Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 5 Episode 5: Sam Dalrymple - Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

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Season 5 Episode 5: Sam Dalrymple - Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Greetings to everybody.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: This is Jeff Sachs, and welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm really thrilled to have today an outstanding uh author, Sam Dalrymple, who's written an absolutely fantastic book, Shattered Lands, Five Partitions, and the Making of Modern Asia.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_02: Sam is an Oxford-trained historian.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: He's a filmmaker.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_02: He's got a very big vision.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: He lives in Delhi and thinks very big about the world around him.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: And especially, of course, in this book, the world that stretches from today's Persian Gulf or Arabian Gulf or British Gulf, it used to be, to uh today's Myanmar and what was uh British Burma, which was part of the British Indian Raj, uh, something that uh most of us never knew or forgot uh at some point or another.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: But what uh Sam does in this uh wonderful book uh is uh bring together this uh great history of what is today by my count about 20% of the world population.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: I think at the time, maybe even a little bit larger quarter of the world population.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's a big part of the world.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: It was the center and the crown jewel of the British Empire, which was the world's empire from at least the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the end of World War II, I would say.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: And Sam, what you do in this book brilliantly and also entertainingly and eye-openingly, I want to say, is that you bring the drama of the end of the British Empire and the emergence of no fewer than 12 sovereign states out of what was uh the British Raj, broadly defined.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: And it's quite a drama, and it's also uh a story that is still unfolding because much of the region is in crisis right now, and we still have the wars, the legacies, uh, the conflict zones, uh, the frozen borders, the coups uh and so forth that still, and the wars in the Gulf region, actually, that have their imperial roots as well.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: Just to add one more point before turning it over to you, Sam.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Your book, uh Shattered Lands, is uh receiving understandably rave reviews.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_02: It's also uh nominated for the Orwell Prize, uh, that is the prize named after George Orwell.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I learned from reading your book uh something I did not know and probably should have known, which was uh George Orwell was uh born in the British Raj in uh Bihar, in today's India, and um that he learned a lot about what he would end up telling us about so powerfully in uh books like 1984 about empire and about what they mean from his own experience.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, Sam, welcome.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh great to meet you uh and congratulations on this great accomplishment.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having me on the show.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's wonderful to be here.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And you have uh taken on a big theme.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us a little bit about uh the background of uh thinking about writing about a quarter of the world's population.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in I I think it's uh your first big uh history book.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: So uh you started you started uh with ambition and you succeeded.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so uh just like to hear your thoughts about that.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the origin of this book came from a project that my friends and I started at Oxford.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: There was this strange moment sitting at university in the final year of our undergrads, where some friends of mine, Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi, were all sitting in a room together and realized A that this meeting could not happen back in the subcontinent, where, thanks to the strictest borders that really exist on Earth, you can't see the Great Wall of China from space, but you can see the India-Pakistan border because it's that heavily fortified and militarized.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, there they're despite huge numbers of people with family links across the border, virtually no one can go because of how bad the uh relationships between these countries are.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so A, there was this strange realization that in the UK, um, you know, we could sit in a room and have Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and a Brit chatting to one another.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then by the way, it's just a the nice scene that uh the legacy of uh empire continues uh in the quite civilized way in the drawing rooms of uh Oxford and Cambridge, uh and in the common language that you're speaking uh English uh with each other, although I suppose you could speak in uh some of the other languages as well, but that you would be speaking English together as a lasting legacy uh of the British Empire.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: But there you are uh at Oxford with what is now uh an incredibly uh divided and dangerous border, and one where there were open clashes uh recently and very dangerous clashes between India and Pakistan.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Just last May, I mean, sort of a year and a month ago, we had missiles being fired over this militarized border, one arguably the closest we've come to all-out missile warfare between two nuclear powers in the 21st century.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much that's happened in the world since with Venezuela and Gaza and Israel and Iran and uh China and you know everything else that's going on in the world that it's easy to forget that that was happening just one year ago.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So we were sitting there having these conversations, and my friend Spursh came up with this idea of using virtual reality with reconnecting families across the border, using technology to reconnect divided families.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: The partition of India and Pakistan saw the largest forced migration in human history, and yet most people have never had the right to return.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Give us some numbers about that.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So India in 1947, in the the greatest and largest of the five partitions I talk about in the book, um, is divided along religious lines on the basis of what's just happened in Ireland a few decades earlier, and in a way that will be replicated a few days uh a few years later, or one year later, in in Mandate Palestine between an Arab and Israeli state.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the that that kind of end of empire, collapse of empire, who do you hand over power to, the Brits, uh, draw a line, and subsequently between uh 10 to 15 million people migrate across that border on the basis of their religion in the next nine months.