Five partitions that shaped South Asia

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. If you were to look down at South Asia from space at night, you would see a bright scar stretching for Over 2,000 miles. This is the border between India and Pakistan, and it's a division that was established within living memory. In this episode, Sam Dalrymple explains how in just a few decades the British Raj shattered along five partitions, from Burma's separation in 1937 to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971.

Speaking with Danny Bird, he uncovers stories Stories of migration, memory and resilience that continue to echo through South Asia today. You open your book with a dramatic image, the India-Pakistan border lit up like a scar across the earth visible from space. Why did you choose to begin there and what does that border symbolize to you in the broader focus of your book, Shattered Lands? I found it fascinating that it's the only wall that you can see from space.

You can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space, even though we all grew up hearing about this as a complete myth. And yet a line created to separate Hindus from Muslims is visibly etched into the surface of the globe. And it's stretches 3,000 kilometers from the Arabian Sea all the way up to the high Himalayas. And the people on both sides have nuclear weapons pointing at one another and yet within the last hundred years this border did not exist.

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