The Forgotten Decisions That Shaped Modern Asia | Sam Dalrymple | Tank Talks Asia

Manisha: Hello and welcome to Tank Talks Asia. I'm Manisha Tank here at the AsiaWorks headquarters in Singapore. Today on the show we are chatting to author, historian and filmmaker, Sam Dalrymple. His debut book, “Shattered Lands: and the Making of Modern Asia” came out earlier this year and is an international bestseller. It's even spent several weeks topping the charts in India.

Sam's in the middle of a whirlwind promotional tour with stops in India and Indonesia, as well as the UK and Ireland. So we're especially thrilled that he's managed to carve out a little bit of time to join us down the line from New Delhi.

Sam, there's so much to talk about. How you doing?

Sam: I have been charging around. I was in Dhaka, in Bangladesh a few weeks ago. And then, just been in Punjab, in Patiala, Chandigarh and then Dehradun. So yeah, it's been hectic but amazing.

Manisha: So part of this is it, is it your book tour? Is this just Sam traveling? Is it you discovering more about this land where you grew up? What's going on?

Sam: It's a book tour. But I make a point of, I make a point of visiting a new place every time that I'm in a new city, I try to find something to write about on my Substack or Instagram.

Manisha: I wanna talk about your book first of all, and then we'll talk about some other stuff. So, Shattered Lands spoke to me because I had walked into a very famous travel bookstore in London. Those who know, they know. It's called Daunt books. You know and actually I was trying to hustle a very nice green tote bag, which are world famous at Daunt books.

And they said, you know, you're gonna have to spend a little bit more to get this tote bag. So I ended up buying a book about Indira Gandhi and then seeing your book, which was a signed copy, and I picked it up and I'm so glad I did. I have enjoyed it so much. And, what can I say? First of all, what was your inspiration for writing this phenomenal piece?

million people displaced in: 1947

And it was with a conversation three years into this with someone in Tripper in Northeast India where when I asked about partition, they said, which one? Because you know, he was like we had the 1937 partition from Burma in the Northeast. We had 47 separating us from what was then East Pakistan. And then in 71, East Pakistan was cut off from Pakistan itself and became Bangladesh. And there was another wave of refugees.

And the way that this man framed it to me was something that surprised me because frankly, I'd been researching partition at this point for three years, but I'd never thought about these other great ruptures, which in some sense are equally momentous.

Manisha: Wait, wait, wait. Can I jump in, Sam? Because you had been studying partition for three years and yet those five ruptures that you ended up writing about, it wasn't clear from that initial three. And that, that's not to say that you were remiss in your study. Why do you think it was that you could study it for three years and not yet realize that?

Sam: I think that post-war, there's been this idea of area studies, which is largely based off basically kind of World War II divisions, of, you know, south Asia is studied by one group of scholars, Southeast Asia is studied by another, and then the Middle East is studied by a completely separate group of scholars.

And as a result, the basic fact that the British Indian empire stretched from modern day Yemen to Burma, including within it a quarter of the world's population, somehow gets kind of brushed over. Very few scholars that I chat to in Delhi or Pakistan, or in London, seem to know that Yemen was once an integral part of India and was issued Indian passports.

Likewise Burma, despite this kind of, you know, sense of a connection, often within an older generation because of food carried over, because of, you know, some ancestor having been living there for generations, somehow it's not seen as necessarily connected in the same way that Pakistan or Bangladesh is to India. And that is completely a post-colonial idea because these places have been connected for centuries.

Manisha: Yeah, so to get back to your story, which I rudely interrupted. So, so someone says to you, which partition are you talking about? And this is where you have this revelation. Then what do you do? Because how do you go off and then research something like that?

Sam: Yeah, what happened was, I, this, the fact that Burma had been the eastern most province of British India really bothered me because of how little it featured in any books that I read on Indian history. And I, you know, had studied Sanskrit and Persian at university. I had read a lot of Indian history and it virtually never shows up.

And so this really began to bother me. And so I began to try and figure out what the Raj actually looked like at the time. And again, the more that I read, the more that it became clear that it was much larger than 99.999% of books on British India tend to give credit for.

