Freedom at Midnight

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He gets an outside perspective of India, allowing him to criticise without having to feel obligated to justify any act or man. This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment. This book changed all my pre-received perceptions, ideas and thoughts about the Indian Independence and the Partition which I have been thinking was the truth all this time.

I would recommend this book to all the Indians and Pakistanis to know about our shared emotional history. He developed interests in travelling, writing and cars and later traveled across the United States as a young man. Dealing with any of the monumental labors of the Collins‐Lapierre firm is a singular difficulty: they are at the same time so very good and so very had.They were part of a campaign of psychological warfare being conducted by the Moslem League to create panic among Sikhs and Hindus. However the author cleverly forgets how they flared the differences between religions in India when it suited them. Ahead of them lay a problem of a scope and on a scale no people had ever encountered before, a problem vast enough to beggar the most vivid imagination.

The composition of this book is such that you won't find it difficult to read through the pages, and the authors have weaved it with simple, yet strong literature. Several years later they decided to join forces to tell a big story which would appeal to both French and anglophone audiences. This book brought many incidents which have been buried deeply behind the pages of history into light. Even after 60 odd years, the recollection of some of the events is truly sickening, even to those of my generation who have never experienced the anguish the men and women at that time suffered. Above all, it renders one of the bloodiest mismanagements in the history of mankind in such sepia-tinted prose that things look really romantic, or atmost tragic.Authors proudly mention Mountbatten's link to the Czars, one of the worst dictators in the history of the world, to establish his credibility. This is the India of Jawaharlal Nehru, heart-broken by the tragedy of the country’s division; of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Moslem who drank, ate pork and rarely entered a mosque, yet led 45 million Muslims to nationhood; of Gandhi, who stirred a subcontinent without raising his voice; of the last viceroy, Mountbatten, beseeched by the leaders of an independent India to take back the powers he’d just passed to them. They have had the greatest cooperation from the personal records of one of the few major survivors of that time. Oh the good old days, when he would wage his war against the Nazis to free Germans, while he kept the Indian masses enslaved.

But sadly, this is a book that tries to justify Britain's occupancy of India, trying to put with an utmost subtlety that the Britishers had no bad intentions and they did nothing but help India grow and become a better nation. If two brothers were living together in the same house and wanted to separate and live in two different houses, would you object? After one year in a tank regiment, he was transferred to SHAPE headquarters to serve as an interpreter.

Here is the Prime Minister Clement Attlee meeting the coming Viceroy Mountbatten: “With his sallow complexion his indifferently trimmed mustache, his shapeless tweed suits, which seemed blissfully ignorant of a pressing iron's caress, the man waiting for Mountbatten exuded in his demeanour something of that gray and dreary city. They had done so with the simple objective of ensuring that the place they leave remain perpetually cancerous.

Above all, it keeps on parroting that the a power that had ruled India in all senses had no idea what kind of fate was going to befall upon the millions of people who had only one stake in this affair— staying alive! It had epitomized the Victorian ideal of India better than anything else -dark, plucky soldiers staunchly loyal to their distant empress, led by doughty young Englishmen, straight arrows all, steady under the Pathans’ fire, good at games, stern but devoted fathers to their men, chaps who could hold their liquor in the mess.

Jinnah does come off rather badly, but again, access to archival material was somewhat limited when the authors were penning this account, Jinnah himself was dead (in 1948), and his personality meant that most of his thoughts were carried to the grave. The most astounding achievement of this book is that it rips out the aura of myths that have agglomerated around our political figures associated with the freedom movement, and humanizes each and every one of them, while being totally neutral, and being absolutely honest with the facts. These cookies allow us to count visits and traffic sources so we can measure and improve the performance of our site.