The Real Story Behind India–Pakistan Partition | Jugnu Mohsin x Sam Dalrymple on British Raj

ELI5/TLDR

Most people picture the British Raj as a slightly-bigger-India that got chopped into India and Pakistan in 1947. Sam Dalrymple’s book Shattered Lands argues the Raj was actually a quarter of humanity stretching from Yemen to Burma, and that it was torn apart in five separate partitions over forty years, not one. Once you see the bigger map, things like Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan, the Bengal famine, the Kashmir mess, and even Saddam invading Kuwait start looking like aftershocks of the same colonial breakup. The conversation is sober but oddly hopeful — Indians and Pakistanis still become best friends the moment they meet abroad, and that fact alone is unusual among war zones.

The Full Story

The map we forgot

In 1931 Britain ran four offices of state — Home, Foreign, Colonial, and a separate India Office, because India alone held a quarter of the world’s people. The Raj reached from Aden in Yemen to Rangoon in Burma. About a third of it was not directly ruled — it was a patchwork of princely states. The official British list of those states opens, alphabetically, with Abu Dhabi. Bhutan, Nepal, Dubai, and Qatar are also on it.

Between 1931 and 1971, in the course of just four decades, five partitions tear this world apart into 12 independent nation states.

Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar. Once you hold this in your head, a lot of present-day conflicts — Kashmir, Balochistan, Myanmar’s civil war, Yemen, even Saddam’s claim on Kuwait — look like loose ends from the same unraveling.

Why Burma matters more than you’d think

Burma was split off from India in 1937. It is, Dalrymple says, one of the least-researched and most consequential moves of the era. The very first document to coin the word “Pakistan” — Rahmat Ali’s pamphlet — justifies the new state by pointing at Burma: if Burma can leave, why can’t northwest Indian Muslims? At the same time, Congress leaders began describing the future Indian nation in terms of Bharatvarsha, the sacred geography of the Mahabharata — Kashmir to Kanyakumari, Sindh to Assam. That conveniently excluded Burma and the Arabian states. Once the Buddhist and Muslim-majority edges of the Raj were lopped off in 1937, the remaining minorities had every reason to start panicking about being swallowed by a Hindu majority.

Jinnah’s slow turn

Jinnah joined Congress in 1906. As late as the 1920s Sarojini Naidu called him “the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.” He drove fast cars, smoked, dressed sharper than anyone else in Bombay, married a Parsi woman named Ruttie. The transformation into the founder of the world’s first Islamic Republic took years and ran on personal grief as much as politics. Ruttie was excommunicated by her Parsi community for marrying him. The marriage soured. New research suggests she died by suicide. While Jinnah was nursing her in hospital during a depressive episode, Nehru and Gandhi pushed through a Congress resolution that erased much of his political work. He never forgave them.

He fears that Gandhi’s use of Hindu imagery threatens to hijack the whole narrative and turn it into more religious than it is secular.

The man who eventually led the demand for a Muslim homeland left Congress, in part, because he could not stand religion being dragged into politics. Ruttie’s farewell letter, paraphrased: try to remember me as the flower that you plucked, not the flower that you trampled on. She killed herself on her 29th birthday. Their unnamed daughter eventually named herself Dina.

Marshal races and other British inventions

After 1857 the British shifted recruiting policy and dressed it up as racial science. Communities that had stayed loyal — Punjabis, Pathans, Sikhs — were declared “martial races.” Bengalis and UP men, who had led the rebellion, were not. The pseudoscience outlived the empire. In 1971 the Pakistani army used it to justify atrocities against Bengalis, and Sikhs and Punjabis still half-believe it about themselves today, even though it was made up in a 19th-century War Office.

Separate electorates, religious census categories, the partition of Bengal — every one of these forced people to pick a box and ignore the actual fluidity of their identities. Each new viceroy brought a new political plan. Casual racism leaked across the entire British political class, not just Churchill — even Attlee, the anti-colonial Labour man, wrote about Burmans as “jolly good chaps but with an unfortunate propensity to murder.”

