India, June 21 -- 1What did the Indian empire actually look like? A 1909 map shows Burma as British India, and Nepal and Bhutan as princely states - they're in yellow, exactly like Jaipur and Hyderabad are - but hides Arabia. A 1909 map of Aden by the Indian Gazetteer recognises much of southern Yemen as dominated by princely states. A rare Indian empire map from 1930 includes Aden but not the Gulf States. The British were always quite reticent about what they were doing in the Arabian states, partly because very few people actually lived there. These were the poorest states in the Raj. Oil hadn't been discovered yet, so it was largely small settlements on the coast. And the Brits were only involving themselves in the cities and making sure that the sheikhs were abiding by them. The person who integrated the sheikhs of the Gulf into the Indian empire was Curzon. He went on a durbar trip to Sharjah [in 1903] and invited the sheikhs and gave them all gun salutes, and created a Persian Gulf residency, on the model of the Hyderabad residency or the Jaipur residency. Subsequently, you had the list of princely states beginning alphabetically with Abu Dhabi. The Ottoman empire officially claimed the Arabian peninsula and the British wanted to avoid aggravating Constantinople, so they always kept the Arabian Raj off official maps of India. Likewise with Britain's presence in Nepal and Bhutan; they didn't want to alarm China or Tibet. But officially under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these were India. And everyone was eligible for an Indian passport. 2Did Gandhi set the tone for what India now looks like? It wasn't him specifically. The idea that set it up was born in the wake of the 1905 Partition of Bengal. You suddenly had nationalists producing images of Bharat Mata, and the Congress latched onto that. But the depiction of independent India as Bharat Mata alienated the Burmese and the Arabs. 3The partitions you discuss occurred over the past 100 years. Were the stories around them hard to access? The origin story of this book was a conversation with someone in Tripura, who I was asking about Partition. And they said "Which partition? Because there was the 1937 one from Burma, 1947 from India. And then Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 and we got another influx of refugees." I had never considered that. Each of these 12 countries has brushed over its past. The key one though is Yemen. It lost most of its papers in the communist takeover of South Yemen. Many of the archives there were burnt. All these Arab states have been very harsh with their citizenship laws, about who gets to be Kuwaiti or from Dubai. They don't particularly want to run over this history, especially in the present day....