Freedom at Midnight (1975) is a book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre about the events around the Indian independence movement and partition. It details the last year of the British Raj, from 1947 to 1948, beginning with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten of Burma as the last viceroy of British India, and ending with the death and funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.
The rude arch of yellow basalt thrusts its haughty form into the city’s skyline just above a little promontory lapped by the waters of the Bay of Bombay. The Bay’s gentle waves barely stir the sullen green sludge of debris and garbage that eneircles the concrete apron sloping down from the arch to the water’s edge. A strange world mingles there in the shadows cast by its soaring span: snake charmers and fortune tellers, beggars and tourists, dishevelled hippies lost in a torpor of sloth and drug, the destitute and dying of a cluttered metropolis. Barely a head is raised to contemplate the inscription, still clearly legible, stretched along the summit: ‘Erected to com- memorate the landing in India of their imperial majesties, George V and Queen Mary on the second of December MCMXI.’
Yet, once, that vaulting Gateway of India was the Arch of Triumph of the greatest empire the world has ever known. To generations of Britons, its massive form was the first glimpse, caught from a steamer’s deck, of the storied shores for which they had abandoned their Midlands villages and Scottish hills. Soldiers and adventurers, businessmen and administrators, they had passed through its portals, come to keep the Pax Britannica in the empire’s proudest possession, to exploit a conquered continent, to take up the White Man’s burden with the unshakeable conviction that theirs was a race born to rule, and their empire an entity destined to endure.
All that seems so distant now. Today, the Gateway of India is just another pile of stone, at one with Nineveh and Tyre, a forgotten monument to an era that ended in its shadows barely a quarter of a century ago.
(From the first Edition )
