Freedom at Midnight

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Dominique Lapierre was born in Châtelaillon-Plage, Charente-Maritime, France. At the age of thirteen, he travelled to America with his father who was a diplomat (Consul General of France). He attended the Jesuit school in New Orleans and became a paper boy for the "New Orleans Item". He developed interests in travelling, writing and cars and later traveled across the United States as a young man. It is incredibly callous in its complete disregard of misfortune that fell upon Hindus of Eastern Bengal. In reality, it was a crime. In reality, the perpetrators have still not been punished. In reality, millions of women and children are yet to be avenged. As partition approaches, various groups take extreme measures to ethnically cleanse their area. There are bad guys on every side. Criminal gangs also find it useful to scare their competition out of the territory. Warning—very graphic! The book looks at events through the eyes of Lord Mountbatten,India's last viceroy.He is the good guy as far as the authors are concerned,and "must save India from itself."

This book is imo, a must read for each and every Indian and Pakistani to actually understand in detail what exactly happened during those tumultuous times in an unbiased manner through the eyes of the person who was at its epicentre. Perspective The perspective of this book is both fascinating and appalling. The author does not hesitate to criticise the Maharajas of India and Indian national leaders. However he also often paints Mountbattion in a favourable light. The one Englishman who thought only the good of India and guided her journey. Which is anything but true. Perhaps because Mountbatton is one of the main source of this book, he has attained a status of a man who made everything possible without making any mistakes.There is no single passage in this profoundly researched book that one could actually fault. Having been there most of the time in question and having assisted at most of the encounters, I can vouch for the accuracy of its general mood. It is a work of scholarship, of investigation, research and of significance.” However the author does make several incorrect claims. He makes references to two nation theory which has already been set aside as inaccurate. The British also come off as a great set of people. A sane voice amidst the chaos of religious clashes. However the author cleverly forgets how they flared the differences between religions in India when it suited them. The partition of Bengal, the famine of Bengal hardly make an appearance. He also makes references to the 'Aryan Invasion Theory' which has been proven incorrect more than once. Three centuries of ruling India had its impact on the men and women who came to work and rule. The authors point out that getting young men to come to the “Jewel in the Crown” to make a name or a fortune was easy before WWI and hard after:

This is a highly readable look at one pivotal year in the history of India: 1947, the year that marked the end of British rule and the partition of the subcontinent into two new nations, India and Pakistan. As an introduction to the topic it is hard to beat, but readers need to be aware of several limitations: In 1967, they co-authored Or I'll Dress you in Mourning about the Spanish bullfighter Manuel Benítez El Cordobés. The massacre of 680,000 members of that race that God had destined to govern and subdue in the trenches of World War I wrote an end to the legend of a certain India. A whole generation of young men who might have patrolled the Frontier, administered the lonely districts or galloped their polo ponies down the long maidans was left behind in Flanders fields.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!

The India represented by those men and women would be a nation of 275 million Hindus (70 million of them, a population almost twice the size of France, Untouchables); 50 million Moslems; seven million Christians; six million Sikhs; 100,000 Parsis; and 24,000 Jews, whose forebears had fled the destruction of Solomon’s Temple during the Babylonian exile. At one point, the book talks of "millions of cattle who ate all the food that could have used to feed the Indian masses" but ignorantly decides to skip the tale of the famines caused by the Raj, that killed more Indians than Jews killed by Hitler.The author however, succeeds because of the little incidents he manages to present in an engaging way. For example, how the line of partition was actually drawn and by whom. I can say with utmost certainty that no text book contains this information and nor will it. When reading about these little things, one begins to understand more about the partition than what is generally understood.