And so I think it was, I'd actually been working on a documentary on partition at the time with National Geographic. But then COVID happens and suddenly, you know, everything grounds to a halt, and doing documentary, and particularly with 95 year olds, very obviously became impossible for about a year and a half. And so I decided to kind of pivot and do a book proposal instead.

And actually a lot of amazing new resources are becoming available online recently, particularly the Qatar Digital Library and the digital archive of the Arabian Gulf. These two resources opened up a whole segment of primary sources that were otherwise incredibly difficult that you had to fly internationally to get to.

Manisha: When you say you had access suddenly to these resources and this digital library, I mean, what sort of things? There must have been things there that you came across and thought, my goodness, this is gold.

Sam: Yeah, I mean so much. So I think particularly, there was this, the story of how the Gulf got separated off from India, is I think the thing that's got this book the most press in some sense.

And there's this fascinating document where there's a British official working with the British litigation in Tehran, who's being put in charge of figuring out the future of the Gulf States. And he writes, it was with apparent unanimity that the government of India told us that they had absolutely no interest in running the Persian Gulf States after we were gone.

And so there's this kind of forgotten moment when Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Kuwait, et cetera, the entire united oil wealth of the Gulf could have been part of an independent India. And yet it's essentially turned down by the government of India, and subsequently made into separate protectorates that are governed by Whitehall rather than Delhi.

And as a result, when India begins integrating its princely states, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Kashmir, Hyderabad et cetera, you know, these states are not on the list that they are in charge of integrating. And I think that this is a fascinatingly forgotten story and one which could have completely rewritten the boundaries of the 20th Century’s nation states. And yet has somehow fallen through the cracks, and yet it's sitting there in these archives.

Manisha: So something that occurred to me while I was reading was, you know, you look at history and you think, oh, they must have had a plan. There was a plan.

But when I read the book, I realized there really wasn't a plan. Am I correct in thinking this?

Sam: I think this is what's extraordinary is how haphazard and chaotic the whole decision making process really is at this time.

I think many people tend to imagine, in the words of Patrick French, that there's kind of, you know, this massive spider's web of kind of, you know, plots and counter plots with a giant spider wearing a bowler hat sitting in the center of it all. And in fact, the thing that really shocks me when I'm researching is how much even the intelligence files reveal no one has any idea what's going on around them.

And so this is, I think, one of the things that I found very shocking, how much partition of India and Pakistan was basically done over 77 days and they barely had enough time to register what was going on.

And so you get, you know, by the time that everything ends, you have the entire libraries of the Encyclopedia Britannica for example, A to J goes to India, and K to Z goes to Pakistan. Because they, everything's done in such a rush that they're not able to figure out what's going on.

Manisha: It's taken a long time, but how does it feel when people, such as myself, and I've seen you in other podcast interviews, and a lot of people are saying this, that they're really glad to be learning about everything that until now had not been uncovered, and notice that I'm saying had not been uncovered, I'm not saying necessarily that it had been hidden, maybe some of it was, but I'd love to get your reflections on that.

Sam: I think that what you've just said about, you know, it's not hidden, it is being uncovered and I think that far too often we imagine history is something that, you know, we all that is out there and is being kept from us as opposed to, you know, actually what's happened is that a whole range of new secret intelligence files have been declassified and put into the public domain. People involved with this story have finally passed away, and their letters have been handed over to public libraries, and so it's more that just, we have more sources available now to paint a more broad picture and the fact that more scholars are researching more minute aspects of this story.

th August,: 1947

Manisha: I want to move on to someone that you said was one of the most surprising characters that you had come across, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founding father of Pakistan, why did he surprise you so much?

Sam: I think that of all political figures, he's A, one of the most polarizing today. You know, I think neither India nor Pakistan are really willing to see him as a human being. In India, he's seen as the kind of divider of the nation. This kind of guy, I think in the Richard Attenborough Gandhi film, he was kind of seen chuckling in the sidelines saying, I will destroy India.

And meanwhile in Pakistan, he's the founder of the nation, shown in kind of demure Islamic dress wearing a Karakul cap from the northwest frontier. And the actual man himself has a more fascinating political journey than anyone else I've read about.

