Shattered Lands

** THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ** A Best Book of the Year in the Financial Times, The Week, Spectator, BBC History Magazine, NPR, History Today 'Remarkable … The prose is vivid, the storytelling cinematic' GUARDIAN A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it. As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia - India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait - were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj. It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet.Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the Himalayas And then