You can land up in trouble if you publish a map of India that doesn’t represent the ‘official’ borders of the country. While we often take our present borders for granted, few of us realize how different ‘India’ looked less than a century ago. Sam Dalrymple’s ‘Shattered Lands : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia’ was an excellent introduction to this aspect of India’s history. It’s not often that a non-fiction book impresses me with hitherto unknown tidbits of our history.
Until as recently as 1928 India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were all part of the Indian Empire, something more popularly known as the British Raj. These territories were run by the Indian Political Service, defended by the Indian Army, and subservient to the Viceroy of India. The list of princely states of India maintained by the British began alphabetically and the first in the list was Abu Dhabi! Dalrymple explains that these 12 modern nation-states were created by five partitions – those of Aden, Burma, India-Pakistan, the integration of the Princely States with India, and finally the liberation of Bangladesh.
Neither Perplexity nor ChatGPT were able to dig out a proper map of the entire territory. Dalrymple explains that one of the reasons for this was Britain’s fear of antagonizing the Ottoman empire. The one reproduced below is from the book itself.
Today, with the civil war and the Houthis’ attacks on the ships, Yemen is hardly in the radar of any Indian. But once upon a time, a thriving diaspora of Indians is what led a young Dhirubhai Ambani to the city to dabble with the oil and gas industry. It’s a cliché to say that the rest is history but in this case, the statement is probably justified. In 1937, after the formal separation of Aden and the neighbouring protectorates from the British Raj, the map of India, for the first time began to resemble the ‘Bharat’ of the nationalists:
The Partition also had important consequences for India’s demographic make-up. By separating the largely non-Hindu parts of the Indian Empire and at the same time making India resemble the ‘Bharat’ of Hindu legend, the British had given credence to the Hindu nationalist claim that India belonged primarily to Hindus. Although Indian nationalists have been more successful than any of their counterparts in South Asia at projecting a sense of long-term continuity onto their modern nation state, the creation of Bharat in 1937 is as central an event in South Asian history as the separation of Burma and the later creation of Pakistan. Britain’s ‘Indian Empire’ may have included all the bits of South Asia that Hindu nationalists dreamed of unifying – including Kashmir, Sindh, Bengal and Tamil Nadu – but until this point it had always previously included further-flung regions like Burma, Dubai and Aden.
For the first time in history, ‘India’ would extend from the Khyber Pass and Baluchistan in the west to Assam and the Naga Hills in the east, Kashmir in the north to Kanyakumari in the south. This new image of India matched the boundaries of the imagined ‘Bharat’ of Hindu nationalist imagination and would henceforth become eulogised as ‘Undivided India’. People too often overlook the fact that this ‘Undivided India’ was only created by explicitly dividing the Indian Empire.
The very same year, Vande Mataram was adopted as the National Song of India by the Indian National Congress!
After the fall of the Ottomans, the most significant head of the Islamic community was the Nizam of Hyderabad. After the last Caliph was deposed, the Nizam married off his daughters to his sons in the hope of reviving the Caliphate with Hyderabad as its centre. Check out this Twitter thread:
Despite all this history, we are reminded that:
Aden is today an Arab city, Dacca a Bengali city, while Rangoon was a Burmese one. Karachi and Lahore were now Muslim cities, while Hyderabad, Delhi and Agra had become Hindu cities, their erstwhile status as Muslim capitals forgotten
How did we never end up with a Kingdom of Hyderabad while Dubai, Bhutan and even Sikkim (for a while) managed to? Alternatively, could Dubai, in the same vein have ended up as an Indian outpost?
On the Razakkar movement in Hyderabad and the subsequent Indian Police Action, I got to know that:
in the summer of 1948, as itinerant militias roamed the state, an astonishing 1.2 million people would be displaced across the borders of Hyderabad, almost double those displaced in the Palestinian Nakba the same year. Some 750,000 Muslims entered the state, fleeing Partition violence in North India, while another 400,000 people – mostly Hindu, but also some Muslims – went in the other direction. The modern Indian state of Telangana may not usually be associated with Partition, but in 1948 the scale of movement to and from the region was comparable to that in Bengal and Punjab.
During the 1930s and 1940s, in some imaginations, Pakistan included a corridor connecting the north-west of British India with Delhi, extending all the way to Hyderabad..
A few other discoveries from the book that shook up my mental map:
- During the Partition riots, the Intelligence Bureau was under the control of Patel, not the British. So the horrors unfolding on the borders were really not being informed to British imperial office in real time.
- The raiders from Pakistan who were rushing towards Srinagar in 1947, were largely erstwhile soldiers of Bose’s Indian National Army.
- The separation of Burma from British India was one of the briefs of the Simon Commission. During the period, an official had written: “ Rangoon was till recently second only to New York in importance as an immigration port. It now occupies pride of place as the first immigration and emigration port of the world.”. The global recession of the 30s crashed the price of rice which had ripple effects on the economy, which was largely run with the credit lines extended by the Chettiars of Tamil Nadu.
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