In the: 1920

He has an, he has an interfaith marriage, he drinks, he eats pork, he's not very religious at all. And so for this man, this very westernized lawyer, who quits Gandhi's Congress because of the fact that he thinks Gandhi's bringing religion into politics. For this man 20 years later to found the world's first Islamic Republic, is something that's rather extraordinary and I think the transition that he undergoes is one full of surprises. And again, so much of his story is kind of covered up by these countries.

So for example, you know, despite a huge amount of evidence now being available that his wife committed suicide, and that fundamentally changed him as a, his personality. This great central tragedy of his life was until recently kind of, you know, always brushed over in the biographies. But you know, these key moments which fundamentally transformed him as a person are still sort of brushed over.

And the, you know, we focus far too much on, essentially in search of some political thread that follows him throughout his life, rather than understanding him as someone who undergoes a greater change in personality and his politics than anyone else I came across in the archives in this period.

The Jinnah from the twenties is a fundamentally different man from the Jinnah of the forties.

Manisha: I mean, I was so surprised as I started to read about him in his younger years and I thought, gosh, what a progressive. You wouldn't imagine that if you based it, say on the movie that you mentioned, or other books that I have read and articles.

Have you had any pushback from those who don't want to believe that that was the case?

Sam: Surprisingly little. I mean, I think I've gotten away quite nicely because I put all the sources in and, you know, alongside one another.

And when it's unclear, I state that it's unclear and we can't know but these are the various theories. I've actually somehow managed to get away with writing a history of India and Pakistan, without pissing off either of them. The only, the only people who seem particularly pissed off at the book are the Emiratis who are horrified to discover that they were the kind of princely states of India, alongside Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Hyderabad, et cetera.

Manisha: I want to now talk about Pandit Nehru. So something that really came out and grabbed me, and I know that this is in his personal accounts as well, it is the account of him boarding the train in Amritsar and it's going to Delhi. And this is what really fires him up.

And this is the point from which, according to you, he wants the British out of India because of course he hears the British Brigadier, General Reginald Dyer bragging about the massacre in Amritsar, which is just an atrocious, horrible moment in history. That really surprised me because I realized that there were these sharp turning points that just changed people and therefore changed history and the trajectory for many people, for millions.

Sam: Absolutely. I think that we, you know, the Nehru's themselves were the richest family in Allahabad. They had this massive mansion. They were definitely kind of champagne socialists to a certain extent. And Nehru’s father, Motilal, had worked extensively with the British, and been working for kind of, you know, Indian independence but wanted to work within the system essentially.

And this turning point where Nehru is in the same carriage cart as Dyer, and he sees him walk off the train, having bragged about the massacre, in pink striped pyjamas. And it's this, it's the horror of that, you know, the banality of evil, essentially.

The fact that this is a man who's brought up in Punjab. This is a Brit who's brought up in Punjab and the callousness in which he's kind of continues along with his day and kind of wanders around in his pyjamas, is what horrifies Nehru to the point that he decides he's gonna start demanding Indian independence.

Manisha: I think it's so important, Sam, that you've brought some of these incidents to the fore.

But I just wanna talk to you about Burma because it's really pertinent to where we are here in Singapore, part of Southeast Asia, and a lot of people here who want to understand the roots of the conflict in Myanmar today.

I have to say that when I read your book, it was the first time that I really understood the seeds of it, and up until this point, it didn't matter how many news articles I read, I just didn't get it. I kept asking the same question, why is this happening?

Sam: Researching Burma, as I told you, was the, one of the first seeds of the book. The fact that this is a connected history that is virtually never mentioned. India, you know, like I think you chat to most people in India today and about their medieval history and their idea of medieval India will stretch through Pakistan, through Bangladesh, through Afghanistan even. It'll bear the contours of the kinda Mughal and Muratha empires.

But Burma features very little in the public imagination, despite numerous Burmese empires stretching into modern India and despite numerous Indian empires stretching into modern Burma. I think that it's extraordinarily central to the early 20th century in much the same way that Singapore is today. You know, Rangoon was the Singapore of the time.

that there's a quote that in: 1933

Burma's descent into Civil War, the collapse of its economy, and the ethnic violence that it's unleashed upon its own people are one of the great stories of the 20th century that we never place nearly as centrally as we perhaps should.

