Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia

Joined in conversation with:
Sara Kazmi (Dept of English, Penn)
Introduction by incoming CASI Director:
Gareth Nellis (Political Science Department, Penn)

In partnership with the Department of South Asia Studies and the Penn Libraries Zilberman Family Center for Global Collections

Sam Dalrymple is 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 British Film Institute (BFI) the same year. 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. In 2025, Travel & Leisure named him “Champion of the Travel Narrative.” His debut book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins & Harper Collins India; June 2025; WW Norton & Company, February 2026) was an International Bestseller, reaching #1 in India and was a “Best Book of 2025” for the Financial Times, The Week, Spectator, BBC History Magazine, NPR, History Today and Daunts.

Sarah Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of English at Penn with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation.

Gareth Nellis will be CASI's new permanent Director as of July 1, 2026. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Political Science at Penn. Professor Nellis specializes in comparative politics, South Asia, and intergroup relations, examining how democratic institutions accommodate social diversity and internal mobility. He joins the Penn community after spending the past seven years at the University of California, San Diego, during which time he was a 2021-22 CASI Non-Resident Scholar.

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Host or Publisher Center for the Advanced Study of India (CASI) at the University of Pennsylvania