The deeply affecting story of the collapse of the Raj, told largely through personal accounts

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
SAM DALRYMPLE
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 528 PP, £25)
TABLET BOOKSHOP PRICE £22.50 • TEL 020 7799 4064

This is very satisfying history. Within 30 years of the slicing of Burma from the Raj in 1937, British India, formerly home to a quarter of the world’s population, was no more. Son of the more famous William, Sam Dalrymple gives us both the fine grain of this enormous story, and a plethora of fascinating maps to make sense of it. Here is the human story, infused with gossip about characters as dysfunctional as Muhammad Ali Jinnah and his Parsi wife, Ruttie, as tragic as Angami Zapu Phizo, visionary leader of the Naga people, and as foolish as Britain’s disastrous last governor of Burma, Reginald Dorman-Smith. But here also is the geopolitical frame through which to view it.

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