The war that broke everything

The Indian Army’s mobilization for World War II was the largest volunteer force in history. Jamnagar’s gem cutters were retooled to grind sniper scopes. Elephants were drafted to log timber on the Burma frontier — the last military use of war elephants. When Congress launched Quit India and got itself jailed for almost the entire war, the Muslim League — which backed the war effort — quietly drew level with Congress in British eyes for the first time. Nature abhors a vacuum.

Then came the Bengal famine of 1943. Two to three million civilians starved to death in the year of the war with the least fighting. Burma’s separation had cut off Bengal’s rice supply; a cyclone made it worse; Allied troop inflation priced rice out of reach for ordinary people. There was, as Amartya Sen later showed, just about enough rice — people simply could not afford it. Wavell and Linlithgow begged Churchill to stop diverting grain and open soup kitchens. Tamil Nadu, also hit, got soup kitchens and nobody starved. Bengal got nothing. Churchill’s reply when told Bengalis were dying:

If the Bengalis are starving, why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?

Janam Mukherji’s research has now shown that the very first violence on Direct Action Day in Calcutta was hungry Bengalis breaking into a food bank — three years on from the famine, still nothing to do with religion.

The cabinet mission and the 77 days

In 1946 the Cabinet Mission Plan proposed a UK-style federation: north India, south India, east Pakistan, west Pakistan, and a princely group, all under one loose union. Jinnah accepted it — the man who had been campaigning for Pakistan for six years agreed to settle for constitutional guarantees. Congress pulled out at the last minute over the North-West Frontier. Jinnah called it the greatest betrayal and announced Direct Action.

Lord Wavell, the penultimate viceroy, wanted to leave India slowly and properly. Whitehall lost patience with him and sent Mountbatten, who got on famously with Nehru and could not stand Jinnah. Attlee had given Mountbatten until June 1948. He cut it to 77 days. Why August 14–15, 1947?

Because it was the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender and would make a nice round whole number.

Who actually killed whom

The standard story is that neighbour turned on neighbour. Dalrymple’s oral histories, drawn from his Project Dastaan work in eight languages, suggest something different. The most common phrase he hears: we don’t know where the mob came from because they weren’t from here. The violence was largely organised — RSS, Muslim League National Guards, Akali groups, paramilitary outfits that had been quietly arming through the 1930s, and local politicians using mobs to ethnically cleanse rivals’ voter bases. Noakhali and Bihar — the second and third great waves of bloodshed — were both led by local politicians taking revenge against neighbourhoods that had voted against them. Land grabs dressed up as religion.

The perpetrators were men.

That line, on the violence of 1971, applies to all of it. Roughly 17–20 million people crossed the Radcliffe Line, drawn by a Hampstead lawyer who had never set foot in the subcontinent. Around 100,000 women were abducted and raped. The decision-makers were men; so were the killers; the silent victims were overwhelmingly women.

The princely fourth partition and Kashmir

People imagine Radcliffe drew the whole India–Pakistan border. He didn’t. 81% of the western border was actually decided by princes acceding to one side or the other — Dalrymple calls this the fourth partition. Radcliffe really only drew the slice between Sri Ganganagar and Gurdaspur. Gurdaspur was Muslim-majority but went to India because India needed a road into Kashmir. The Chittagong Hill Tracts were 99% Buddhist and animist but went to East Pakistan because Chittagong port needed a hinterland. Murshidabad, a historic centre of Bengali Muslim culture, went to India.

Kashmir’s Maharaja originally wanted to follow Nepal and Bhutan — Himalayan princely states that successfully argued for full independence. What changed his mind was a partition mob crossing from Punjab into Jammu and massacring Muslims. That convinced Pakistani generals to go behind Jinnah’s back and sponsor a tribal lashkar into Kashmir — the first, but not last, time the Pakistani military operated independently of its civilian leaders. The lashkar stopped to loot Baramulla, an hour from Srinagar, instead of pressing on. The Maharaja acceded to India. Pakistan’s British commander-in-chief General Gracie refused Jinnah’s order to engage. By year’s end, men who had been brothers in arms in the desert war were shooting at each other on the roof of the world.