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Between one to three million people do not make it across the other side of that border.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: What's interesting, obviously interesting about it is there was no real line between Muslim and and Hindu populations.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: So drawing the line that there is a Pakistan and this is the Muslim side, and what is India becomes the Hindu side, there were tendencies, but they were not uh hard lines of where populations were.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh as you point out in the book, what became uh today's India and what is today's India is uh a vast Muslim population of uh the second largest Muslim population in the world, I suppose, after Pakistan itself.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think that it's very easy to forget that the the the Raj at its largest had the largest Muslim population on the planet and had more Muslims in it uh than the entire Arab world put together.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And for the very longest time, the Raj was considered the epicenter of the global Islamic world.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: People went to the city of Hyderabad for Islamic learning, which today there are very few Muslims living in.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's incredible, actually.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: When the Ottoman caliph is looking to marry his daughters, he doesn't turn to the Shah of Iran, he doesn't turn to the king of Egypt, he doesn't turn to the Saudis or the Emiratis, he turns to the royal family of Hyderabad in central India to marry his daughters as the kind of the other great Islamic rulers.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I I think we forget the central place of India in the as the heart of both the Islamic world, the Hindu world, the Buddhist world, the Zoroastrian world.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: This was this was this was such a vast imperial entity, much like I think I think you can make comparisons with sort of Spanish New Spain, in the sense that you had huge, uh varied populations um speaking all sorts of languages, following all sorts of faiths, tied together in an a single imperial unit.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um what we so often forget is that and that that that is, I guess, the central crux of the book, is that the Raj in the 1920s stretched from what is now Yemen to what is now Burma.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it it and and the multiple fractures that pull it apart explain so many of the great conflicts we see in the world today.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that uh is the recurring uh fact of uh the five partitions that you talk about uh in the book is uh they basically come pretty suddenly.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: There are a few differences, but basically they're thrust upon politicians and policymakers and everyday people, not quite out of the blue, but much more suddenly than you might imagine of these grand events.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: And the Indian partition, which is uh I think the third of your partitions and and the biggest of all, the division of the subcontinent uh into Pakistan and India, and then later on, uh later partition between West uh Pakistan and uh East Pakistan, which becomes Bangladesh.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_02: These are dramatic events that are not exactly uh going to plan, I would say.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_02: There is no plan.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the improvisation is stunning.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: The face-to-face shouting matches of the politicians that uh you depict, where they are basically saying to each other, Are you kidding?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: uh or missed opportunities that are absolutely astounding.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then suddenly millions of people are running for their lives.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that you've hit the nail on the head.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think so often in the 21st century you read school textbooks in places like Pakistan or Myanmar or Bangladesh, and it often treats nation states as as somewhat inevitable.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: The nation states that we have, however, are in many ways so not inevitable as to kind of, you know, be rather absurd to even suggest it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: One just needs to look at the fact that in the 1920s, when Gandhi is doing his famous salt march, the uh the word Pakistan has yet to be written, Nor Bangladesh, Myanmar is Burma.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: People are discussing whether or not it makes sense to ever separate Burma off from India, and where and and people are talking about the very idea of separating these regions as somewhat absurd because they've never existed as separate entities along the borders that we have today before.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think so often we treat these things as inevitable.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: When do you think uh British leaders knew, quote unquote, that India would be become independent?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I I ask this because in a way World War II was uh a decisive event, as you described, but suddenly the society is, first of all, mobilized, the millions of Indians become part of the war effort.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_02: They demand independence.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Political leaders say, if we're gonna do this, we demand independence.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: There is something acknowledged about that in a way, and yet at the same time, uh Winston Churchill, I'm paraphrasing, but uh there's a famous line that I did not become prime minister to oversee the dissolution of the British Empire.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_02: I can't believe he actually thought that at the end of uh the Second World War India was going to become independent.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: So was he just out of it in some delusional way, or was his loss of election, which was again one of the biggest shocks of political history, I would say, that the man who saved Britain then lost the election in uh, I think it's uh July 1945 to Clement Attlee, who had his hand actually in uh one of these commissions uh about uh reform of the British Empire.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_02: But did the British leadership on its side know what was about to happen uh as as World War II was ending?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: History marches slowly and then suddenly happens all at once.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think that in the 1930s there was a vague sense that this couldn't go on forever, that the empire was heaving under its own weight, and that, you know, at some day, I I think there was a set general sense that maybe some sort of future a bit like Canada or Australia, um sort of a dominion status, might be conceivable in the next 20 to 30 years.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the speed with which independence arrived is singularly down to the events that occurred in World War II.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: I think that so often when we write uh the history of World War II, particularly in the West, in the States or in Europe, we tend to focus on the Western Front or the war in the Pacific, and we forget the central place of India, of the Raj in the war.