New Delhi, Nov. 3 -- As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, 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 British Raj. And then, in just 50 years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division. A new book by the author Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, presents the unknown back story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. Dalrymple spoke about his new book on last week's episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dalrymple is a historian and award-winning filmmaker who grew up in Delhi. He studied Persian and Sanskrit at Oxford University and, in 2018, co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition. He spoke with host Milan Vaishnav about his personal journey with Partition, the forgotten separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, the creation of Pakistan, and the atrocities of the 1971 war. He also shed light on the forgotten Gulf outposts of the British Raj. "When the Brits were figuring out what was going to happen when they left their Indian Empire and handed it over to Indian nationalists, there were conversations where they essentially offered to hand the Gulf over to the future Indian government, just like the other princely states," said the author. But Dalrymple claimed that India's future rulers were not interested in this inheritance, "They saw it as an extra expense, as costing too much effort to govern these small pearling villages on the other side of the Arabian Sea in exchange for basically nothing." Dalrymple also explained how the early idea of Pakistan was quite different from the idea of Pakistan that would emerge after Independence. "If you look at the first time the word 'Pakistan' is coined, it's by a Cambridge student called Choudhry Rahmat Ali in 1933, and he's responding to the separation of Burma," said the author. "He had written that it makes no sense that, if Burma were to be separated from India, the Muslims of India must be forced into an Indian federation. So, he then calls for the separation of a region called 'Pakistan', which referred, for him, to the regions of Punjabis, Afghans, Kashmiris, Sindhis, and the Baloch. It didn't refer to Bengalis or anyone else." Asked what message he hopes readers will take away from his book, Dalrymple said he wants to remind people of the subcontinent how contingent South Asia's national borders really are. "None of the borders that we now see were in any way inevitable," he explained....