If history is destined to be revisited, the young might be best placed to do so. “Our idea of undivided India is basically wrong,” says Sam Dalrymple, 28, as we sit chatting about his upcoming book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia in a friend’s drawing room in Defence Colony, Delhi. He shows me a map on his phone. “If you look at what India constituted in the 1920s, it’s far vaster than India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The ‘Indian empire’, as it was called, extended as far east as what’s now Myanmar and as far west as what’s now Aden in southern Yemen... It included places like Dubai, which were basically princely states.” 

The story of why Dubai got away, or how Burma was separated, he says, is not something that ever comes into the conversation when you hear about partitions. And yet these divisions have led to major conflicts in the region, such as the Rohingya crisis, which you can trace to the partition of Burma.