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the four great turning points, up there with the Battle of Midway and D-Day of World War II, are the battles of Kohima and Imphal, where the British Indian Empire clashes with the Japanese Empire that's been sweeping across Asia westwards and you know, through uh through China, through Indochina, onto Burma and Malaya, and so through Singapore and suddenly sweeping up through the Burmese jungles towards India, where they hope to knock out the British Empire and basically push Britain out of the war.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that we write that story out of the world.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even know it.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: We don't even know it.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it's so, so central to the making of the world today as we know it.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that you can understand the history of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Burma, or indeed Nepal with the Gurkhas, etc., without understanding that some of the most dramatic events of the war occurred here and completely changed the politics of the region forever.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you uh know your uh fellow historian, uh, whether you know him personally, Rana Mitter, uh at at Harvard, uh who's uh Wonderful man.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful historian.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: And we uh had a a book club uh together with him recently about his book on uh the war in China, The Forgotten Ally.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: And uh again, I I read that.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: I sometimes think I know something uh until I find out how little I know.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: And it's the same thing you're saying, Sam.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: These grand events.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: China lost uh maybe 14 million people dead in the Japanese uh war, and we don't even know about it.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: And when China holds its victory celebration, oh, nobody from the West would dare go there, though China was the great ally.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So it's the same situation here, these huge monumental events, but we see things so much through, if I could say the Western Eye or the North Atlantic Eye or London and Washington or whatever it is.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1943, when the Japanese Empire clashed with the British Indian Empire, it was the clash of the two most populous empires in world history.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that, you know, left left many millions dead.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that I think that it's always important to remember that, you know, a the the the vast percentage of the world that lives in China and in South Asia, and the fact that these events continue to be the prism through which, you know, a fifth of the world perceives their past, present, and future through in much the same way as, you know, World War II and the Vietnam War in the case of the states continues to shape the West's imagination of itself.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that we ignore these histories at our own peril.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: I think we're all learning uh to uh recalibrate and rethink, but I just want to underscore for people listening that uh the countries that Sam is writing about uh and take the most populous, uh uh because the uh Arab states uh in the Gulf region are much smaller.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: But if you take India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, we're talking about uh nearly two billion people.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we're talking about an astounding proportion of the world.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: If you combine India today and China, we're at uh roughly three billion of the world's eight billion people, so around 37 percent.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: And if you take uh the United States, uh European Union uh and United Kingdom, oh, we're uh at about uh 860 million, and uh it's a little more than 10 percent of the world population, so much, much smaller than uh the uh populations of of the places we're we're speaking about.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you and your fellow students uh were sitting and realizing that each of you had stories of uh the massive dislocations, so you launched Project Dustan, and what is that?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_02: And what what did you actually launch out of out of that?
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: So Dustan's aim was to reconnect families.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: What does Dustan mean, by the way?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Dustan is the Urdu word for story.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, okay.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And my friend Sparsh Ahuja, um, who's a brilliant documentary filmmaker, had um always seen his grandfather writing in Urdu, this language that uh, you know, his family didn't speak anymore.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And whenever Sparsh would ask his grandfather about this language, he'd kind of you know hide his writing away and say, oh no, no, that's that's the past.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was only when he grew a bit older and started asking more questions about his grandfather's past that he began to realize this whole life that his grandfather had before the Great Migration.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so Sparish had always wanted to go there, but because he hadn't been able to get visas, he never could cross.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so we realized that thanks to digital technology, we can visit our ancestral homes or you know, places virtually.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so the aim was to reconnect 75 uh families virtually with their ancestral homes and communities before the 75th anniversary of partition in 2022, and then use those stories in a sense as an educational tool to help educate the world about what is arguably one of the most singularly most important events of the 20th century, and probably in the West one of the most ignored.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's up there with the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, the World Wars, the Rwandan genocide, the you know, civil war in China as one of the central cruxes around which history has pivoted.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it remains the prism, as I said, through which the past, the present, and the future is perceived in so much of the world, and yet we aren't taught about it in America, in Britain.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: But we will be because uh India today is uh is the third largest economy in the world.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and it it will overtake the United States by my count, uh by my estimate, by mid-century.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: So the whole focus of the world economy is shifting, and the focus of uh therefore history and how it's told, uh and our perspectives uh are shifting, and you're making a huge contribution uh to that.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: Let me ask you, uh, by the way, uh because you mentioned Urdu, I guess the predominant language uh in Pakistan, although I don't even know how predominant uh myself, whether it's uh completely universal or not.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: But when East and West Pakistan are created, the language in East Pakistan is not Urdu, it's uh Bengali.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: East Pakistan is actually uh the more or less uh the Muslim Bengali speaking population of Bengal, uh the uh Bengali-speaking part of South Asia.