Freedom at Midnight, published in 1975, recounts the months from Lord Mountbatten's appointment as the last Viceroy of India in early 1947 to Gandhi's assassination in January 1948. The authors, an American and a French journalist, spent years interviewing surviving participants, including Mountbatten himself, and reading official papers, and they tell the story with the momentum of a thriller.
The cast includes Mountbatten and Edwina, Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel and the maharajas whose princely states had to be absorbed, as well as ordinary people caught in the upheaval. Set pieces include the drawing of the boundary line by a British lawyer who had never visited India, the midnight transfer of power, the massacres in Punjab, the vast refugee columns and the plot that ended in Gandhi's death.
The book was an international bestseller and introduced many readers to the scale of Partition's violence. Historians have criticised it for its generous portrait of Mountbatten, its relatively harsh treatment of Jinnah and its fondness for anecdote over analysis. Read alongside more scholarly accounts, it remains a vivid and gripping entry point to the end of the Raj.
Book details
| Author | Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre |
|---|---|
| First published | 1975 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Type | Non-fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 570 |
| Setting | British India, Pakistan and London, March 1947 to January 1948 |
Themes
- End of empire
- Partition
- Political negotiation
- Communal violence
- Gandhi's assassination
Who should read it
General readers who want a dramatic, page-turning account of 1947, ideally balanced with a scholarly history.