FREEDOM AT MIDNIGHT by LARRY COLLINS and DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE 572 pages. Illustrated. Simon & Schuster. $12.50.
At the stroke of midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, an age ended. After an occupation of 347 years, the British gave India back to the Indians. Like every detail of that massive transition, the moment chosen for India's deliverance was an awkward compromise. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the English viceroy, had intended to make his country's exit on Aug. 15, the second anniversary of Japan's surrender in the Pacific. Legions of India's astrologers howled; every stellar influence on that date spelled catastrophe. The ceremony was advanced twelve hours. The stars were not fooled.
In this song of India, Authors Collins and Lapierre (Is Paris Burning?, O Jerusalem) again display their celebrated flair for the epic. Religious confrontations, border wars, political sacrifices are illuminated like scenes in a pageant. The very sounds and odors of a vanished world are resurrected—often at the price of subtlety and perspective. For the birth of a nation is not the stuff of mere melodrama; the historical and human scale is too profound.
In 1947 India was an arena of contradictions. Three hundred million Hindus and 100 million Moslems were learning that they hated the occupying British only slightly less than they hated each other. There were 3 million walking skeletons in Calcutta; simultaneously, some of the country's 565 maharajahs continued to test the aphrodisiacal powers of crushed diamonds. The viceroy's house in New Delhi employed nearly 5,000 servants and 418 gardeners. But back home, England reeled under postwar debts and shortages. Coal was scarce, and a bottle of liquor cost $35. For reasons as much financial as idealistic, the Labor government of Clement Attlee was determined to drop the white man's burden. But there was a hitch: the bloodbath following England's exit threatened to be worse than the one that would occur if she stayed.
Half-Naked Fakir. The situation was unimaginably complex—and utterly hopeless. Freedom at Midnight focuses on the four men who plunge ahead anyway, haggling out the new terms under which one-fifth of the world's population will live. Perhaps because Mountbatten is one of their primary sources, Collins and Lapierre cast him in heroic mold. The great-grandson of Queen Victoria faces his task with a stiff upper lip and a trembling lower one; he relishes the pomp of the viceroy's office while struggling to give it away.
Jawaharlal Nehru, Hindu leader of India's Congress Party and the first native Prime Minister, is also warmly praised for his Brahman sensitivity. The villain of the book is Mohammed Ali Jinnah, fanatical leader of the Moslem League, who demands the separate state of Pakistan for his people. "We shall have India divided," he warns, "or we shall have India destroyed."