) while conjuring up instances of conversion of Muslim women after Hyderabad’s forced annexation to India. He sources this outrageous accusation only from the book written by Abdul Ghafoor Noorani. Even Pakistan’s invasion of Kashmir in Oct 1947 is portrayed as a ‘reaction’ to the massacre of Muslims in Jammu. He even makes out that had Pakistan did not hesitate to move in support of the Lashkar invaders, Indian army would not have been able to push them back. All of this is typical Pakistani propaganda regurgitated by a British author for consumption by an unsuspecting Indian public!

In addition to having a dig at Indian nationalism every now and then, Dalrymple surreptitiously nurtures Naga separatism in the tribal areas of India’s northeast. He coins phrases like ‘unresolved questions of nationality in the Indo-Burmese border lands’ as a result of the latter’s separation from India in 1937. He claims that ‘Nagas felt betrayed’ by the British decision to split into two states. There’s even a map of ‘Greater Nagaland’ comprising regions of Manipur, Assam, Arunachal and Burma (p.328). It is to be feared that this Delhi-domiciled Scot may become a leech extracting lifeblood out of India. His remarks on the disturbed post-partition religious atmosphere are not honest but specious claims like ‘no truth or reconciliation mission has ever tried to address any of the deep-seated traumas of the fifth of the world’s population whose lives are daily informed by these great tragedies (p.428). This requires one to be intellectually truthful. Accept that Muslim invaders have carried out countless atrocities in India, then recognise it as evil and try to reconcile the modern world with lessons learned from the past. Instead, the secular liberals deny them outright or claim that these were beneficial to Indians. Such a road will take you nowhere. The book also provides some interesting facts about the Indian community in Arabia. The Sultan of Oman made Kanak Khimji, a Gujarati merchant, a sheikh of the new ‘Bania’ tribe. He was the first Hindu sheikh.

This book is a hodgepodge of Left-Islamist calumnies against Hindu nationalism which on closer inspection is a scapegoat to mask its real intent to go for India's jugular. There is no doubt that if this book was published in Pakistan, Sam Dalrymple would have been feted with the prestigious Nishan-e-Pakistan. Instead, as of now, the naive Indian society subsidizes this insidious piece of one-sided research. Sardar Patel is portrayed as a villain who helped the RSS kill Muslims while serving as the Home Minister. He accuses that Patel ordered the release of criminals and justifying the violence. V.P. Menon is termed as ‘indentured-labourer-turned civil servant’. On the other hand, he worships Nehru and rehabilitates the Junagadh Nawab who loved dogs better than his begums and was corrupt to the core. This is alleged to be false and made up by India because the Nawab chose to accede to Pakistan even though his country was Hindu-majority and shared no land border with Pakistan. Make no mistake about it – The author’s writing style is as pleasant as his father’s and he is sure to attract more and more gullible Indians as his fans. That’s the saddest part. This book is hence a dollop of poison coated with honey. The book makes a prescient observation about the world that the last decade has witnessed the decline of globalization, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world.

The book is recommended only to those readers who can see through its charming shell at the malicious intent lurking at the core.

Rating: 1 Star

The Revenge of Geography

Title: The Revenge of Geography – What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Random House, 2012 (First)
ISBN: 9781400069835
Pages: 403

The concept of a land of domicile, a country or a nation, is inseparably linked to geography which demarcates the boundaries of the entity. A nation is virtual, but its boundaries are often not. Kalidasa's epic poem Kumarasambhava starts with a description of the borders of India thus: "In the northern direction lies the divine-souled lord of mountains named Himalaya. Plunging into the eastern and western oceans, he stands as if he were the measuring rod of earth". These lines were composed in central India in the fourth century CE. Similarly, every country was demarcated by its natural frontiers. As migrations and invasions upset the rhythm of political life, artificial or no borders came up to separate nations. When natural borders faded, religion, ethnicity, language and ideology came to separate human societies. With the blindingly fast adoption of technology in transportation and communication, geography was thought to be irrelevant in the twentieth century because people could talk to each other in real time across the globe and can meet in person in a few hours. While this may be the obvious thing, this book argues that geography is not totally displaced and sometimes it will come back with a vengeance upsetting a strategic calculation or as an unexpected demographic flashpoint. The book supports these findings with well-thought-out arguments. Robert D. Kaplan is a renowned foreign policy expert who has authored fourteen books on foreign affairs and travel. He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for more than a quarter-century.

