Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia – India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait – were 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, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia but in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division. Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Sam Dalrymple’s stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.

Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian, filmmaker, and multimedia producer. He graduated from the University of Oxford as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar, where he served as president and co-founder of the Oxford University Silk Road Society. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India.

His work has been published in The New York Times and featured in TIME, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He is also a columnist for Architectural Digest. Sam has collaborated with BBC Radio 4, and his debut film, ‘Child of Empire,’ premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022. The premiere of his animated series ‘Lost Migrations’ sold out at the British Film Institute.