Freedom at Midnight

This book is an account of the year 1947 in context to the freedom of India from the British Raj. It opens on New Year's Day, 1947, London and takes the reader on a journey of significant events that lead to the independence of India. On the way, the reader is introduced to many brilliant characters who shaped up the history in that part of the world and have since left their mark that is still evident. The decisions made by these people defined the future of millions of people.

Freedom at Midnight is an intimate account of the reasoning of these historical figures that lead to the independence and division of India. Why did Prime Minister Clement Atlee who took office dedicated to break the Empire apart choose Louis Mountbatten, a member of the royal family to be the last viceroy of India? Why was he the man to administer India's freedom operation?

This book is one of the most intimate accounts of the most venerated figures in the world's history, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi aka Mahatma Gandhi. His approach, position, attitude towards the British Raj, the Indian Congress, the political and social blueprint that he dreamed of the Independent India. And vice-versa. As the book flows like an epic, it gives detailed account of final days of Gandhi and who, why and how of the assassination of this revered leader. The reader is also introduced to Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

What happened to the Maharajas, the palaces, the tigers, the jewels and the harems? What lead to the demise of fantastic royalty in India? The authors have devoted a whole chapter to recounting the opulence enjoyed by the Maharajas and their magnificent indulgences.

How was the line drawn that divided the nation? Who initiated the idea and why was the idea initiated? Collins and Lapierre show poignant picture of the greatest migration in history. The religious division left an estimated 250,000-500,000 people dead.

One of the unsolved matter since than that still afflicts both nations (India and Pakistan) and have since lead to three wars, Kashmir, is devoted a whole chapter. The valley that was once described as "heaven on earth" by the last Mogul Emperor of India today is contradicting the emperor's statement in every way possible. This book discloses the history behind the conflict.

One of the most appealing qualities in the writing of the authors was their effort into giving some personal accounts into the lives of the common people. I recommend this book to anyone who is a student of world history and precisely history of India. This book takes the reader through the year that lead to the birth of three nations, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.


Decent Introduction to the History of the Subcontinent   May 10, 2002
givbatam3 (REHOVOT Israel)
36 out of 51 found this review helpful

I would recommend this book to someone who has only a limited knowledge of the history of the British Indian Empire and the subsequent partition which created the modern nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The book gives an overview of the history of the British Raj and the subsequent partition but lacks balance. As other reviewers have pointed out, the book tends to idealize Gandhi (although it does point out how many of his followers ended up distancing themselves from him due to his various personal quirks and bizarre utopian economic and industrial schemes), as well as Nehru and the Congress Party and, on the other hand, demonizes Jinnah and the Muslim League. This book repeats the claim that the demand from Jinnah for partition was only a personal crusade of his and had people known he was dying of lung disease they would have waited for him to leave the scene and other, more "moderate" Muslim leaders would have stepped forward and agreed to remain in a united India. Another book I have read, "End of Empire", points out that in a conference held after the end of World War II, Jinnah agreed to accept loosely federated united Indian state but the Congress party rejected the proposal so it is incorrect to say the the "blame" for partition is solely Jinnah's. Jinnah was a totally unreligious Muslim who was an early member of the Congress party and believed in Hindu-Muslim cooperation but he opposed Gandhi's religiously-based civil disobedience campaign, fearing correctly that it would lead to violence and sectarianism. In the provinicial governments set up after the Indian elections held in 1937 the Congress party often refused to share power with Muslims in provinces where Hindus were the majority. This led Jinnah to the conclusion that Indian must be partitioned, a policy he opposed when it was first proposed in the early 1930's. In any event, the rise of Muslim conciousness around the world in the post-War era and its increasing rejection of secular politcs would have almost certainly lead to turmoil in the heavily Muslim parts of a united India as we see happening in Kashmir.

Similarly, the hypocrisy of Gandhi and Nehru are glossed over in the book. Gandhi, who demanded from his people that they make sacrifices in order to push the British out of India, turns around and tells the Jews who were being murdered by the Nazis and the Ethiopians being invaded by the Italians to passively accept their fate. Gandhi had the good fortune to confront the basically civilized and democratic British but he had no antidote to genocidal Fascism. Similarly Nehru, who preached passive resistance to the British had no problem sending the Indian Army into Portuguese-controlled Goa when he saw that Gandhi's way was not working fast enough.

