Sam Dalrymple > Quotes

“Like many Hindus, Gandhi identified India with Bharat – the holy land of the ancient Mahabharata Hindu epic. Neither Burma nor Arabia featured in the epic, and thus many Hindu nationalists felt that these regions should be separated off from India. Gandhi’s support for this stance had caused a rift with his Burmese acolyte Ottama, who tried to publish a rebuttal in Gandhi’s magazine.62 But Gandhi refused to publish the article, writing, ‘The Burmese should certainly have my sympathy if they wished to secede.’ Indeed, when he visited Burma that spring, he declined to meet Ottama at all, telling him, ‘I am sorry indeed that anybody should have mentioned anything to you about my proposed visit to Burma.’
When Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Rangoon, therefore, Mahatma Ottama was conspicuously absent.
Gandhi went swiftly on a ‘procession through the streets’, then set off on a series of rallies.64 When his hosts tried to take him to a theatre one evening, he startled them by declaring theatres ‘satanic’ and refusing to go. His speeches nonetheless attracted thousands and at a meeting with Rangoon’s Gujarati community, he addressed the question of separation, declaring that Burma was ‘not what we call Bharatvarsha [the land of Bharat]’65 – not a part of ancient India’s Hindu geography – and that Indians should act like guests in a foreign country there. A few days later he expanded upon his thoughts, explaining that it would only”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“be worth the while of Burma to remain part of India if it means a partnership at will on a basis of equality with full freedom for either party to secede whenever it should wish. The main thing is that Burma should have an absolute right to shape her destiny as she likes.66
To his surprise, crowds muttered in disapproval, and the protests only got louder as he headed into the surrounding towns, snaking his way down the coastline by train to the Eurasian colony of Moulmein, then turning north to Prome, Paungde and the old capital of Mandalay. ‘At all places, the Burmese leaders uttered a note of protest against the talk of separation from India’,”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“The morning that Gandhi’s ship pulled into Rangoon on 7 March 1929, the sea was calm and the deck resounded with recitations of Tulsidas’ poetic epic ‘The Ramayana’. With the rising dawn, Gandhi could see the distant smoke billowing from the city’s factories, mills and oil refineries, and soon he made out a ‘monster cosmopolitan gathering’ of people from across the Raj jostling on the extensive waterfront jetties to greet him. ‘The crowd cried out, “Long live Mahatma Gandhi!”’ recalled a Burmese writer who was present, and ‘a young boy watching up a palm tree clapped his hands with glee, and fell down’.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“The ‘chilly effect’ of Gandhi’s comments ‘persisted throughout the Round Table Conference’ and for Jinnah it only confirmed his distrust of the Mahatma.† Henceforth, whenever Gandhi met the Muslim leadership in London, they would bring up a new and unexpected set of questions: Was India one nation or two? ‘Was Islam merely a religious minority, or were Muslims [a nation unto themselves?]’27
Sarojini Naidu had been chosen as one of only three women representatives at the Round Table Conferences, and she found the whole drama bitterly dissatisfying. ‘I have never attended anything more disappointing and dull in every way,’ she wrote to her daughters. ‘It is almost worse than the endless Unity and All-Party Conferences we have had ad nauseum in India!’ When Gandhi ‘discusses the second chamber, finance and franchise, he is less than convincing,’ she wrote. Indeed, for Sarojini, the only fun to be had was a rogue encounter with Charlie Chaplin, who she found to be ‘shy and quite charming’ and who, much to her amusement, Gandhi had ‘never heard”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“Ruttie’s suicide would be hidden for many years and only those in the Jinnahs’ inner circle were told the truth. Yet as Sarojini Naidu wrote to her daughter Padmaja:
Poor little Ruttie had taken an overdraught of veronal … But, darling you realize of course that this is not the official version … Poor mad little suffering child. Maybe [now] she’ll find the peace that she was denied – or denied herself on earth.
Jinnah’s friend Dwarkadas sat next to him at Ruttie’s funeral, and he later described the scene.
Never have I found a man so sad and bitter. He screamed his heart out … Something I saw had snapped in him. The death of his wife was not just a sad event, nor just something to be grieved over, but he took it, this act of God, as a failure and a personal defeat in his life.75
With Ruttie gone, Jinnah found solace in his still-nameless daughter, who soon took the name Dina. As a single father, he made her his primary project, moving to London and enrolling her at a new school in Sussex. By the time he returned to India, he would be a changed man.
By early 1929, with Jinnah living in Europe, Gandhi once again assumed supreme leadership of Indian politics. Looking to find a way to unite everyone, Hindu or Muslim, Bengali or Burmese, behind a single cause, he announced his intention to stage a national protest against the British Salt Act which gave the British government a monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of Indian salt.”
― Sam Dalrymple