Manisha: Look, I could keep on asking you questions about the book. All I'm gonna say at this point is, it's absolutely fantastic. If you're listening or watching right now, you must rush out and buy this book.

I wondered, as a historian, was it difficult to take a stand on issues? You know, at the end of the day, you want to tell, you wanna tell people what it is, what's happening at that point in time? Is that difficult to do without it being affected by bias or prejudice?

Sam: I think my aim going in was I want to precisely, as you said, like explain the conflicts that we have today and give people the tools to read them, but without saying this should have happened. I think that shoulds and woulds, I've tried to excise from the book, although you know, I think anyone who reads the book knows my thoughts on the whole thing in some sense.

But I don't, I don't try to know the answers. I don't try to know how the best peace plan should be worked out. Rather, the aim is that if you read the book, you'll understand how we got to where we are today. Both and the, you know, there's a bunch of different conflicts that the book explains, from the Rohingya genocide to conflicts in Kashmir, Balochistan and Northeast India and the Chittagong Hill tracks, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and the Yemeni Civil War. Each of these can essentially be understood if we understand the history of India's partitions.

Manisha: Absolutely, like I said, I'm gonna say it again, go out and buy it 'cause you're gonna understand so much more about the world and we are talking about more than, when it comes to Asia, Southeast Asia, and then you're talking about the Middle East and then what was the dominion of India, we are talking about a huge chunk of the world's population today.

Sam: One quarter.

Manisha: Exactly.

Sam: One quarter of the world’s population.

Manisha: Now, the thing is, this book almost didn't happen because you wanted to study philosophy and physics. What? Why?

Sam: Yeah my, when I was at school, I was bent on becoming a particle physicist and I did an internship with CERN at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

Manisha: That's pretty hardcore.

Sam: I was that kid. And then essentially, we had a rather unconventional family holiday to Bamyan in Afghanistan and that really triggered a kind of a shock in me in some sense. And made me want to, you know, seeing the crevices where the Buddhas had once been, seeing all these amazing old mosques, this whole history that I had no conception of, fascinated me. I started teaching myself Persian. I started writing about monuments whenever I visited them.

And in a sense, you know, gradually I moved in that direction. I got a column with Architectural Digest. I began studying languages and particularly Sanskrit and Persian, the languages that I studied, through reading them you could understand the history of Hindu and Muslim interactions over centuries to some extent.

Manisha: Yeah, actually, and studying Persian and Sanskrit, I mean, that is no small thing, Sam. That's a full time job right there.

Sam: I don’t claim to be fluent at either of them though. I can get by in both, but they are, it's been seven years since I was studying them, so there's definitely, well that sense that I'm not as fluent in Sanskrit as I once was.

Manisha: Okay. So Project Dastaan, tell me about this. So this, first of all, what was the inspiration for it?

Sam: Sure. So Project Dastaan emerged from our, a university project essentially, where I was in the room with some Indian friends and Pakistani friends and me. This strange sense that, you know, we couldn't have had that meeting in the subcontinent itself because of these borders and yet chatting, it became very evident that, you know, my friend Sparsh, Indian friend now based in Australia, you know, his family had migrated over from Pakistan at partition and his home was lost to him. He couldn't cross that border. And yet for our friends Ameenah and Saadia, you know, they could go over in two hours from Islamabad.

And likewise, Ameenah dreamed of crossing the border and seeing her ancestral home of Hoshiarpur and so there's this strange sense that these places aren't lost. They're just impossible to get to across the border.

And so we set up this virtual reality organization to use VR to reconnect peoples with their childhood home, community, mosque, temple, gurdwara, school, sweet shop, whatever it was that they wanted to see on the other side of that border again. And often try to reconnect them with old friends who'd got stuck on that side of the border 78 years on.

Manisha: How has it gone down with the communities that you were aiming at?

Sam: I mean really, really well. I think that we were all prepared for some sort of official blockage and saying, no, you can't do this.

But actually once we sort of partnered with the Partition Museum in Amritsar and the National Museum in Lahore, actually people and governments in both countries were really eager for us to do this. They saw it as rather important in the lead up to the 75th anniversary of partition.

Manisha: I think it's quite remarkable and all the more power to you in your quest to learn more and to understand more, I have to say.