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: And that language division, I think it's fair to say, is partly at the at the crux of what eventually becomes uh the next partition you talk about, which is between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_02: And it starts actually with the idea in in West Pakistan, uh, or in Pakistan then, but the capital, that they would impose Urdu on the population of Bengal.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: And uh they said, no, our language uh is Bengali.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: So of course, language is about culture.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Culture, it's ethnicity, it's about uh historical memory.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: And one thing that is incredible is the linguistic diversity, the stunning linguistic diversity of this region within India, uh, across uh this region, it's just so many languages, so many peoples.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the way to perceive the subcontinent is as as a mirror of Europe in terms of diversity of peoples, food, culture, landscapes, um, and and and it's roughly a similar size, you know, the subcontinent in Europe.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I think tellingly, the Urdu language is actually essentially a language that emerges in places like Delhi and Lucknow, which are in North India.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And it was the language of the partition refugees who helped form Pakistan, who helped put forward the demand for a separate Muslim state, who migrate to Pakistan and Urdu is seen as a linked language because Pakistan had so many diverse languages.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in what's now Pakistan, many people will speak Sindhi or Balochi or Pashto or Burushaski or Punjabi as their first language and not and Urdu as a second language.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: But for me, I think that the emphasis on language has somewhat been overblown.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think that the real thing that changed Pakistan's future is the fact that the military takes over.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because the military, um, when the military takes over in the late 50s, up until that point, about 50% of Pakistani prime ministers have come from what's now Bangladesh, and half have come from what's now Pakistan.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: What changes with the military takeover is that the military at that point had only 2% of their officers from what's now Bangladesh.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: So very quickly, all the power gets centralized in the West, and the East begins to feel like a colony of the West.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: There is this kind of forgotten decade where I think that there could have been this movement forward.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: We forget that there were also upsets about the imposition of Urdu in places like Punjab and Sindh and elsewhere in Pakistan, not just in the East.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: But what's different is that the army came from the West.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, as the army begins to kind of impose stricter and stricter rules, as power gets centralized, as corruption seeps in, and more and more money is diverted for projects near these West Pakistani officers' houses and their local towns, none of it's being given to the East.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you have a very clear kind of division economically that begins to happen, I think, in the 60s.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, very, very interesting.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: And and it it raises, it brings us to yet another partition that I would not have uh focused on as a partition per se, but you make clear really is.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that is that uh British India was itself a not only a linguistic mosaic, but it was a political mosaic because there were princely states.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and these were very important.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: And what happened with the princely states shaped a lot of modern history, including the militarization of Pakistan, which you just discussed.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_02: Two of these states are stunning in uh their importance.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_02: One of them we still hear a lot about, the other I would not have even known was so central until reading your history, uh, and that's uh Hyderabad.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but the other princely state uh is uh Kashmir, of course, which remains today a major flashpoint, a uh frozen conflict, sometimes unfrozen, but also one of the reasons why Pakistan militarized uh because uh the ongoing conflict.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_02: Could you walk us through this because it's fascinating, both maybe start with Hyderabad, because I think almost nobody knows uh about the princely state of Hyderabad and how important it is in history, and then turn to Kashmir where we know something but we need to know more.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, much like the British Isles themselves are a mosaic of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland being part of the UK, the Raj itself was always a mishmash of directly ruled provinces, such as Punjab, Bengal, the United Provinces, which is now UP, Madras, Bombay Province, etc., etc., etc.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are also 560-something princely states, which are little kingdoms that have been absorbed in, that are under the protection of the Indian army, that use the Indian rupee, that are, for all intents and purposes, part of this system, and yet internally the Maharaja, Sheikh, Sultan is allowed to kind of, you know, have their way, so long as their communications, defense, and kind of foreign policy is all controlled by the viceroy.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: When it's clear that independence is coming, many people think that the princely states are also going to get independent.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And crucially, many princely states are independent today.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: And that's and that's what happened in the Gulf region, for example.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens in the Gulf, you know, Dubai, etc.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's what happens with Nepal and Bhutan, that are independent countries to this day.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, there are huge numbers of these states that eventually decide that they want to join either India or Pakistan.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there is by and large this assumption that kind of, you know, many of the states that are unviable as independent countries are going to join the country that aligns with their religion.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, obviously, you know, uh Bhavalpur, which is majority Muslim, is going to join Pakistan, whereas obviously Mysore, which is majority or Jaipur, uh, is going to join India because it's majority Hindu.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: But these two big states, Kashmir and Hyderabad, are not as simple because in both cases, the ruler and the majority population have different religions.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, this is amazing.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_02: And it goes back to Westphalia and uh and European history.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: Whose religion?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: The people or the ruler?
