The Empire writes back

Burmese politician who served as Prime Minister of British Burma during the colonial era before the Second World War played a big role in instilling the sense of oneness among Burmese people. And this he did by promoting discrimination against Indians. Sam writes, “Saw declared it his government’s ‘sacred duty’ to promote Buddhism’s proper practice. He set about passing bills that were prejudiced against Indians, including making visas to Burma too expensive for most Indians.

An interesting thing about Sam’s writing is that it is cinematic. Picking up a book that covers complex history can get boring. Where’s the lie? Especially if you’ve been in a reading slump. But with Shattered Lands, there is a very slim chance of that happening because you might have heard about Jinnah being popularly referred to as Quaid-e-Azam but not know much about his love for ham sandwiches. Sam mentions an incident where Jinnah’s wife, Ruttie, drove to meet him at the town hall with packed ham sandwiches. Jinnah screams at her, saying, “What have you done! If my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost chance of being elected?” Now, that reads straight out of a dramatic Bollywood script. Anecdotes like these make you want to keep going.

Sam’s research on the Raj’s westernmost protected states—reconstituted today as Yemen and five of the seven Gulf states—is not as extensive. The reader is also bound to make comparisons with the in-depth research about the east. However, he digs up many forgotten histories from dusty archives. Sam mentions Muhammad Ali Luqman, a Gandhi-loving Arab journalist in Aden, who once thought that the city’s “connection with India was organic”. By the time of the Suez crisis in 1956, he’d become a staunch Yemeni nationalist, arguing that South Asian residents, who’d lived there for decades, should “quit our country”.