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Freedom at Midnight by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins: book review



Freedom atMidnight (1990, this edition 2012) is an epic 726 page historical tome. At midnight on 14 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru announced India’s independence from British rule. It marked the beginning of the birth of the second most populous nation of 400 million people, and the Partition – the split that created India and Pakistan (East and West) – with East Pakistan eventually becoming Bangladesh in 1971. But it was no easy road to independence.

The book commences with the authors interviewing Lord Louis Mountbatten, Admiral of the Fleet, Earl of Burma, and the last Viceroy of India, in 1970 in England, “the last living protagonist of this classical tragedy” and nine years before he was assassinated in Ireland. The authors explain how they prepared their research so that they could commence writing from June 1974.

There are four main protagonists in this tragedy: England’s Lord Louis Mountbatten, the leader of the All-India Muslim League and lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, president of the Indian National Congress and barrister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indian Hindu Mohandas Karamchand ‘Mahatma’ (Geat Soul) Gandhi.

The real beginning of the book commences on January 1, 1947, in London at a time of the British Empire and the British Raj. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was no longer in power. PM Clement Attlee of the ruling Labour Party met with 46-year-old Mountbatten to discuss India. There had been much debate about India’s independence and no one was in agreeance. At the same time in India, Gandhi was fighting for independence – through non-violent means – and in discussions with Nehru. Had Mountbatten known that Jinnah was diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) and had six months to live, history may have been very different. But no one knew. And Jinnah wanted consideration for India’s 100 million Muslims. 

On June 3, 1947, the four leaders met in the New Delhi studio of the All India Radio and formally announced their agreement to “divide the sub-continent into two separate, sovereign nations.” Mountbatten placed a 34-page single-spaced document in front of them, called The Administrative Consequences of Partition (referred to as the Mountbatten Plan). It outlined the consequences of cash, assets, social services, railways, infrastructure, prisoners, and places of significance such as the Taj Mahal. All three non-British leaders had reservations about the plan: Nehru was reticent, Jinnah nodded begrudgingly, and Gandhi was silent. Jinnah would become the first Governor-General of Pakistan and Nehru would become the first Prime Minister of India. Mountbatten became known as the man who divided India.

Mountbatten announced the date of implementation, without consultation: the last strike of midnight that heralds the commencement of August 15,1947. When astrologers read their charts, they proclaimed the date “so inauspicious that India would be better advised to tolerate the British one day longer rather than risk eternal damnation.” What followed was the “most complex divorce in history.” “Some of the bitterest arguments came over the books in India’s libraries … Dictionaries were ripped in half with A to K going to India, the rest to Pakistan … Some of those supposedly intelligent men actually came to blows arguing over which dominion had a greater natural interest in Alice in Wonderland and Wuthering Heights.”

No one could foresee the magnitude of the decisions. No one could foresee the magnitude of the slaughter after Partition and the hundreds of thousands of lives lost. What followed next was “the greatest migration in history.” Individuals could choose to stay in India or to migrate to the Punjab and Bengal regions now known as West and East Pakistan. The decision was not easy. Even brothers went their different ways.

By October 1947, the war for Kashmir had begun. Kashmir’s Hindu Maharaja Hara Singh wanted independence, and Mountbatten said that it was not an option. Hara Singh had to choose to accede his principality to India or to Pakistan. Kashmiris have not, to this day, had their decision officially sanctified. Pakistan and Indian soldiers converged on the region in 1947 and have remained there ever since.

The book concludes with Gandhi. The 78-year-old Gandhi commenced a hunger strike in January 1948 to demand that India make the payment of 550 million rupees to Pakistan as part of the Partition agreement – for unity’s sake. India was withholding the fund in a bid for Kashmir. His ailing health saved Pakistan from bankruptcy. For this Gandhi was assassinated “which ended the insensate communal killing of neighbour by neighbour which had followed Partition.”

The authors have made an epic attempt to recount the lead-up to the historic Partition and its consequences – the decisions of the separation of land and assets, where people were on the eve of Partition and what they were doing and thinking (not just the key leaders, but accounts of everyday Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims, as well as British expatriates) – and how to keep order after midnight. The authors state the failure of leaders to keep order and mitigate the slaughter “would baffle historians and focus a wave of criticism on India’s last Viceroy” – Lord Louis Mountbatten.








MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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