“Sarojini Naidu was fed up with him. ‘I am really bored to tears by the caprices and vagaries, vacillation and vanities of the little man,’ she wrote to her daughters on 23 September 1931.
He does not know his own mind for three minutes consecutively!! With great difficulty I have found and officially established him in a beautiful house overlooking Hyde Park where he can see people, but some kink in his brain makes him cling to the East End to”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“Jinnah’s rise had seemed unstoppable, but in 1918 he had scandalised Bombay high society by courting Ruttie Petit, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a Parsi baronet and one of the most ‘envied debutante[s] of her generation’.20 The patriarch of the family, Sir Dinshaw Petit, happened to be a vocal supporter of interfaith marriages, believing like many liberals at the time that they would be vital in gluing India into a single nation. When forty-two-year-old Jinnah had asked to marry his teenage daughter, however, Sir Dinshaw was horrified and banned the two from meeting. Jinnah and Ruttie continued their courtship, however, and Ruttie writes that Jinnah burned ‘storming passions into the very fibre of her being’. In his presence she appeared utterly radiant: ‘like a fairy,’ wrote one observer, and two months after her birthday they eloped, with Ruttie converting to Islam the day before the wedding.21
‘Jinnah has at last plucked the blue flower of his desire,’ wrote Sarojini Naidu, who was closely following the scandal along with the rest of Bombay society.
It was all very sudden and caused terrible agitation and anger among the Parsis: but I think though the child has made far greater sacrifices than she yet realises, Jinnah is worth it all – he loves her: the one really genuine emotion of his reserved and self-centred nature and he will make her happy.22
Sarojini’s optimism proved misplaced, however. Parsi society ostracised Ruttie, and her father summoned the couple to court, alleging that Jinnah had abducted her. Here Ruttie defiantly stood up and told the judge, ‘Mr Jinnah has not abducted me; in fact I have abducted him.’23 But in the aftermath she was excommunicated from her community, banned from all Parsi social occasions and told she could never return to her childhood home.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“Outside of Congress, however, Jinnah’s political career began to decline and his relationship with Ruttie deteriorated. Depressed and alone, Ruttie sought solace in Bombay’s jazz clubs while Jinnah focused on building a political base in the Muslim League – a rival political party to the Congress. But his growing emphasis on his Muslim identity only alienated Ruttie more, and one day, when she drove to meet him at the town hall, he screamed at her for packing ham sandwiches. ‘What have you done!’ he exclaimed. ‘If my voters were to learn that I am going to eat ham sandwiches for lunch, do you think I have a ghost of a chance of being elected?’29 Ruttie distanced herself from her husband after that, and instead started experimenting with drugs and spirit communication, leading friends to worry about the number of morphine needles she left scattered around her room.
With their marriage falling apart, both Jinnah and Ruttie neglected their newborn daughter, who would remain nameless for almost six years. The ‘little baby is one of the most pathetic, heart-breaking things I have ever seen,’ wrote Sarojini’s daughter Padmaja Naidu to her sister in 1921. ‘I simply cannot understand Ruttie’s attitude – I do not blame her as most people here seem to do, but whenever I remember the dazed, scared child, like some mortally hurt animal, I come near hating Ruttie in spite of my great affection for her.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

“Racial tensions were evident from Ramnath’s first destination, the southern bazaar town of Margui, as a Burmese headmaster complained to him about the town’s Indians:
The Indians have taken away all government jobs from us … The Chettis are buying our land and houses, the Bengali Muslims have occupied all navigational jobs. The foreigners are now everywhere in our country and we are now fast becoming extinct. I am scared of foreigners. We are now trying to take Brahmadesh [Burma] out of India, and we will definitely be successful.”
― Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia