The noun “Partition” (with a capital “P”) has, in South Asia and perhaps globally, come to mean the 1947 split of India and Pakistan, a climactic event that still roils, if not poison, domestic and international politics.

In his aptly-titled Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple brings not only cinematic urgency to this oft-told narrative, but also sets it in a much wider historical context of other “partitions” of India, five in all by his count.

The 1971 splitting of East and West Pakistan, resulting in the establishment of Bangladesh, is the the other “partition” most recounted, often on its own. Yet Dalrymple is no doubt correct to set the latter in the context of the former, much as did Tahir Kamran in Chequered Past, Uncertain Future: The Story of Pakistan.

Dalrymple however turns the clock further back.

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… Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’… Five Partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.

Shattered Lands  as deeply-felt as it is deeply-researched

Shattered Lands is in some ways two different books: one, by the far the larger one, is an integrated narrative of the unwinding of the entirety of the “Indian Empire” and its successor states. Dalrymple is good at connecting dots and establishing throughlines. His background as a filmmaker is also much in evidence: the narrative is episodic and directed; characters are developed through their own words and actions.

Raised in India and having co-founded a peace-building initiative to reconnect refugees displaced by Partition, Dalrymple has first-hand exposure to issues and individuals. His approach uses and incorporates a great many primary sources, including diaries and oral histories conducted in a wide variety of languages.  Its huge cast of characters includes not just the likes of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Aung San, but also Nobel Prize-winning economist  Amartya Sen and Naga Bible-salesman Angami Zapu Phizo. Shattered Lands is—despite its wide geographical and thematic spread—readable and easy to follow.

Shattered Lands also posits a historiographical superstructure in the form of the “Five Partitions” of the title. Dalrymple’s expansion of the geography beyond the subcontinent itself is most convincing in his inclusion of Burma (now Myanmar) into the narrative. Regardless of whether Burma was “really” part of India (Gandhi, for one, concluded it was not), it was nevertheless tightly tied administratively, commercially and militarily. Unwinding it (there were more than a million Indians in Burma in the 1930s) was “devastating” social and political consequences, “triggering famine, a catastrophic migration crisis and laying the seeds for several insurgencies.”

Prior to Upper Burma being incorporated into the British Raj in the late 19th-century, borders between it and India had been largely vague and inconsequential, something untenable in a later world of unambiguous nation states. In a footnote, Dalrymple quotes Robert Reid, the Governor of Assam:

[the] boundary between our [Indian] hills and the Burma hills is as artificial as it is imperceptible,” he observed. The hill people “are not Indians in any sense of the word, neither in origin, nor in language, nor in appearance, not in habits, nor in outlooks, and it is by historical accident that they have been tacked on to our Indian province.”

During the War, Reid

lobbied to unite the Patkai peoples on both sides of the border in a completely separate crown colony … the possibility of another partition after the war.

Shattered Lands is an integrated narrative of the unwinding of the entirety of the “Indian Empire”.

Yet Burma was part of “India” only because the British deemed it to be so (Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, was never part of the Raj; it was acquired differently). Perhaps the devastating consequences that Dalrymple describes in empathetic detail derive not so from Burma being separated from India, but rather from Burma having been conjoined to India in the first place.

The fourth of his partitions is that of “Princely India”:

Much of the shape of modern India, Pakistan and Burma was actually determined by the decisions of the Indian princes, rather than British administrators, who chose to ‘integrate’ their kingdoms with one of the new countries, or become independent.

Few (if any) were in fact given the latter option. Given that even states such as Hyderabad that would have remained independent had they been allowed to, were forcibly annexed, this process seems not “partition” but its opposite.

And finally, while the Arab states—which bring the partitions to five—were nominally part of the Raj, this seems little more political and administrative expedience. That the Persian Gulf states might have ended up as part of the modern state of India, as Dalrymple claims, seems unlikely.

“Partitions”, while emotive, seems a less than entirely apt term to describe this process. Thankfully, Dalrymple’s mastery of narrative and sources means one doesn’t need to accede to the “five partitions” framing in order to benefit greatly from a book as deeply-felt as it is deeply-researched.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.