Freedom at Midnight

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Ahead of them lay a problem of a scope and on a scale no people had ever encountered before, a problem vast enough to beggar the most vivid imagination. The next morning those soldiers who had served under his command owed their lives to his last intervention on their behalf.

If you want to read something that really gets to the heart of the enormous complexities of British rule in India, the Indian liberation movement, the key characters on all sides, and the results of partition (including present day legacies): read Michael French's excellent 'Liberty or Death'. One possible reason for this lack of crucial details: the authors want the readers to believe that the violence of partition, and partition itself, was largely the fault of Muhammad Ali Jinnah - the political force behind the creation of Pakistan. Here they recreate the drama, the fervor, and the triumph that heralded one of the most dramatic events of our time. The authors interviewed many who were there during the events, including a focus on Lord Mountbatten of Burma.Then one day, at the end of the summer, the "ghost train" arrives, a silent funeral train loaded with the bodies of thousands of refuges, bringing the village its first taste of the horrors of the civil war. It is all here: maharajas and tigers, filth and squalor, extravagance and macabre sex, massacres, smells, starvation, cruelty and heroism.

Jacob shares his desire with another inmate named Simon, who initially disagreed and later agreed as he wants to meet his family. Ambedkar - one of the authors of the Constitution - also feared the fate of that community in an independent India and converted to Buddhism on his deathbed as an act of symbolic resistance to Hindu-majority rule. The jail sequences were shot in Thiruvananthapuram, a jail set was used for the extensive night shoots.These fables have a tendency to sweep history in very broad strokes, ignoring much and instead forcing us into believing generalised facts such as those about all Britishers/foreigners being diabolic, all freedom fighters being pious to the hilt and many others.