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The book's best portrait is of the man who dwarfs the other three—Mohandas Gandhi, that tiny ascetic who for 30 years harried his British rulers with fasts and passive resistance. The mystic whom Winston Churchill once scorned as a "half-naked fakir" is a saint to his followers. "How can you say one thing last week," an associate asks him, "and something quite different this week?" Replies Gandhi: "Ah, because I have learned something since last week." The Mahatma continues to learn; he becomes at last India's soul and conscience. The most moving pages of Freedom at Midnight show him doing what battalions of soldiers could not: preventing by his frail presence the slaughter of Moslems and Hindus in Calcutta.
But Gandhi cannot save all lives. Even before his assassination, the hacking out of West and East Pakistan leads to appalling religious butchery. The strain on both new nations is nearly fa tal. Within months of its creation, Pak istan's checks are bouncing. Shaken by his awesome difficulties, Nehru asks Mountbatten to take secret control of the country once again. The irony is crushing: the last English viceroy also has to serve as India's closet king.
The perception of these incidents was difficult at the time; today, given the remove of history, actions and characters should prove less elusive to reader and writer. But the authors' overheated prose does more to inflame than enlighten. Exposure to their narrative style is an experience akin to sitting through hundreds of newsreels booming of "blood-spattered byways" and "hate-inflamed ravings." Moreover, Collins and Lapierre's uncritical admiration for things British creates the impression that colonialists were innocent victims, rather than coauthors, of India's ceaseless agonies. The land and its people deserve more than a series of murals painted in primary colors. Yet even these oversized apologetics are diminished by the vastness of the nation and the tur moil that attended its beginnings. Freedom at Midnight has many flaws, but India is not one of them. Ultimately, the book, like the country itself, is overtaken by events.