Wherever you go,” said Idriss in reply, “we shall always remain brothers, because we spilled our blood together.” Those interested in more recent and expansive views of the events leading up to and following 1947 should consider The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan. The next morning those soldiers who had served under his command owed their lives to his last intervention on their behalf. An hour out of Rawalpindi, the train bearing the Sikhs and Hindus of the 2nd Cavalry was ambushed by Moslem League National Guardsmen. Without their arms they would have been massacred.

Brasted, H. V.; Bridge, Carl (1994). "The transfer of power in South Asia: An historiographical review". South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. 17 (1): 93–114. doi: 10.1080/00856409408723200. Frankly, never has a single book amazed and intrigued me so much, while being so educative and informative.There is no single passage in this profoundly researched book that one could actually fault. Having been there most of the time in question and having assisted at most of the encounters, I can vouch for the accuracy of its general mood. It is a work of scholarship, of investigation, research and of significance.” That age had begun on a soft summer day in a little Spanish port in 1492, when Christopher Columbus sailed off across the endless green seas to the edge of the world in search of India and found America by mistake. Four and a half centuries of human history bore the imprint of that discovery and its consequences: the economic, religious and physical exploitation of the nonwhite masses throughout the globe by the white, Western, Christian masses at its core. Aztec, Inca, Swahili, Egyptian, Iraqi, Hottentot, Algerian, Burmese, Philippine, Moroccan, Vietnamese-an unending stream of peoples, nations and civilizations in the course of 450 years had passed through the colonial experience; decimated, impoverished, educated, converted, culturally enriched or debased, economically exploited or stimulated, but finally, irrevocably altered by it.

Think this is one book which every kid in the subcontinent should read before he finishes high school. Glad that I've read it now, even if, 15 years too late. Present: Simon and Jacob plans to escape and somehow makes the other inmates leave their cell. Meanwhile, a thief named Devassy and a migrant worker Ramu arrives, where they also plan to escape with Simon and Jacob. However, the police find marijuana in Simon's cell. Jacob digs a hole through the toilet of his cell down the drainage and into the compound, where he starts building the tunnel a bit-by-bit with the help of Devassy, Ramu and two other thieves, who are basically twins who initially hated the escape plan, but later agreed after learning that they have been falsely accused. A new inmate arrives on the charge of molestation, where Jacob and his gang somehow evade him. With whom Jacob had a fight earlier, Udayan arrives at their cell to foil their plan. Cruelty and dimension; a land of past accomplishment and present concern, whose future was compromised by problems more taxing than those confronting any other assembly of humans on earth. Yet, for all that, for all her ills, their India was also one of the supreme and enduring symbols protruding above the cultural horizons of mankind. Freedom at Midnight aroused controversy for its portrayal of the British expatriates, the native rulers of India, and members of India's first cabinet. [2] [4] James Cameron described it as the result of deep research into events often neglected by other historians. [5]

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Very rarely comes a defining moment that changes history to the extent of being un-recognizable and very rarely comes a book that changes your life, perceptions and everything that you presumed to be true once and for all. Independence of India was the defining moment in modern India and this book by the author duo Dominique Lappierre and Larry Collins on the before and after-math of the same is the defining book in my life.