Still, fairness requires stating that when all is said and done, when we compare modern India with the other giant nations, China and Russia, India, with all its flaws, has more or less remained a democracy and did not end up carrying out mass terror against its population as the other two did, so this speaks well for the country that Gandhi inspired and Nehru lead for so many years. This book gives the reader much of the background needed to understand this.


A must read for every Indian or anyone interested in India.   September 15, 1999
uday@yours.com (Bombay, India)
14 out of 14 found this review helpful

History has never been so intriguing. Being an Indian I read the book from an Indian standpoint and for me it was an incredible experience. Having grown up in India I have been exposed to a lot of material about Independence but none have aroused such thought as "Freedom at Midnight". A masterfully written, superbly researched and above all a very human account of what happenned in that period of Indian History. Mountbatten comes across as the hero of India and though Gandhi is shown to be more human than saint his actions were definitely that of a Mahatma. This book gave me a better understanding of my own country. A must read for every Indian or anyone who is interested in India.


Good read as fiction, very poorly researched   August 12, 2004
Chengiz (NY)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

Collins and Lapierre are among the most overrated historical writers of all time. The writing of "Freedom at Midnight" is good and the text is interesting, and in my opinion they would do quite well writing fiction. One would think given the pages and pages of references at the back that this is a thoroughly researched book, but this is a good instance of how statistics can lie.

Here are some of the big errors I found in the book:

1. The biggest whopper is that Messrs. Godse and Sawarkar enjoyed a homosexual relationship. Nobody who knows even an iota of the facts from any other sources will believe this -- all I could do was shake my head and smile at this preposterous claim, which incidentally does not even provide a reference.

2. The life of the maharajas chapter - all lies. The reference for this whole chapter is a book written by an Englishman who wanted to impress people back home. It is akin to claiming a "Wild West" account as fact.

3. There is no RSSS. The organization is RSS, Swayamsevak is one word. This just smacks of poor research. I doubt the writers have even looked at the covers of some of the books they have claimed as references.

4. Many place and people names are badly misspelled. There is no Pavel in Bombay for instance. The place name is Parel, and it is not a high income locality. In fact, it has a huge factory workers' colony.

I found several more, and am sure still many more exist in the book -- I am just a typical Indian, no historian or anything like that. Although this book is very interesting, I wish I had not read it and would not recommend it to anyone who wants genuine knowledge about India. Whatever I knew of the book's subject is now mixed up with the book's lies, so I don't even know what is true or not anymore. Surely, false information is worse than no information at all.


Outstanding storytelling   May 8, 2005
Rishabh Jhunjhunwala (Seattle, WA, USA)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

Freedom At Midnight is one of my favorite books of all time. The way it tells the story of the last few crucial pre-indepence years of the Indian struggle is admirable - it provides huge amounts of information, different viewpoints, and popular notions at the time all without making the whole affair a dry history lesson. It's gripping as any bestselling novel.

Some of the flaws of the book include an overt tendency to canonize Gandhi, to mention startling facts in a kind of look-this-is-so-exotic way without much exploration into their causes, and other simplistic approaches. For a book that otherwise provides fascinating insights into Gandhi, there needed to be much more information about and analysis of the lesser known aspects of his life - like his experiments with celibacy, and his occasional violation of vows. The British are portrayed too tamely and sympathetically and their atrocities (like Kalapani) are not recorded. The canvass of the book is too large to do justice to many events.

The authors freely crowd the commentary with their own takes on the issues, which makes the telling all the more interesting. Gandhi, much more than most other characters in the novel, is intimately presented to the reader, so much so that the book becomes a tearjerker when describing Gandhi's plight. And, to be honest, the simplistic startling facts do tend to be fascinating.

The storytelling ability of the authors is the highlight of the work. At many points, the book becomes impossible to put back down, much to the detriment of other engagements (the book took up 3 or 4 precious hours on the eve of the most important exam of my life).

A fascinating, commendable work.