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.