Past Imperfect Episode 24: Sam Dalrymple on South Asia’s five tectonic partitions

Past Imperfect Episode 24 features Dinyar Patel, Associate Professor of History at SPJIMR, in conversation with Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. The Partition of 1947 was not carried out in isolation. Dalrymple’s Shattered Lands reconstructs a longer and much more complex story: how the British Indian Empire, which once stretched from modern-day Yemen to Myanmar, was sundered through five distinct and traumatic separations. Between 1937 and 1971, twelve nation-states emerged from the rubble of empire—yet their creations were not inevitable. Shattered Lands is a story of cosmopolitan connections, opposition to partitions, and several missed opportunities which could have changed the course of South Asia’s very violent twentieth century.