Fifty years ago, seconds after midnight on 14-15 August 1947, the Union Jack, emblazoned with the Star of India, began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House, New Delhi. One fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen. But 400 million people were to find that the price of freedom was partition and war, riot and murder.
In this new edition of their superb reconstruction of events at the time, Collins and Lapierre recount the eclipse of the fabled British Raj and examine the roles enacted by, among others, Mahatma Ghandi, Lord Mountbatten, Nehru and Jinnah in its violent transformation into the new India and Pakistan.
'Thrilling...staggers the imagination'
DAILY MAIL
'There is no single passage in this profoundly researched book that one could actually fault. Having been there most of the time in question, I can vouch for the accurate of its general mood. It is a work of scholarship, of investigation, research and of significance.'
JAMES CAMERON, 'New York Times'
'The song of India... illuminated in scenes like a pageant.'
TIME
'A heroic tale that has not been told a tenth as well before... It will give more non-Indians more knowledge of the vast circumstances surrounding the birth of India than anything previously written. With an instinct for drama and a skill in narration, the authors take the reader from Whitehall to Delhi, to Calcutta, to Lahore, to Pula, to the villages of the Punjab and Bengal; their hold on the reader never falters.'
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH