New Delhi, Aug. 15 -- As India celebrates another Independence Day today, it is important to remember that August 14 and 15 also mark the division of British India into the dominions of India and Pakistan. The independent countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, a part of the subcontinent for centuries, were also ruled by the British as part of a united India.

Yet most Indians do not know about how the lands that make up the Pakistani provinces of Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as well as the eight divisions of Bangladesh came under the British yoke.

Particularly interesting is the story of the British conquest of Sindh in the 1840s. The ancient land, through which the Indus flows and which is bounded by the Arabian Sea ...