Sam Dalrymple




SAM DALRYMPLE is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian. His debut book, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins UK/ Harper Collins India/ W.W. Norton US), was an International Bestseller and reached #1 in India. It was named a Best Book of 2025 by the Financial Times, NPR, The Spectator, BBC History Magazine, History Today, The Week and Daunt’s, and is being translated into five languages. 

It was shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize, the 2026 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, the 2025 Eastern Eye Award for History, the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman 2025 for Best Debut and the Atta Galatta 2025 Non Fiction Prize, and longlisted for the Kamala Chattopadhyay NIF Prize 2026, Kalinga Literary Prize 2026, the RC Majumdar Prize 2026, the Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan Award 2026 and the VoW English Book Awards 2026.

Sam writes the history Substack Travels of Samwise, and guest-edited the MARG volume Beyond the Mughal Arch (2026). His writing has appeared in TIME, the New York Times, The Spectator, Conde Nast Traveller, Tatler and Architectural Digest. Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. He also leads heritage tours across India, Pakistan and Turkey with Sampan Travel, Steppes Travel, Banyan Tours and Chase Travel, and speaks regularly on empire, borders and partition.

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. In 2018 he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative reconnecting 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 the Smithsonian, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Asian Art Museum and the Partition Museum, with support from the British Council, Australia Council for the Arts and the Ford Foundation.


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Bio
 Shattered Lands
Project Dastaan
Architectural Digest
Child of Empire
Lost Migrations
Case Studies

Project Dastaan




In 2018, I cofounded Project Dastaan (داستان‎/दास्तान: “Story”), a peace building venture which reconnects individuals displaced in the 1947 Partition of India, the largest forced migration in history, to their ancestral villages through VR. It is funded by the National Geographic Exploration Society, the Catchlight Foundation and various fundraising events. It is endorsed by Malala Yousafzai, Gabo Arora (UNVR) and Rotary Action Group for Peace

We would interview Partition survivors in one country and then send out a team in the other to track down their ancestral homes, communities, mosques, mandirs and gurudwaras. As a Scot raised in Delhi, I was able to be the go-between for the countries. We managed to do this for about thirty people.

Speak to those who lived through these great ruptures and they paint a complex picture of loss, not only of a home, but language, deep friendships, divided families, land. A whole generation still feel strong ties to the place they left. After seventy-five years there is still no shared understanding of the profound collective loss for them and subsequent generations in the Indian subcontinent and diaspora. Many families we interviewed were shocked to realise that ‘the other side’ experienced exactly the same as their own families.



In 2020, I personally led the Project Dastaan Kickstarter, raising $29,000 from 464 backers over the course of a month, and overseeing a team of 38 volunteers across the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan and the United States. My cofounder Sparsh Ahuja, was a recipient of the San-Francisco based CatchLight Fellowship in 2018 in order to seed fund the project. The Project was also accepted onto Kaleidoscope VR's DevLab Accelerator in 2020 and is part of the UK-based National Partition Commemoration Project, which launched the 'South Asian Heritage Month' Campaign at British Parliament in 2018. In 2022, co-founder Saadia Gardezi was awarded a National Lottery Project Grant by Arts Council England to fund a multi-venue tour across the UK in commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of partition.

Lobbying at British Parliament for Partition’s inclusion on the British Curriculum


Fellowships/Grants/Awards
UK Research Institute/Arts and Humanities Research Council - Child of Empire Tour - with SOAS, 2022
Unity for Humanity - Accessibility Stipend, Child of Empire at Sundance, 2022
Webby Awards - “Best VR Video” Nominee, 2020
Arts Council England/Digital Catapult/StoryFutures Academy - Creative XR Cohort III, 2020
British Film Institute/Doc Society - Made of Truth Short Grant, 2020
British Council - Digital Collaborations Grant, 2020

In the Media
The New Yorker - Seventy-five Years After Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative?, Dec 2022
The BBC - My journey to the ‘place no-one spoke of’, Aug 2022
National Geographic - 75 years later, survivors of India’s violent partition return home—virtually, Aug 2022
The Economist - A virtual-reality film revisits the partition of British India, Feb 2022
The Hindu - Flashback 75: Partition in virtual reality in Child of Empire, Jan 2022
No Proscenium - Review, Child of Empire, Sundance New Frontier Diares, Jan 2022
The BBC - VR helps Indians and Pakistanis visit their lost homes, Aug 2021
The Quint - Taking India-Pakistan Partition Witnesses Back Home Through VR, Aug 2021
TIME - How a Refugee Revisited His Birth Village During the Pandemic—After 73 Years Away, Dec 2020
Reuters - Far from home, refugees build digital heritage with virtual reality, Sep 2020
Scroll - After seven decades, the children of Partition are going back home through virtual reality, Aug 2020
Nikkei - Virtual reality reconnects casualties of Partition with ancestral homes, Jan 2020
Dawn - Project Dastaan takes partition witnesses back home, Aug 2019
Elle - The initiative reconnecting survivors of Partition with the homes they left behind, Dec 2018


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