Skip to main content

Freedom at Midnight




I wanted to celebrate this Independence by rereading the classic work, Freedom at Midnight. The exercise which began a month back is over today. A book which sold millions of copies and found thousands of fans need no review now. However, I’m writing this piece just to remind the younger generation that there is a work like this which is worth spending time on if they wish to understand India better.

The massive book which runs into several hundred pages covers just one year in India’s painful history: 1947. It begins with the arrival of the Mountbattens in India at the turn of the New Year and ends with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi a year later. We meet a lot of Indians between the Mountbattens’ reluctant flight to Delhi and the mournful cremation of the Mahatma in Raj Ghat. Nehru and Patel, Jinnah and Savarkar, and a whole lot of average Indians come vividly alive in these pages.

The book was written after a protracted research by the authors, Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins. By the time they started writing the book, they had collected “over eight hundred kilos of documentations, transcript of some nine hundred interviews, historical archives.” It was a research of unprecedented magnitude.

Gandhi emerges as a great hero in the book. The complexity of the Mahatma’s character – his impatience with certain things and people in contrast to his tremendous forbearance, his rejection of modern medicine even when his wife faced her death, his towering will power in contrast to his saintly humility, to mention just a few paradoxes – is delineated with clinical precision by the authors. The man whom many British people described as a sly creature with a lot of self-contradictions emerges as a rare saint whom both Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina admired and loved.

Nehru was Gandhi’s favourite acolyte in spite of the immense differences between the two characters. Gandhi was a saintly ascetic with deep faith in God; Nehru was an agnostic and a romantic idealist who “dreamed of reconciling [in India] the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx.” The word religion inspired “horror” in Nehru. He “despised India’s priests, her sadhus, her chanting monks and pious sheikhs. They had only served, he felt, to impede [the country’s] progress, deepen her divisions and ease the task of her foreign rulers.”

Jinnah was a non-believer too. “The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah,” say the authors, “was his parent’s religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah’s vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Moslem Holy Book than he did.”

V D Savarkar and other RSS leaders emerge as villainous characters in the pages who did little good to the country. “Savarkar detested Congress,” says the book, “with its pleas for Hindu-Moslem unity and its Gandhian non-violence. His doctrine was Hindutva, the doctrine of Hindu racial supremacy, and his dream was of rebuilding a great Hindu empire from the sources of the Indus to those of the Brahmaputra, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas. He hated the Moslems. There was no place for them in the Hindu society he envisioned.”

Nathuram Godse “failed English on his matriculation and did not get into a university. Out of school, he drifted from one job to another, nailing up packing crates for a shipper in a freight depot, peddling fruit, retreading tyres. A group of American missionaries taught him the only profession he really mastered, one he continued to exercise in 1947, the tailor’s trade.”

Godse’s accomplice, Narayan Apte, was a sensualist who taught mathematics at an American Mission High School where “his real interest” was to introduce “his female students to the erotic message of the Kama Sutra…”

The authors take occasional, enlightening glimpses into India’s earlier history too. We are given a tour of the princely kingdoms and many of the Maharajas emerge as utter incongruities with their impoverished subjects. We also meet a lot of ordinary Indian citizens who fought for the country’s freedom and then fought among themselves brutally in the name of their respective religions.  Blood flowed freely in the holy rivers of North India in August 1947. Many pages of this book reek of that blood.

The book is a tour de force that should be read by every Indian, especially the younger generation of today. They may be surprised by how little they knew the real history of India’s freedom struggle. They may learn to do something for their country at this juncture when a lot of action is required from youngsters whose idealism is not snuffed out yet.

“The difference between what we do and what we could do,” as Gandhi says in the book, “would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” Let me end this with another quote from the Mahatma: “A leader is only a reflection of the people he leads.”



PS. The edition of the book that Amazon delivered to me a month back is published by Vikas Publishing House, Delhi. The first 50-odd pages, the entire introduction that was added to the new edition brought out on the occasion of an anniversary, is replete with printing errors. Every page has more than one error which irritates the reader unfailingly. However, the rest of the edition is error-free.