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: So in Hyderabad, which I'll talk about first, Hyderabad is a Hindu majority area in central India, the states that now constitute modern Telangana, Karnataka, and Maharashtra, that is ruled by a Muslim Nizam.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Nizam, as I mentioned, was considered the foremost Muslim ruler in the world, and after Rockefeller's death, he is considered the richest man in the world.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, completely mind-boggling when I read that.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: He has the greatest art collections that now today form much of the kind of Gulf and Malaysian museum collections, but well m many of the world's great masterpieces in the 1930s are sitting in central Hyderabad.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And yet it's a very feudal society, so you've got deep divisions in class, despite the fact that his court is very diverse and isn't very kind of religiously focused.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims all very happy alongside one another.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is that it's right in the heart of India.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: India is very unwilling to let this state go independent because it's a gigantic hull.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a there's a statement which is, you know, you can live without your arms, but can you live without your heart?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, says some people in the Indian government.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this constant pressure to try and get it to join India.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Did the Nizam, was he thinking about independent or did he want independence?
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: He wanted he wanted complete independence.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's lobbying at the UN to try and get recognized as an independent country.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's negotiating with the Portuguese to buy Goa so that he's got a port, etc., etc., etc.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: And again, this is a this this is a hefty state.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: The economy uh of Hyderabad at the time rivals that of Belgium's.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is not some small little tiny place in the middle of nowhere.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens though is that there is a communist revolution in the countryside called the Delangana Armed Rebellion.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: And in order to put down this rebellion, he begins leaning more and more on these paramilitary groups called the Razakars, many of whom are kind of very, very sort of fundamentalist Islamist groups who, in addition to massacring communists, begin massacring Hindus and burning temples.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is very quickly this entire state descends into civil war.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that the Indian army in September 1948, over a year after independence, rolls into Hyderabad.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in the and essentially the first major into one of the first major international deployments of the Indian army is into Hyderabad, which again is largely forgotten that it was a separate de facto state for a year and a bit after independence.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the displacement in this conflict is huge, and so often it's treated as a sort of side story.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: There is more displacement in the war for Hyderabad State in 1948 than in the Israel-Palestinian war and the Nukbah of the same year in 1948.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the scale of displacement is enormous, and yet so rarely do we actually hear stories from this war.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's just one of the two major ones.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: The other one, of course, is Kashmir.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: What what happened to the Nizam, by the way, and all that wealth?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the Nizam has a very colourful end to his world.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, his state is dissolved within the Indian Union.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_00: For a while, he kind of has an equivalent of a place in the kind of House of Lords, essentially.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um but eventually loses more and more money.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: He dies, I think, in the 60s, and his son takes over, but finds that more and more people are robbing him of his wealth and he doesn't have any powers anymore.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: So he moves off to the Australian Outback to become a sheep farmer.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that one of the sons ends up being the cameraman in Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this kind of as well as the kind of leg crossing scene and basic instinct.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, there's this kind of the phenomenal.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, this man who this this sheep farmer is technically the legitimate heir to the Islamic Caliphate rather than ISIS, etc.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, he is the legitimate heir of the last Ottoman caliph, in addition to the Hyderabad the royal family.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this the story of Hyderabad is extraordinary, colourful, and yet has a very real and devastating human collateral that is this this world is destroyed.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a the the letter by Jackie Kennedy, who visits Hyderabad in the 60s and sees this world that is on the verge of collapse, and you know, uh this world where uh too refined to survive for even yet another decade, where you know, the the the the the old uh erstwhile aristocracy is spending the last of their wealth as their palaces crumble into oblivion behind them and and and then and the younger sons no longer want to take up the old duties and take on the old ways that are all moving off to the Gulf, all of the you know, th this this world that's now vanished.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: What a what an amazing story.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh the the the crisis in Kashmir has not vanished, so it's a it's a related but a different uh story.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us about this, because this is a very pressing, I don't know if it's frozen, but ongoing conflict uh more than uh 75 years later.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell So Kashmir was the I think it was the largest princely state.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was roughly the size of France.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's in the high Himalayas, um stretching from the plains of Jammu up to the uh K2, the second highest peak on planet Earth, after Everest, and is this extraordinarily beautiful state with a Hindu Maharaja, a Muslim majority population, but also vast Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist populations.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most mixed states that you can imagine, and huge numbers of languages, etc.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like the Caucasus, there are, you know, different communities in every valley.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens is that initially the Maharaja wants to go independent.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: He's bordered on three sides by foreign countries, and much like Nepal and Bhutan, who are asserting their right to independence at this time, he thinks he can go the same way.