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Freedom at Midnight

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Beautifully written to make stories from around the period of independence sound like a collection of creative short stories. This sort of narrative history also contains drawbacks that limit our understanding of this important moment. Their life, their contrast way of working, their thought process and the respect they both have for each other was written down spectacularly.

None of the seven was in even the remotest way prepared for the shock they encountered as they began to turn the pages of that document.Page after page, it summarized in its dull bureaucratic jargon the appalling implications of their decision. The author however, succeeds because of the little incidents he manages to present in an engaging way.

Over four prior book collaborations, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre honed a winning formula for accessible, page-turning popular histories: focus on a narrow, dramatic moment in time, using a restricted point of view. This device frees Mountbatten and the British from the charge of poorly handling or rushing independence. On the other hand, the authors were clearly Anglophiles enamored of the last British Viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten. Book club edition, octavo hardcover (VG) in d/w (VG): all our specials have minimal description to keep listing them viable.

If you want to read a romanticised hagiography of Mountbatten, or, if I'm being charitable, a version of the liberation of India as seen through Mountbatten's eyes: read this. No one listened to his warnings; Jinnah turned a deaf ear, Nehru-Patel duo were eager to see British go and rule an independent country; but all of them were in for a rude shock when rioting and killing on a large scale ensued as soon as Partition and independence were formally announced. The obvious racial undertone gets a new height when the authors bring forth idiotic and almost dead Aryan invasion theory to explain why Punjabis are a "marshal" race, as opposed to the "small and dark Bengalis" who are "mere Asiatics. I am happy at the generation I am living in, but after reading this book, it made me wonder whether I have missed the most epoch making time of my country, well any country for that matter. If you watch the movie Gandhi, and read this book, you have pretty much got the history of the time covered and a good understanding of the politics of the time.

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