Freedom at midnight

The authors have re-created the majestic and tumultuous end of an era, when 400,000,000 people, one fifth of all humanity, claimed their freedom from the greatest empire history has ever known -- only to find that the price of freedom was partition, war, riots and murder. Their subject is the eclipse of the British Raj and the birth of an independent India and Pakistan; the violent transformation of that fabled India -- the land of maharajas with their palaces, vices, jewels and harems, their gold-caparisoned elephants and their glittering private armies; the India of Kipling's army, with its centuries of legendary heroism, its skirmishes along the Khyber Pass of the Northwest Frontier against the firecest warriors on the globe, the Pathans, its young British officers commanding troops of a dozen races and religions and castes; the India of tiger hunts and pigsticking, of polo and memsahibs, of dazzling balls and luxurious clubs; the India of astrologers and sadhus, holy men and strange customs; the India that was the heart and soul of an empire -- into the new India of Gandhi and Nehru, precursor of the Third World.