While most people associate the term ‘partition’ with the division of India and Pakistan in 1947, Sam Dalrymple argues that the dismantling of the British Raj involved four other partitions. Each of these had massive but relatively unconsidered consequences, including bloodshed, famine and the creation of twelve nation-states. The end of the Raj led to the formation of not only India and Pakistan, but also Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE and Bangladesh. While some of those places are not generally associated with British India, Dalrymple points out that they were parts of India as described by the Interpretation Act of 1889 and came under the control of the governor-general of India. Residents used the Indian rupee and, if they travelled, carried passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’. 

Dalrymple’s argument for guiding at least some attention away from the familiar ground of the 1947 partition is strongest in the case of Burma. When the Simon Commission visited Rangoon in 1929, it took the view that Burma was not really part of India, since its inhabitants were ethnically distinct and there was no railway connection to the rest of the Raj, and so it should become a separate colony. Some anti-imperialists, such as Mahatma Gandhi, agreed. His reasoning was that Burma had never been part of the historical Hindu holy land of Bharat, as envisaged in the third-century BC text the Mahabharata. The decision to separate Burma from British Indian administration was finally implemented in 1937. The situation was greatly complicated by the Japanese invasion of the country during the Second World War. What happened in Burma after 1937 was, in some respects, a foreshadowing of what was to come on the subcontinent in 1947. The creation of Burma as a separate entity triggered intercommunal pogroms, famine and mass migration.

With his remaining three ‘partitions’, Dalrymple might be accused of stretching the definition. He argues that the disposal of the hundreds of princely states that lay within the Raj counts as one partition. Before 1947, the British controlled the foreign policy, defence and communications of the princely states, while the