The decade nobody remembers

After the Liaquat–Nehru Pact of 1950, India and Pakistan spent eleven years cooperating. Newly declassified intelligence files (work by Avinash Paliwal and Pallavi Raghavan) show their secret services even shared intelligence to fight communism in Burma after China went red. Joint India/Pakistan passports existed — the National History Museum in Lahore has them. Bhutto kept his Indian citizenship until 1955. Jinnah’s tomb in Karachi was built by an Indian Muslim from Bombay. The thaw broke in 1961 when India “liberated” Goa from the Portuguese. Ayub Khan read it as Indian expansionism and, for the first time, started funding Naga rebels in northeast India. Within two years Indian intelligence was talking to separatists in East Pakistan and the North-West Frontier. By 1965 cooperation was dead and partition survivors could no longer cross to visit family.

Key Takeaways

The Raj in 1931 stretched from Aden to Rangoon and held a quarter of humanity; what we call “Partition” was actually five partitions across forty years producing twelve nation-states.
The official list of British Indian princely states opened with Abu Dhabi and included Bhutan, Nepal, Dubai, and Qatar — the Gulf states were Indian protectorates.
Burma’s 1937 separation is the missing prequel to Pakistan: the very first pamphlet coining “Pakistan” cited Burma as the precedent.
Jinnah’s hardening was personal as well as political — Ruttie’s excommunication, depression and suicide, plus a Congress resolution passed while he nursed her, soured him on Gandhi and Nehru permanently.
“Martial races” is 19th-century British pseudoscience invented to justify post-1857 recruitment patterns; it was weaponised again in 1971 against Bengalis.
The Bengal famine killed 2–3 million in 1943 in the year of least wartime fighting; Amartya Sen later showed there was enough rice — people just couldn’t afford it after wartime inflation.
Direct Action Day’s first violence was hungry Bengalis breaking into a food bank — not religious rioting.
The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 nearly worked: Jinnah accepted a UK-style federation; Congress pulled out over the North-West Frontier.
Mountbatten compressed Attlee’s 18-month timeline into 77 days; August 15 was chosen because it was the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender.
81% of the India–Pakistan western border was set by princely accession, not Radcliffe; Radcliffe only drew the Sri Ganganagar–Gurdaspur stretch.
Gurdaspur went to India despite a Muslim majority specifically to give India road access to Kashmir.
The Pakistani military first defied its civilian leadership in 1947 by sponsoring the Kashmir lashkar without Jinnah’s knowledge — a pattern that has repeated since.
India and Pakistan ran a real rapprochement from 1950 to 1961, including shared intelligence operations against communism and joint India/Pakistan passports; the Goa invasion of 1961 broke it.
Partition violence was largely paramilitary and politician-driven (RSS, Muslim League National Guards, Akalis, local politicians cleansing rivals’ voter bases) — the “neighbour turned on neighbour” story is mostly wrong.
The 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley now hosts thousands of oral history interviews and is opening up via university subscriptions.

Claude’s Take

This is a strong conversation between two people who actually know the material. Mohsin asks pointed, well-prepared questions and Dalrymple delivers the goods — names, dates, fresh archival work, the bigger map. The most useful contribution is the framing of partition as five events over four decades, not one cataclysm in 1947, and the related point that what looks like religious bloodshed was largely organised political violence. That’s not a controversial claim among current scholars but it has not made it into popular memory, and the conversation does the work of moving it there.

Where to be a little careful: the “neighbours mostly didn’t kill neighbours” line is plausible and well-supported in his fieldwork, but oral histories collected eighty years on are themselves shaped by what families want to remember. The Bengal famine framing — Sen’s argument that it was an entitlement collapse rather than a true food shortage — is academically mainstream but has been contested at the margins. And the warm picture of the 1950s Indo-Pak thaw, while now well-documented in declassified files, is the kind of thing that makes for tidy narrative arcs; reality was probably patchier than “eleven years of cooperation.”

Score 9. Earned by the structural reframing, the specific archival citations (Mukherji on the food bank, Paliwal and Raghavan on intelligence cooperation, the 1947 Partition Archive), and the willingness of both speakers to refuse the easy narratives. The voice is generous without being sentimental, and the conversation closes on a real observation rather than wishful thinking — that no other contemporary war zone produces people who become friends the second they meet abroad. That, by itself, is worth keeping.