Announcements

HarperCollins acquires debut history from Sam Dalrymple Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia

In a pre-emptive co-publication deal with HarperCollins India, William Collins publishing director Arabella Pike has bought World rights in the first book by Sam Dalrymple from David Godwin. Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia will offer a radical new assessment of Indian independence, told largely from witness testimony.

 

India was the heart of Britain’s imperial project. During the 1930s, ‘India’ stretched from the Red Sea off the coast of Africa to the borders of Thailand, unifying a quarter of the world’s population into a single colony governed from the Viceroy’s house in New Delhi. The history of how this vast territory fought for independence has been dominated by the partition of 1947, when millions of refugees were forced across hastily erected borders between Hindu-majority India and the newly created Muslim-majority Pakistan. In just six months, eleven million people had been driven from their homes and two million killed. Some eighty-three thousand women were abducted and raped. But, as this new book argues for the first time, this was just one of five partitions.

 

As British rule disintegrated, ‘the Raj’ was partitioned five times between 1937 and 1971. These breakups and the manner in which they occurred are crucial to understanding the modern world. Each left violent legacies, many of which plague Asia today – including civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, the ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and North East India, the Iranian Revolution, the rise of the Taliban and the Rohingya genocide.

 

Weaving original testimonies from survivors with dazzling narrative skills, Dalrymple brings together into a single history the Partition of Burma, the Great Partition, the Partition of Princely India, the Partition of Arabia and the Partition of Pakistan. It promises an important corrective to the history of Asia and the root causes of the tensions the region faces today.

 

Arabella Pike says: ‘From his pioneering work for the Dastaan project and many years spent living in India, Sam Dalrymple brings a fresh perspective to the legacy of Britain’s imperial past across Asia. His first book is an ambitious, brilliant conceived history and we couldn’t be prouder to be publishing him.’

 

Sam Dalrymple says: ‘Growing up in Delhi and studying South Asian languages at Oxford, the spectre of Partition has been present in much of my life. In my work with Project Dastaan, I gradually realized that Partition’s tragic legacy looms over a much wider region than is generally understood. It’s an extraordinary story that explains so much about what is still unraveling today, from the insurgencies in Kashmir to the Rohingya Crisis. Bizarrely it’s never before been told as a single tale. I am thrilled and honoured that Harper Collins has agreed to publish it!’.

 

Udayan Mitra, Publisher-Literary at HarperCollins India, adds ‘When we talk about the Partition in India, we tend to think of the event that took place in 1947, dividing the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. In fact, the territories that made up “the Raj” were partitioned as many as five times between 1937 and 1971, and, as Sam Dalrymple shows, each of these had far-reaching consequences that impact Asia even today. Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia will prove to many readers to be a new way of looking at history, making connections that are not generally made; it marks the arrival of a major non-fiction writer. We at HarperCollins India are delighted to have acquired Sam Dalrymple’s book alongside William Collins in the UK, and are looking forward very much to publishing Five Partitions

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sam Dalrymple is the Co-Founder of Project Dastaan, a South Asian peacebuilding organisation. He has been published in The New York Times and Conde Nast Traveller, and worked with BBC Radio 4, The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Turquoise Mountain. He graduated as a Sanskrit and Persian scholar from the University of Oxford where he served as president and co-founder of the Oxford University Silk Road Society.

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