Kaplan makes a short review of the state of things and its historical development to the position it is in now. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, geography was an honoured discipline to which politics, culture and economics were often conceived of in reference to the relief maps. The author addresses the question of historical consequences and economic progress of different states based on their geography. An interesting point is his response to the question of why Africa is so poor. The geographically anchored answer is that though it has an area five times that of Europe, its coastline is only a quarter as long. It lacks many good natural harbours. Few of tropical Africa's rivers are navigable from the sea, often dropping from interior tableland by a series of falls, so that interior Africa was isolated from the coast. Moreover, the Sahara Desert hindered human contact from the north. The thick forests also prevented easy travel along the route. This may seem to be a deterministic argument which concedes to fate the full responsibility on the destiny of a region. Technology helped mankind to undo the geographical knot. The first cycle of the post-Cold War era saw military interventions in Kuwait, Serbia and Kosovo which appeared to be benign and also a defeat of geography through air power and the triumph of humanitarian intervention. In the second cycle involving Iraq and Afghanistan, the revenge of geography turned the tables on the Americans. This link to geography and human action was noted by ancient scholars as well. Herodotus, born around 490 BCE, maintains the perfect balance between geography and societal interactions in his narrative about the origins and execution of war between the Greeks and Persians.

The book then examines the theories put forward by eminent scholars around the turn of the twentieth century and how relevant they still are to deciding the probable course of action. Sir Halford J. Mackinder is the father of modern-day geopolitics whose thesis made central Asia the pivot on which the great empires of the Eurasian heartland rested. Russia was adjacent to this region whose natural protective border was only forests which were porous to the horse-mounted barbarians. In the thirteenth century, it fell prey to the Golden Horde of Mongols. Thus Russia would be denied access to the European Renaissance and branded forever with the bitterest feelings of inferiority and insecurity. Nicholas J. Spykman thought a little differently. Instead of the central heartland, he held that the Rimland of Asia such as comprising the demographic giants of Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Japan and the oil-rich Middle East, with their littorals, was the key to world power because in addition to dominating Eurasia, the maritime-oriented Rimland was central to contact with the outside world. The defence of Western Europe, Israel, moderate Arab states, Shah's Iran and the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam all carried the notion of preventing a communist empire in the heartland from extending control to the Rimland. The third complementary theory in this field is from Alfred Thayer Mahan who postulated that sea power was not only more important than land power in the fight for dominance, but also less threatening to international stability. The limited capacity of navies to extend coercive force inland made them no menace to liberty and usually limited them to the role of protecting commercial shipping lines. Hence, he argued, instead of the heartland of Eurasia, the Indian and Pacific oceans are the geographical pivot of empires.

    The book provides some prescient observations on the political mindset of Russia that would set it in a belligerent mood against its neighbours and the Western world. Russia was always trying to expand whether it was under the Romanovs, Communists or Putin. Its expansionism was fuelled by its vulnerable state, which had no natural frontiers and hence always subject to invasions from the outside. In 1991, Russia was shorn off all its annexes in central Asia and was stripped to its lowest land extent since the time of Catherine the Great. The 2022 Ukraine war has its roots in this mentality of Russian politicians. Kaplan argues (in 2012) that Putin's concentration on Ukraine is proof of his desire to anchor Russia in Europe by re-creating a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Ukraine is the pivot state that in and of itself transforms Russia. With it back under Russian domination, 46 million people would be added to Russia's Western-oriented demography. Examining the Indian subcontinent, the author comments that with the real possibility of the US and China becoming rivals, the direction in which India tilts could determine the course of geopolitics in Eurasia, or in other words, India would be the ultimate pivot state (p.228). He also advises the US to engage in wars where their air and sea power is involved, but not the army. It is the permanence of small wars that can undo America, not the odd, once every third of a century miscalculation, however much tragedy and consternation that causes.

With the theories set in the foreground Kaplan goes back and analyses each region one by one in some detail. He examines Europe, Central Asia, India, China, the Middle East, Iran and Turkey, Mexico and the oceanic appendages of great powers. Relying on Toynbee's statement that the static border between a prosperous and civilized state and a less civilized and poor neighbour, always works to the advantage of the economically weaker but physically virile barbarian, unless the border is pushed outward by the stronger nation. He cautions that the border between the US and Mexico falls in this category and speculates on the probability of Mexicans overrunning the southern frontier states of the US at least. The author wants the theocratic regime in Iran to get toppled, but stops short of condemning them on the issue of human rights violations against its own citizens. He suggests diplomatically that the Shia imagination is more easily adaptable than Sunni to the idea of revolution which required a sense of history and social justice combined with that of martyrdom, but clarifies immediately that the world will not see the true appeal of Iran in all its cultural glory until the clerical regime liberalizes or is toppled.

