This JCB Prize for Literature long-listed gem is an unapologetic exploration of a city in transition, and its characters navigating love, loss, and societal upheavals. Even though the stone has been turned a hundred times before, Collins‐Lapierre will earnestly turn it again, revealing some small adverbial addendum to the vast historical tapestry, which is a phrase I offer them for their next adventure. Well, be rest assured that this book will end up ripping out each of those notions and burning them to cinders.

Freedom at Midnight is a panoramic spectacular of a book that reads more like sensational fiction than like history, even though it is all true…. You are bound to bow in humility and fall in love with this mahatma, whether you have read good or bad or nothing about him before. One the one hand, it will give the reader a profound sense of the tragedy of Indian partition upon independence in 1947. The 30 hours of interviews and thousands of pages of private diaries and notes the authors sifted through give this history a special inside look as seen by the man who, more than anyone, shaped the final outcome. On 14 August 1947 one-fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen.

A book written only to make you like the British Raj, making Mountbatten the hero of all this, being equally praised by the British and Indians. He also makes references to the 'Aryan Invasion Theory' which has been proven incorrect more than once. Gandhi's India between the conception of this book and its birth would have rocked even the most mature political society, and India's was always fragile and insecure. Murder and arson were so senseless, so chaotic in nature that to one British police officer in Lahore it seemed “like a city committing suicide. The way they have covered the whole period of Independence in over 650 pages is commendable, considering the fact that they have covered almost all the important events.

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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. Page after page, it summarized in its dull bureaucratic jargon the appalling implications of their decision. The circumcised penises of their Moslem male victims were hacked off and stuffed into their mouths or into the mouths of murdered Moslem women. The book provides a detailed account of the last year of the British Raj; the reactions of princely states towards independence, including descriptions of the colourful and extravagant lifestyles of the Indian princes; the partition of British India (into India and Pakistan) on religious grounds; and the bloodshed that followed.

Because of these limitations this book is a place to start, not the place to stop in any serious study of South Asia, but reviewers who have suggested that the authors are apologists for the British are dead wrong. No part of this Blog can be reproduced in any manner without prior permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non commercial uses permitted by copyright law. When reading about these little things, one begins to understand more about the partition than what is generally understood. My distaste for this book notwithstanding,I acknowledge that the authors possess good storytelling skills. It was a carefully elaborated christening present from Mountbatten and his staff to the Indian leaders, a guide to the awesome task that now lay before them.The subtitle alone makes it difficult for me to rate this book as more then one star but what you must understand is that this book was in no small part the last and greatest of Lord Louis Mountbatten's monuments to his tireless self promotion. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). The authors use the mass communal slaughter that was taking place at the time as a device to keep the tension building.

If you do not allow these cookies we will not know when you have visited our site, and will not be able to monitor its performance.Indians - even Gandhi, at points - come off looking like a pretty debilitated bunch and certainly not fit for self-rule. Listner पत्रिका में छपा था, उसमे माउंटबैटन ने खुद ही अपनी बड़ाई हाँकी है कि कैसे देश को आज़ादी के बाद उन्होंने कैसे टेक ओवर किया था नेहरू एवम पटेल की मिन्नतों पर। वाह! Readers in Pakistan may find it particularly off-putting as it gives a very negative portrayal of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and essentially is an argument against partition.