The Interview : Sam Dalrymple

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Sam Dalrymple, a Delhi-raised Scottish historian and award-winning filmmaker. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar, and also studied at the University of Isfahan and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad in Iran. He has worked across South and Central Asia, including stints with Turquoise Mountain in Kabul, and with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Hunza and Lahore. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and received the inaugural XR History Award from the Körber-Stiftung Foundation. His animated series Lost Migrations sold out at the BFI the same year. Dastaan’s work has been exhibited at leading institutions including the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

Dalrymple’s writing has appeared in the New York Times and The Spectator, and his work has been featured in TIME, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He is a columnist for Architectural Digest, and in 2025, Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. He runs the history Substack @travelsofsamwise. 

His recently released best-selling book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, has been making waves and was shortlisted for the 2025 Eastern Eye Award for History.

Thank you Sam for talking with The Wise Owl.

RS: In Shattered Lands, you frame five partitions not as isolated ruptures but as interconnected consequences of imperial disintegration. What made you choose this approach—and did anything surprise you when you started connecting the dots between these seemingly separate events?

SD: The conventional narrative often treats 1947 as a unique tragedy. But once I began tracing the deeper arc of imperial withdrawal, I noticed echoes - Burma’s separation in 1937, the carving away of the Gulf protectorates, even the final rupture in East Pakistan in 1971. Each one influenced the other like a set of dominoes. Indeed when coming up with the idea of Pakistan, Rahmat Ali Chaudhury explicitly references Burma’s separation as precedent for carving new nations out of the Raj. 

What surprised me most was how intimately connected the people involved were - officials who once served in Rangoon would later show up again in Karachi. Refugees from Burma also witnessing the 1947 partition of Punjab. Dhirubhai Ambani protesting the Nawab of Junagadh, and later becoming a crucial eyewitness to the rise of Arab nationalism in Aden. These stories were all part of one unravelling.

RS: You’ve worked with oral histories, virtual reality, and textual archives—each with its own epistemological limitations. How do you reconcile these disparate modes of storytelling, and in your view what truths do lived memories offer that official records often overlook or suppress?

SD: Each source offers a different kind of truth. Archives give you structure, dates, and decisions. But oral histories give you texture, emotion, memory. What lived memories reveal is the emotional architecture of history - the fear of a child crossing a border, the silence around a lost home, the unspoken grief that isn’t in any file. They complicate the clean lines of nation-states and reveal the messiness of identity, love, and longing that bureaucracies rarely capture. Both are hugely important as sources, and serve historians in different ways.

​

RS: Language seems to play a huge role in Shattered Lands—not just as a means of communication, but as a carrier of identity, loss, and belonging. How did working across so many languages shape the way you told this story?

SD: Sources in different languages often tell you different things. Konyak sources, for example, often argue that the India-Burma border was created in the 1960s. English language sources, however, show it was created in 1937. Yet the fact that locals along the borderlands only began to EXPERIENCE the border in the 1960s is fascinating in and of itself.

​

RS: Partition has often been historicised through a nationalist lens. The focus of your book, however, is on emphasising human entanglements across religions, regions, and ideologies. How did you pierce the rigid framework of historicised accounts? Did you at any time during your research feel the need to rework your assumptions?

SD: Absolutely. I think this is clearest in the story of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Indian nationalist histories treat him as a communal anti-Hindu villain, whilst Pakistani nationalist histories often treat him as a demure perfect Muslim. Yet read any sources from the 1920s and you'll discover a man who had an interfaith marriage, who drank whiskey, ate pork, and was considered the greatest ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His change in the course of the 1930s into the founder of Pakistan is a fascinating one, that challenged so many of the assumptions that I previously had about the man. 

​

RS: Your work with Project Dastaan uses VR to simulate displacement and return. In what ways does immersive storytelling bridge intergenerational trauma? Do you think it is always cathartic or do you feel it might carry with it the risk of re-traumatising or simplifying lived pain?

SD: It’s a delicate balance. For many, seeing their childhood home, even virtually, was profoundly healing. It allowed a conversation with the past that had been locked away for decades. But Immersive storytelling can never substitute for the real loss. It creates a liminal space where dialogue becomes possible, where grandchildren can learn about what their grandparents endured, and about their family’s origins. But the key is approaching it with care, listening first, and never assuming one narrative fits all.

​

RS: You describe borders as being drawn with "ink and fire” (a very evocative phrase). In your view, were these partitions the result of calculated statecraft, administrative hubris, or something far more chaotic and intimate?

SD: A mix of all three. There were certainly cold calculations - imperial strategies, oil interests, geopolitical chess moves. But there was also hubris: a belief that borders could be drawn on maps without reckoning with the lives they sliced through.

And then there was miscommunication and personal vendettas. So much of the story of partition can only be understood through the personal animosity between Gandhi and Jinnah.

At the same time, each border was experienced in so many ways, through friendships breaking, families splitting, names being changed, gods being left behind. 

RS: You’ve spent time across India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Did being in those places change the way you understood partition—not just as a historical event, but something still alive in how people see each other and themselves today?

SD: Absolutely. In Lahore, I saw temples that had once welcomed Gujarati traders. In Murshidabad you can visit one of Bengal's great Muslim cities, now stranded in India rather than Bangladesh. Being on the ground made me realise how artificial these borders are, and yet how powerfully they shape lives. The legacy of partition is psychological, linguistic and cultural, and it continues to evolve.

RS: Even though Shattered Lands deals with the past, it feels incredibly relevant today—with borders hardening, wars erupting and people still being displaced. What do you hope readers will take away from the book, especially in the context of our current world?

SD: I hope readers see how arbitrary so many of these borders really are. And that partition continues to play out in politics today, whether it’s refugee crises, rising ethno-nationalism, or gated identities. But I also hope they see the ties that once connected so many people together. 

Thank you so much, Sam, for taking time out of your packed schedule to speak with The Wise Owl. We wish you continued success in all your creative ventures and deeply commend your efforts with Project Dastaan to reconnect those displaced and scarred by partition. We hope your work will continue to inspire healing and dialogue across borders.