Freedom at Midnight

Product Information

This device frees Mountbatten and the British from the charge of poorly handling or rushing independence. When it is not engaging however, it is not so because bad narration but because the subject becomes so brutal and horrifying. Those interested in more recent and expansive views of the events leading up to and following 1947 should consider The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan. I have no doubt if I had rated back then it would have been five stars and included in my favourite books and ones that I would read again. He was the only major politician to see through the horrors of Partition and the bloodshed it would unleash.

It had epitomized the Victorian ideal of India better than anything else -dark, plucky soldiers staunchly loyal to their distant empress, led by doughty young Englishmen, straight arrows all, steady under the Pathans’ fire, good at games, stern but devoted fathers to their men, chaps who could hold their liquor in the mess. After all bureaucrats and military generals, and all those people are supposed to come from a royal background such as Mountbatten's and Churchill's. This book enticed my appetite to read more history about the formation Modern India and the Leaders of that time. As you read, you'll find a great deal is written about Mahatma Gandhi, the "dejected bird" of Mountbatten, Nehru, the handsome Indian who is incredibly fascinated by the Mountbattens, Jinnah, the only guy who is shown in the bad light, and Patel, well.While a current reader does not expect a highly sympathetic and nuanced portrait of India from a book written three years before Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the rise of post-colonial studies, as a narrative with insight into the rush of daily life on the cusp of independence, it remains an enjoyable and exciting read. The other facets of the Indian independence story like the Kashmir problem and the issue of princely states have also been dealt in a very detailed manner too and are wonderful read on their own accord themselves. The words alone were enough to conjure up the old romantic images: Gunga Din, Gentlemen Rankers off on a spree, the Road to Mandalay, the Night Runners of Bengal, White Feathers, and Gary Cooper urging his Bengal Lancers up a rocky defile.

An hour out of Rawalpindi, the train bearing the Sikhs and Hindus of the 2nd Cavalry was ambushed by Moslem League National Guardsmen. India would harbor a leper population the size of Switzerland; as many priests as there were Belgians in Belgium; enough beggars to populate all of Holland; fifteen million sadhus, or holy men; 20 million aborigines, some like the Nagas of Nagaland still hunting human heads. The authors delve deeply into orientalist lore to depict the exploits of the maharajas (princely rulers of various territories who had their sovereignty revoked upon independence in 1947 and their titles and privileges rescinded 25 years later), and are not shy about including salacious - often stomach-churning and horrifying - stories. 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. 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.They have had the greatest cooperation from the personal records of one of the few major survivors of that time.

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. After one year in a tank regiment, he was transferred to SHAPE headquarters to serve as an interpreter.All pages of text are present, but they may include extensive notes and highlighting or be heavily stained.

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.

Those of us on the scene at the time wondered if human ingenuity could possibly cope, and whether we should not, as the Muslims proposed, chuck the whole political onus back onto God. Because anything good that comes out of India, well it has to be influenced by the higher race, even in ancient times. He managed to lose his ship, and 130 men, during the evacuation of Crete but emerged the hero in the propaganda film made of the event 'In Which We Serve' where Noel Coward played him. Cruelty and dimension; a land of past accomplishment and present concern, whose future was compromised by problems more taxing than those confronting any other assembly of humans on earth. Today we publish some of the world's foremost authors, from Nobel prize-winners to worldwide bestsellers recent successes including the Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel, and George RR Martin's blockbusting A Song of Ice and Fire series.