I've also enjoyed some of your travel writing. So, you wrote a piece for Tatler earlier in the year and you got to go to the lovely new Raffles hotels that have opened up in Rajasthan.

Sam: Exactly.

Manisha: Nice perk, I have to say. But, I love this, I love this, you know, sort of these old palaces being repurposed, but did you feel that amid all of that luxury you were still able to connect to the history?

Sam: Sure. I mean, that is in a sense a lot of the travel writing for Tatler, Conde Nast Traveller I particularly write for, and then Architectural Digest, I, to some extent use as a jumping off board to discover histories that would be too expensive for me to go by myself. And so, you know, it's a wonderful opportunity to spend proper amounts of time in these places.

And I think if you've read my pieces, the lovely hotel’s there in the background, but ultimately I'm there to learn about textiles or an art tradition or a culinary tradition which tells a story over the longer duration of time.

Manisha: Well, I, you know, I like your penchant for luxury travel writing, I have to say. But what I also really enjoyed was you started that piece in Tatler with a reference to Singapore, which I was really excited by. And you mentioned Rudyard Kipling coming here. And just the most wonderful quote that you picked out from Kipling, which was describing the city as clinging, remorseless, steam, sweat that knows no variation between night and day. I mean, if only Kipling were here today and got to experience the AC.

Sam: I think he’d have a very different experience.

Manisha: But then saying that, you know, Raffles was the only, sort of pointing out it was the only acceptable place to stay or to, I think it was to eat. But thank you for mentioning Singapore, because that gets us very excited.

Okay. We are getting into the last couple of minutes here with you, and I know you are extremely busy because you are jetting all over the place promoting your book, quite rightly.

I just wanna talk to you about what it’s like as this, well I want to talk about how you define yourself, because you've grown up mostly in India, you went to a British school, but then you went to, I think it was Marlborough College in the UK. So that sort of back and forth experience. And then university in the UK.

I have this discussion with my children all the time. What do you feel you are? Are you, are you English? Are you Scottish? Are you Indian? What, what are you, and does it even matter?

Sam: That's a very good question. I mean, I consider Delhi home. I'm completely ethnically Scottish. I consider myself British in the broader sense. You know, I'm not a kind of Scottish nationalist by any means, but I'm completely ethnically Scottish. And yet I'm brought up in Delhi and have an English accent so, frankly, the only thing uniting Scotland and India is a kind of shared animosity to the accent that I have.

And so, and so, it's a complex relationship, but I think, you know it's, I think far more people have some sort of Creole mixed identity than we tend to give credit for.

Manisha: Okay I just wanna round out on one thing really, which is, what are you gonna do next? When's the next book, Sam?

Sam: This is, it's too early to tell. This book's just come out about three months ago, four months ago.

e in French Indo China in the: 1920

The first gunshots fired in the Vietnam War are shot by the Indian Army. What the hell are they doing there? And so I, this is a story that's increasingly obsessing me, and we will see where it goes.

Manisha: So can we obsess you with the idea of coming and basing yourself in Singapore when you do the research. It's a good drop off point, you know.

Sam: I mean, yeah I'm not complaining. The food there is spectacular, so..

Manisha: And you get a lot of really good Indian food here too. So just last of the last question, I wanna sneak this one in. I was doing a little bit of digging, I promise I'm not a stalker, but I was doing a little bit of digging and I found out that you have a family connection to Singapore, which is actually quite a famous one.

l Harbor, and it was named in: 1900

Sam: My grandma is from the Keppel family, although I'm not sure if it's a direct relation or not. It's, you know, my grandmother is a Keppel and part of that wider clan. And so yeah, it's a thing that you, I mean, we spoke about this just before coming on air, it's something that I had no idea about, but now desperately want to dive into the archives and find more on.

Manisha: So Sam, thank you so, so much for sparing the time. It's been wonderful talking to you. Please stay in touch with us here on TTA. We would love to have you back and we are campaigning to get you to Singapore, so hopefully soon.

Sam: Thank you. See you soon.

Manisha: I'm afraid that's it for this episode. I'm Manisha Tank, from me and the team, thank you so much for listening and please don't forget to subscribe and follow Tank Talks Asia.

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