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: He wants to become the Switzerland of the East, is what he says.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: Hari Singh, he's called.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: But both India and Pakistan from the beginning have their eye on Kashmir.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: So firstly, India's first Prime Minister, Nehru, is actually from there.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas Pakistan, the word, was actually an uh an anagram for the states uh for the states that Pakistani nationalists dreamed of uniting.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Punjab, Punjabis, Afghans, Kashmiris is the K.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then S for Sindh and Tan for Balujistan.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know it's it's there in the name as one of the places that they imagined.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: And these kind of rival visions, and and it's also, you know, been one of the great ancient seats of Hindu learning.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, all these layered histories, one on top of the other.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is initially it looks like that they can get their independence and that the state will be going the way of Nepal.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens is that partition violence that is sweeping across India after the division of India and Pakistan enters the winter capital of Jammu, leaving around 10,000 Muslims dead.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, you get a group of soldiers in the Pakistani military, not for the last time, going behind the back of civilian authority and sponsoring an incursion into the state to try and basically get it to join Pakistan by force.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is known as the Lashkar, or in English pilots is often called the tribal invasion.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, you get Pakistani soldiers sponsoring a group of Muslims from the Northwest Frontier to go and take the region by force.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, very quickly, in self-defense, the Maharaja accedes to India, despite the fact that it's majority Muslim, he cedes to India, and brings the Indian army in.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: So very quickly, you have the Indian and Pakistani armies clashing at uh clashing with each other on the Tibetan plateau.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what's so tragic about this is that the soldiers who are meeting for the first time on this plateau have just come back from fighting World War II together.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're all brothers in arms, they're all best friends from the front who are suddenly asked to point their guns at one another.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the great tragedies, I think, is um that these stories that I heard from interviewing some of the veterans of this first India-Pakistan war.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today, in both India and Pakistan, is portrayed as this kind of nationalist moment when, you know, national identity was asserted.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yet there were stories like um there was a commonly known thing that if someone lobbed a pack of cigarette cartons over the front line, they contained letters from soldiers on the other side of the front trying to check whether their best friends were still alive, despite the fact that they'd been ordered by their respective governments to shoot at one another.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so you you hear these stories so often, one after the other, and it we forget that these soldiers were fighting alongside one another just months earlier.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think one of the most telling stories that happens right at the end of Shattered Lands.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: In 1971, when the Indian Army is victorious over Pakistan's Eastern Command, helping to establish the country of Bangladesh, the Indian, I think General Nagra, by the Observer Journalist, is asked whether he's met the head of Pakistan's Eastern Command, General Niazi.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, yes, it was so tragic.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: We were great friends in college.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: We were to we worked together at Staff College together, and you know, it's so bizarre to see him in such different circumstances with us as the victors and him as the enemy.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, that you you get um there's such intimacy in this story.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's so often it's it it it it it it's people who know each other who are suddenly sent to fight against one another.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, in all the prisoner of war camps subsequently, there's all these stories of people on the other side of the border trying to visit their childhood friends in the POW camps because, of course, you know, many of the soldiers who get captured had migrated from India to Pakistan and now are POWs in India.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so their Indi their old Indian neighbours go go go go to pay them a visit and say and try to negotiate their exit from prison.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: They don't manage to, but you know, there that there's so much intimacy in the Indian and Pakistani relationship.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's one of the reasons why when you go abroad, Indians and Pakistanis are always best friends and always kind of you know listening to the same music, eating the same food, speaking in the same languages, often dating one another in a way that I don't know occurs in any other major conflict zone in the 21st century.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get that between Russians and Ukrainians, you don't get that between Israelis and Palestinians.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: The the level of intimacy in India and Pakistan is extraordinary for countries that were lobbying missiles at each other just a year ago.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that the uh Kashmir debacle shows is how uh how politics is overtaken by events and typically by violence, and then gets locked in for decades and decades and decades, and even more wars, more skirmishes, uh, more confrontation and so forth.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: You describe, again, something that I did not know, did not understand, but if I'm correct, there was a somewhat of an agreement or close to an agreement that the issue of uh of uh Kashmir would be resolved by a referendum.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh at some moment, if I remember correctly from the book, the Indians offer, I think Nehru offers to Jinnah, to the head of Pakistan, uh, withdraw your troops and we'll have a referendum.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh Jinnah says no, uh and keeps the conflict alive and the referendum never takes place.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_02: Could you clarify that story?
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because the fact is uh we've not had a political resolution to this uh since basically 1950, and it remains a a global flashpoint.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: The question of a referendum in in in Kashmir is one of the most uh hot topics because I mean in Pakistan today and in much of Kashmir, you get people saying, you know, uh that India's presence on the Indian side of the border of Kashmir is invalid on the basis that it never held a referendum.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, India says, you know, they offered the referendum and it was Pakistan's founding father who turned it down.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_00: And now, you know, 75 years after promises were made, what does that mean?