Wish you a happy and meaningful Independence Day.

Comments

  1. Thank you for sharing this post so that we get a gist of the book without wading through a thick book. I normally don't have the patience to read books huge in size.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But my gist won't do the remotest justice to the book.

      Delete
    2. Reminding the true spirit of India, which has been long forgotten. The importance of the book in contemporary India is that it is the reminder to a time that was crucial,but yet forgotten times. It is in the past the future lies

      Delete
    3. I hope the young generation really reads this book. They need to.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In this Wonderland

I didn’t write anything in the last few days. Nor did I feel any urge to write. I don’t know if this lack of interest to write is what’s called writer’s block. Or is it simple disenchantment with whatever is happening around me? We’re living in a time that offers much, too much, to writers. The whole world looks like a complex plot for a gigantic epic. The line between truth and fiction has disappeared. Mass murders have become no-news. Animals get more compassion than fellow human beings. Even their excreta are venerated! Folk tales are presented as scientific truths while scientific truths are sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. When the young generation in Nepal set fire to their Parliament and Supreme Court buildings, they were making an unmistakable statement: that they are sick of their political leaders and their systems. Is there any country whose leaders don’t sicken their citizens? I’m just wondering. Maybe, there are good leaders still left in a few coun...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Death as a Sculptor

Book Discussion An Introductory Note : This is not a book review but a reflection on one of the many themes in The Infatuations , novel by Javier Marias. If you have any intention of reading the novel, please be forewarned that this post contains spoilers. For my review of the book, without spoilers, read an earlier post: The Infatuations (2013). D eath can reshape the reality for the survivors of the departed. For example, a man’s death can entirely alter the lives of his surviving family members: his wife and children, particularly. That sounds like a cliché. Javier Marias’ novel, The Infatuations , shows us that death can alter a lot more; it can reshape meanings, relationships, and even morality of the people affected by the death. Miguel Deverne is killed by an abnormal man right in the beginning of the novel. It seems like an accidental killing. But it isn’t. There are more people than the apparently insane killer involved in the crime and there are motives which are di...

When Cricket Becomes War

Illustration by Copilot Designer Why did India agree to play Pakistan at all if the animosity runs so deep that Indian players could not even extend the customary handshake: a simple ritual that embodies the very essence of sportsmanship? Cricket is not war, in the first place. When a nation turns a game into a war, it does not defeat its rival; it only wages war on its own culture, poisoning its acclaimed greatness. India which claims to be Viswaguru , the world’s Guru, is degenerating itself day after day with mounting hatred against everyone who is not Hindu. How can we forget what India did to a young cricket player named Mohammed Siraj , especially in this context? In the recent test series against England, India achieved an unexpected draw because of Siraj. 1113 balls and 23 wickets. He was instrumental in India’s series-levelling victory in the final Test at the Oval and was declared the Player of the Match. But India did not celebrate him. Instead, it mocked him for his o...

Whose Rama?

Book Review Title: Whose Rama? [Malayalam] Author: T S Syamkumar Publisher: D C Books, Kerala Pages: 352 Rama may be an incarnation of God Vishnu, but is he as noble a man [ Maryada Purushottam ] as he is projected to be by certain sections of Hindus? This is the theme of Dr Syamkumar’s book, written in Malayalam. There is no English translation available yet. Rama is a creation of the Brahmins, asserts the author of this book. The Ramayana upholds the unjust caste system created by Brahmins for their own wellbeing. Everyone else exists for the sake of the Brahmin wellbeing. If the Kshatriyas are given the role of rulers, it is only because the Brahmins need such men to fight and die for them. Valmiki’s Rama too upheld that unjust system merely because that was his Kshatriya-dharma, allotted by the Brahmins. One of the many evils that Valmiki’s Rama perpetrates heartlessly is the killing of Shambuka, a boy who belonged to a low caste but chose to become an ascetic. The...