Product Description

The electrifying story of India's struggle for independence, told in this classic account (first published in 1975) by two fine journalists who conducted hundreds of interviews with nearly all the surviving participants -- from Mountbatten to the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi. On 14 August 1947 one-fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen. But 400 million people were to find that the immediate price of freedom was partition and war, riot and murder. In this superb reconstruction, Collins and Lapierre recount the eclipse of the fabled British Raj and examine the roles enacted by, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Mountbatten in its violent transformation into the new India and Pakistan. 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 Moselms 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73583 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

About the Author
The enormous success of the international writing partnership of Collins and Lapierre is based on the phenomenal non-fiction bestsellers OR I'LL DRESS YOU IN MOURNING, IS PARIS BURNING? and O JERUSALEM! More recently Lapierre wrote CITY OF JOY (about Calcutta) and Larry Collins has written a number of thrillers published by HarperCollins (FALL FROM GRACE, MAZE and BLACK EAGLES). Lapierre is French, Collins American.

Customer Reviews

How balanced?
A fantastic read - moving, with the kind of sweeping coherent narrative worthy of a great fictional author. And maybe there's the rub: it has been criticised (I think with some justification) with being pro-British, and building the story from the elegiac portrayal of a fading empire whose greatness once...etc etc- and perhaps because of relying too heavily on Mountbatten as a source. So read it - but maybe read Liberty or Death by Patrick French as well! In that version of the independence struggle, the British and - heresy in India, I know - Gandhi come in for heavy criticism.

Not at all a book for intelligent or informed readers
I have to disagree with the other reviewers on this one, I'm afraid ... this book does not at all present a balanced picture of the events surrounding the independence and partition of India ... much more than that, it is an attempted apology for the British role in that process & the authors' sycophancy to Mountbatten is frankly distasteful (they even mention that after reading this book, he asked them to be his biographers!! Say no more). That may be their view, which is fair enough, but they barely present, discuss, analyse or rebutt (more credible) opposing views. More dangerously in a work of popular history, it portrays the British Raj as an age of untarnished glory, with the prose practically dripping with the authors' romanticisation of the era. That may have been the experience of the tens of thousands Brits ruling India, but it obviously was not the much harsher historical reality of the hundreds of millions of exploited Indians or they clearly would not have been agitating for independece. Worse, this is a history-by-personality, embarrassingly light on meaningful or robust analysis of broader economic and social reasons for change ... and even as history-by-personality, it is one dimensional and full of caricatures. Mountbatten is always "dashing", the masses "unruly", Jinnah "cold and austere", etc etc. A very superficial and unobjective book, which is disappointing but probably explains why it sold so many copies. There is not enough space to set out the numerous misconceptions in the book, suffice to say, don't let this be your only source.

A very well presented perspective
This book is an incredible read. It is a book that records history and tries to understand the idealogies and the struggles of British Raj and the transition from colonialism to independence in the Indian subcontinent.

This book, however, is naturally biased towards British views - but clearly, the authors seek to understand the Indian view and present it in a very readable and interesting way.

I highly recommend this book to people interested in Indian studies or people who are generally drawn by India. 'Freedom at Midnight' provides a unique and rare colection of things you always wanted to know more about.