I just found this thread now, so I hope alright if I bump it.
Why did the British partition India the way they did? It seems like if the Brits wanted something quick and easy, they would have gone with ethnicity...
You are assuming it Britain wanted to partition that way rather than partition being partly decided by the flow of events - "Divide and Rule" was more "We Divide and You Rule" as one commentator put it. As for ethnicity, I doubt it would have been 'quick and easy' as this map of languages spoken in the modern Republic of India demonstrates (a proxy of ethnicity... kind of):
Oh yeah, of course. I guess I figured the Brits would have just wanted to slice it up by ethnicity considering the relevance of that concept to Western European nation-states.
