The Long Goodbye

By Paul Gary

FREEDOM AT MIDNIGHT by LARRY COLLINS and DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE 572 pages. Illustrated. Simon & Schuster. $12.50.

At the stroke of midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, an age ended. After an occupation of 347 years, the British gave India back to the Indians. Like every detail of that massive transition, the moment chosen for India's deliverance was an awkward compromise. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the English viceroy, had intended to make his country's exit on Aug. 15, the second anniversary of Japan's surrender in the Pacific. Legions of India's astrologers howled; every stellar influence on that date spelled catastrophe. The ceremony was advanced twelve hours. The stars were not fooled.

In this song of India, Authors Collins and Lapierre (Is Paris Burning?, O Jerusalem) again display their celebrated flair for the epic. Religious confrontations, border wars, political sacrifices are illuminated like scenes in a pageant. The very sounds and odors of a vanished world are resurrected--often at the price of subtlety and perspective. For the birth of a nation is not the stuff of mere melodrama; the historical and human scale is too profound.

In 1947 India was an arena of contradictions. Three hundred million Hindus and 100 million Moslems were learning that they hated the occupying British only slightly less than they hated each other. There were 3 million walking skeletons in Calcutta; simultaneously, some of the country's 565 maharajahs continued to test the aphrodisiacal powers of crushed diamonds. The viceroy's house in New Delhi employed nearly 5,000 servants and 418 gardeners. But back home, England reeled under postwar debts and shortages. Coal was scarce, and a bottle of liquor cost $35. For reasons as much financial as idealistic, the Labor government of Clement Attlee was determined to drop the white man's burden. But there was a hitch: the bloodbath following England's exit threatened to be worse than the one that would occur if she stayed.

Half-Naked Fakir. The situation was unimaginably complex--and utterly hopeless. Freedom at Midnight focuses on the four men who plunge ahead anyway, haggling out the new terms under which one-fifth of the world's population will live. Perhaps because Mountbatten is one of their primary sources, Collins and Lapierre cast him in heroic mold. The great-grandson of Queen Victoria faces his task with a stiff upper lip and a trembling lower one; he relishes the pomp of the viceroy's office while struggling to give it away.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Hindu leader of India's Congress Party and the first native Prime Minister, is also warmly praised for his Brahman sensitivity. The villain of the book is Mohammed Ali Jinnah, fanatical leader of the Moslem League, who demands the separate state of Pakistan for his people. "We shall have India divided," he warns, "or we shall have India destroyed."

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.

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