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, we've had war since and that's gone ahead of events, and and you know, you you can't take promises from the you know the wake of World War II and and and hold people to account 75 years later.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: The tragedy of Kashmir is that every war between India and Pakistan, it's Kashmiris who get caught in the middle.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's fled up particularly badly in the 90s when I think Bill Clinton called it one of the most dangerous places on earth.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the number of people displaced, lives destroyed, and and ultimately it it remains today.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's like saying there'll be a referendum on on Taiwan and China.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a no no one on the ground thinks that either government is going to accede to that, no matter what you know, local Kashmiris might might want.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Events have changed, and ultimately it's Kashmiris who suffer.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: In the 90s, you had huge civilian casualties, the emergence of various kind of uh insurgency groups, counter-insurgencies, uh particularly in India, that led huge, thousand many thousands of civilians dead or brutalized, the forcing out of the entire Hindu population, the Kashmiri pundits out of the region, and the the militarisation of an extraordinary society in a way that I think it remains one of the great tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries, and we can only help hope that things get better.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think what's what's tragic again is how close we've come so many times to durable and you know you don't this isn't just a thing between India and Pakistan, you can see it in so many conflicts like, you know, uh, you know, across the world.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: But um I think that the the extraordinary one that I always find rather amazing, I think it's the Agra Summit, which which occurred in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement with Ireland.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And as I mentioned earlier, the partition was done on the basis that Ireland had had a ri religious partition earlier and that it was it was very much of the same vein.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so after Ireland creates this system where Northern Ireland can be both Irish and British, and that there is freedom of movement and that you could uh you know that these borders are somewhat porous, there is this moment in the 90s um which is tragically lost, where it's it's it's posited that you know Kashmir will be some um sort of in-between zone where all Kashmiris will get dual citizenship, where Indians uh where Kashmiris will be allowed to travel to both India and Pakistan, um, and that the modern borders will kind of basically remain but be virtually meaningless for everyone living there.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have so many moments like this where one what one can see the conflict so almost being resolved.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then suddenly I think it was uh that the Pakistani military kind of you know had begun firing on the line.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Of control, and then the Indians pulled away from negotiations with the Pakistani civilian government, and the whole thing falls apart yet again.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we got so close and have done so many times.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: What I think is tragic today is that particularly in India, there's the sense that uh it's not even worth negotiating with Pakistan anymore because every time we get close to a deal, you know, there's some shooting on the border and the civilian politicians aren't chatting to the army, etc., etc., etc.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think it's a great tragedy, and we we will only be worse off for it.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_02: I got uh some uh small glimpse.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: My wife and I were able to uh get to Kashmir 47 years ago during a time of relative quiet and peace.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so we were a week on Doll Lake in a houseboat, uh, in one of the most beautiful places uh in in the world.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_02: Peaceful, calm, the uh lotus blossoms everywhere.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, and um this is what Kashmir could be and should be uh absolutely uh uh a miraculous uh place in its uh in its beauty.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: But as you say, events uh keep taking over.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_02: Before we finish, I want to turn to the last place we haven't uh really touched on, and that uh most people would not think about as being in any sense part of the India story, uh, and that is uh the uh today's uh Arabian Gulf region, uh, because as you point out, uh six of the countries, Yemen, Oman, United Arab Emirates, uh, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar were actually part of uh the British Empire and uh ruled from Bombay, actually, uh under the Empire.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: So uh can you tell us about that?