This book was written in 2012 and appears so outdated after the Ukraine war of 2022, Gaza conflict in 2023 and the Iran war of 2026, all of which seem to have rewritten the balancing equations of power in the world. The book accepts as a precondition that the US can control almost anything anywhere in the world and though it can sometimes make mistakes, taken as a whole it is a benevolent power. This prejudice forces the author to handle other issues as consequences rather than causes. A lot of political and strategic analysts' writings are examined and quoted in support of the author's argument.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 2 Star

A Small Town in Ukraine

Title: A Small Town in Ukraine – The Place We Came from, the Place We Went Back to
Author: Bernard Wasserstein
Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2023 (First)
ISBN: 9780241632703
Pages: 290

Hitler and the Nazis massacred six million Jews in the Holocaust. Beneath this ball-park figure lies an unimaginable level of suffering: both of individuals and the families they belonged to. Families were plucked out of their surroundings and thrown into a machine that usually crushed them out of existence. If they were lucky to escape with their lives, often death looked like the more desirable fate. Bernard Wasserstein, the author of this book, is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Chicago and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Being a Jew whose grandparents lived in Berlin, Germany in the Hitler period, he recounts the story of how they met their death in the Nazi pogrom. His grandparents and paternal aunt perished in the genocide in Poland while his father miraculously escaped as he was away at the time when the family was rounded up. The family originally belonged to the small town of Krakowiec (pronounced Krakowitz) in Poland on the Ukrainian border. Both the World Wars found this little town in the midst of the combat zone. Its ownership changed hands several times - from the Habsburg Austrians to Poland, then to Germany, then to the Soviet Union and finally to Ukraine where it now rests and its name has been changed to Krakovets. This book tells the history of this town too as an inseparable aside to the destiny of the Wasserstein family even though they lived only for a short time in the end. This book is an attempt to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the history of our time could affect ordinary people.

Berl Wasserstein, the author's grandfather, was the head of the family in the 1910s and they hailed from Krakowiec. Being a remote backwater there were no prospects to prosper by industry. The suffocating anti-Semitism thwarted Jewish enterprise to improve their lot. Berl migrated to Berlin which offered better opportunities along with his wife Czarna and children Addi Wasserstein (the author's father) and daughter Lotte (author's aunt). This was 1930s when the Nazis controlled the political and commercial aspects of Germany. Legally, the family were Polish citizens as German identity papers were not issued to them. However, anticipating expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany, Poland shut its gates to those who had not been to Poland in the preceding few years even though they claimed Polish citizenship. Germany expelled all male Jews and Berl and Addi were stranded in the no-man's land between the two countries. They were taken back to Germany temporarily and asked to leave the country. All except Addi went back to Krakowiec and lived there for a few months. When Germany overran the place in World War II, Jews were first isolated in ghettos and then taken to a labour camp where the family was mercilessly shot. Meanwhile, Addi found safe passage to Hungary just before the gates closed. He moved on to Italy, Turkey and finally to Palestine. He then migrated to England to set up a new life there. This story is narrated by the author in a poignant manner. It is only with a sense of deep sadness that readers can go through this book. How stoically the victims met their fate continues to amaze me.

The book provides some horrifying examples of how anti-Semitism was practiced in eastern Europe. In some instances, every Jew was mandated to wear a white armband with a blue star of David. If a Jew passed a German in the street, he was required to remove his hat on pain of death. Anti-Semitism ran high in Poland from very early on. When the town of Krakowiec was annexed to Austria in 1772, its Empress Maria Theresa expressed horror and disgust at the discovery that her new territory contained 200,000 Jews. She considered Jews a plague who practice 'all sorts of dirty dealing'. During World War II, the fortunes of Germany and Soviet Union ebbed and flowed many times. Having tasted German rule, the Jews greeted Soviet occupation with relief, as the lesser evil. The joke went round that whereas the Nazis had condemned the Jews to death, under the Soviets the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Wasserstein brings out the ethnic rivalries in Eastern Galicia to which the town belonged. The Poles and Ukrainians were at each other's throats and both of them were against the Jews. Roman Shukhevych, who is feted as a Ukrainian freedom fighter is claimed in this book as a Nazi collaborator, anti-Soviet guerrilla leader and ethnic cleanser of Poles and Jews. It appears that the Soviet rule was somewhat benign to Jews. But, the Soviet administration carefully avoided the word 'Jew' in their reports on Nazi atrocities. It was replaced with the term 'Soviet citizens'. A final, posthumous indignity was thus inflicted on the victims - the deprivation of their core identity. Today, there is no memorial to its former Jewish inhabitants in Krakovets, apart from a meagre wooden signpost placed in an empty field to mark the location of the former Jewish cemetery.

The book is quite easy to read and the narrative is in an appealing style to most readers. Most of the Polish names of people and places appear without vowels and are hard to pronounce. It also contains a detailed history of Krakowiec over the centuries which seems laborious and does not serve any purpose. If the family was not staying in the town for decades, their links to the place would be tenuous. However, this book is another worthy reminder of the Holocaust and impels the global citizens to take all measures not to repeat such a terrible episode in the future.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star