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I mean this is one of the most fascinating stories, and one of those which is so overlooked.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the there are multiple layers, as I mentioned, between direct and indirect control that the Raj has on places.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um the city of Aden in what's now Yemen was the western city of India, and was and many early Yemeni nationalists in their early days are Indian nationalists.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Mohammed Il Luqman, for example, um, you know, is is is a travel buddy of the Dalit leader Mbedkar and the translator for Gandhi, and he later is one of the most important people in the rise of Yemeni nationalism.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um likewise, I think that we so often forget that Qatar, Dubai, Kuwait, Bahrain, etc., were protected states under not London, but under India.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the reason when Ibn Saud goes to unify the tribes of Arabia and create the country of Saudi Arabia after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the reason that he doesn't expand into the Gulf is because they're under the protection of the Indian army and because they're using the rupee, and if you want to sue someone in Dubai, you have to go sue them in the High Court of Bombay.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and you know, it there's uh there's a picture in the book of uh there's a passport of a Yemeni Jewish woman who wants to migrate from the city of Aden to Jerusalem after the after the Balfa declaration declares the Holy Land a homeland of the Jewish people.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: In order to make this migration, she has to go on an Indian passport that says Indian Empire.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: Despite the fact that she's never been to what we now consider India, she is born and raised in Yemen.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: But by virtue of her being Yemeni, she is legally an Indian citizen.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's this extraordinary story.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's definitely part of the Raj for the least long.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most of it is only really integrated into the Raj under Viceroy Lord Khazin in the early 20th century.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you do get these remarkable legacies of these connections.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: For example, many of the sheikhs and sultans of the Gulf are sent off to Mayo College, for example, in what's now Rajasthan, while they become more fluent in the Urdu language than they are in Arabic.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: And Urdu remains the language of the Omani army into the late 60s, for example.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one of the great culinary masterpieces of South Asia, Halim, that I'm sure many of your listeners uh will have eaten before.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the great dishes of South Asia, is a Yemeni dish that is brought to the Deccan in central India, Hyderabad, where it's mixed with Telugu spices.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: Because many of the princes of what's now Eastern Yemen, but was then sort of semi-independent states, like Qayati state, etc., ruled eastern Yemen from the outskirts of Hyderabad, as the Nizam of Hyderabad's vassals.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this whole fascinating lost world.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think that by understanding the events that overtook this region, um, I think so often the Gulf's pre-oil past gets neglected.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the reasons that this is the case is that until kind of the 2000s, many people thought that there just wasn't that much documentation of what went on in the Gulf before oil.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it turns out that there is, but it took, I think, the Kuthar Digital Library that basically, you know, the Gulf, uh the Catharou gave a huge amount of money to digitize any documents in any country that told you anything about the Gulf, and they wanted to kind of put it all together in one digital archive.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_00: It turned out the entire pre-oil British era history of the Gulf was sitting in Bombay in the Maharashtra State Army.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in it's in Mumbai, and um and scholars have now completely rewritten the history of the Gulf using these materials.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, another thing that I learned that I did not know and found fascinating was uh how many influential people, in addition to those you've mentioned, the Ambani family, for example, uh the founder of uh Reliance uh started in the Gulf.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and the Gujarat base now has its origins uh in uh his rise, uh the father's rise in uh the early oil days.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell So the Ambani's are a very fascinating example where you had this generation of Indians in Aden who were trained on free market capitalism rather than Nauruvian socialism.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: When they're kicked out in the late 60s, thanks to the Aden evacuation and you know uh the the the communist South Yemen taking over and the expulsion, the rise of Arab nationalism, the expulsion of many of the minorities, uh much like Uganda, etc.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: But many of them go back to Gujarat and Dirubai Mbani, who had worked out in the 50s in Aden, sees here an entire kind of you know group of geniuses who are just waiting to be kind of given jobs.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so he hires the lot of them.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the the first generation of reliance is made up of these brilliant entrepreneurs from the early days of the Gulf.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we ignore the history of the Gulf, I think, far too much.
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_00: But also, I think we forget that Saddam Hussein's justification for his invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, which of course triggers, you know, every other subsequent American intervention in the Middle East to some extent, and you know, is is a crucial turning point in the history of the Middle East.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait he justifies on the basis that Kuwait was under basically Ottoman Empire's tutelage, and that the British had recognized one of the local emirs as a prince and integrated them into their princely state system and thus kept them from becoming part of Iraq at the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it was due to perfidious Britain that uh that the that Kuwait was not rightfully part of Iraqi civilization.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at Saddam Hussein's words, he explicitly justifies the annexation of Kuwait on the basis that he'd not been able to do this earlier because of the Indian Army and all of these literature.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_02: Feeding into one of my favorite themes, because I often say that uh all problems in the world go back to the British.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, when I when I say that, then I get um rather nice but uh a little bit irate uh male from Scotland and from Wales who say it's not us, it's the English.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: Please be careful, Professor Sachs.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_02: But what you're what you're showing is uh indeed the roots of so many of the current challenges.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_02: This is really the point.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh go back to unsolved political issues uh that uh date to this uh brilliant uh history that you are uh uh doing uh so much to to bring to light.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_02: Sam, this is an amazing book.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_02: I we should have hours uh to discuss this, alas we just have our hour together right now.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_02: But uh I want to thank you for the book.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_02: I want your next book uh to uh be uh recovered unity instead of shattered lands.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you're talking about the expanse of the Indian Ocean.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_02: It can come together uh without uh one Raj or one empire or one uh polity, but it could come together in peace, in solving uh these uh border disputes, uh enjoying linguistic and ethnic diversity, culinary diversity.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I think by understanding the history of how things came to be divided, maybe it will make a major contribution to how things can be united again.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: But it's a it's a brilliant book.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's very kind.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so good for you to be with us.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_02: We've been uh speaking about Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_02: I encourage uh everybody to be reading it.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_02: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely brilliantly told.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining us today on Book Club with uh Jeffrey Sachs.
• 54:04
  SPEAKER_02: And uh thank you, Sam, for your amazing contribution and for joining us today.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 54:14
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