Category: History & Politics

  • Freedom at Midnight

    Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

    It’s ironical that I picked up Freedom at Midnight thanks to the show, but this is how history needs to be written. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have created a meticulously researched account of the final year of British rule in India – starting with the appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy of India and ending with the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi.

    But it isn’t dry history, it is almost like a cinematic view of the events that led to the partition of India and its independence in 1947. The narrative is gripping, the prose is eloquent, and the descriptions vivid enough to make one actually feel it’s playing out in real time.

    Through a combination of interviews, archival research, and narrative storytelling, Freedom at Midnight brings to life the key players and tragic choices of that defining year. The Congress, the Muslim league and its leaders, the princely states and their colourful rulers, the machinery of the Raj, all come to life.

    So too do the places – Delhi, Punjab, Bengal. And the British’s summer capital Simla, and how supplies and earlier, even people, were carried up steep mountains by porters each year. The book’s strength lies in its ability to weave together high-level politics and decisions with the (affected) human stories. From the opulence of the British Raj to the celebrations across the nation to the brutal massacres of partition, it is a vast canvas, both geographically and emotionally.

    Freedom at Midnight is written like a thriller – the pace never slackens, even as it moves in and out of complex political drama, the horrors of large-scale violence, and the moving stories of people caught in the upheavals. If one had to pick, Lord Louis Mountbatten stands out. And so does Gandhi.

    Admittedly, the prose does point to a Raj romanticism and the authors have a bias for both the gentlemen. But I don’t think that takes away from the enormity of the task at hand, and they respectively achieved. Appointed the last Viceroy of India, Mountbatten is portrayed with as charming, burdened with the unenviable task of overseeing the end of empire. Gandhi is inimitable – both saintly and stubborn, a man of deep moral conviction navigating a world descending into chaos.

    Jawaharlal Nehru emerges as idealistic and modern, while Muhammad Ali Jinnah is painted in darker shades – stubborn, brilliant and aloof. The quietly important VK Menon, the strong and efficient Vallabhai Patel, an adamant Churchill, kind and gracious Lady Edwina Mountbatten, all play pivotal roles.

    Freedom at Midnightvividly brings out the price of freedom – on a date hastily (in hindsight) decided by Mountbatten in the spur of the moment – the chaos of partition, the failure of political leadership to prevent communal violence, and the limits of British imperial power.

    It captures the horrors of the time – the trainloads of corpses, the mass migrations, and the unspeakable violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. It is possible to simultaneously feel for the decision-makers and the moral cross they had to bear, and for the people who faced the realities stemming from those decisions. They were all just humans, caught in a particular time in history.

    Freedom at Midnight is a fascinating read with a level of detailing that’s quite astounding for the enormousness of the canvas. In my Bibliofiles 2025 long list.

    (Not by design, but Freedom at Midnight is indeed a worthy book for review #400 on Goodreads)

    Notes & Quotes from Freedom at Midnight


    1. Mountbatten’s last act as Viceroy was to promote the wife of the Nawab of Palampur to the rank of Highness. She was an Australian and had been denied that rank because she was not of Indian blood. Years later, she asked for the author’s autograph after a lecture in Geneva. Mountbatten also used the debt 3 years later to ensure the navy kept its customs’ privileges because the Collector of Customs had previously been the Nawab’s British Resident – Sir William Croft.
    2. The first British to land in India was William Hawkins, captain of the galleon Hector
    3. Cows were deemed sacred to protect them from slaughter during times of famine
    4. One of the people released thanks to the Irwin pact was Gurcharan Singh, right when he was about to be hanged. He became Gandhi’s follower and would be the person to hold Gandhi in his last moments. Irony!
    5. Gandhi refused to save his wife because the drug would have to be administered intravenously, and that went counter to his principle – natural cures
    6. “You will never know how much it costs the Congress to keep that old man in poverty” ~ Sarojini Naidu, because many in the crowds around Gandhi were Congress folks, to protect him
    7. The Nizam of Hyderabad combined his passions for photography and pornography to amass what was believed to be the most extensive collection in India!
    8. When Jinnah first announced the formation of Pakistan, his inability to speak Urdu meant that the only words he said in the language (after the announcement in English) was Pakistan Zindabad. Many people didn’t realise the language switch and thought he said ‘Pakistan’s in the bag’!
    9. Mountbatten decided on the transfer of power date in the spur of the moment, when asked by a journalist. Same date as the unconditional surrender of the Japanese in WW2 in his previous role
    10. So banal and petty was the bureaucracy of partition that dictionaries were split from A-K and L-Z and taken to separate countries!
    11. The man who had articulated the idea of Pakistan was Rahmat Ali in 1933, and at that point, Jinnah vehemently refused to be party to it
    12. To the orthodox Hindu, the navel is the body’s frontier – for acts above it, right hand, for acts below, the left.
    13. By giving Gurdaspur to India, Radcliffe also gave it land access to Kashmir, changing that state’s destiny
    14. Nehru and Patel were stunned in the early days of partition horrors. They asked Mountbatten to come back and take charge, and it became an Emergency Committee
    15. Pakistan blatantly lied about the Pathan force it had sent to take over Kashmir. Ironically, their sacking and rape of the nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary delayed them and allowed the Indian army to take control.
    16. India held back Pakistan’s share of the overall money – 550 million rupees, courtesy the Kashmir issue
    17. Immediately after partition, there were refugees chanting “Let Gandhi die” (I am assuming Murdabad and not anything this drastic) as he fasted for peace
    18. A few weeks before his assassination, Gandhi’s last fast for peace was almost fatal. His ask – a peace charter which had to be signed by all key political and social organisations – was an impossibility that the leaders managed to accomplish just in time.
    19. Godse and co, tried to assassinate Gandhi once before. They failed, and part of their attempt was a bomb going off. The enquiry, led by DJ Sanjevi, was an exercise in incompetence. One of the cops, UH Rana, even had the identities of the would be assassins, but didn’t share them in time.
    20. Two crucial people were missing on the day of the assassination. Sushila Nayar, his doctor who always walked ahead of him, was in Pakistan, making preparations for Gandhi’s planned visit. D.W. Mehra, the policeman who was assigned to protect him, had been called away for other duties.
    21. Jinnah’s condolence message called Gandhi one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community. When pointed out that Gandhi’s dimensions went beyond his religion, he insisted on retaining the line.
    22. Jinnah’s tuberculosis diagnosis was a well-kept secret, and so was his life expectancy – a few months. If Mountbatten had known this, he would have delayed the transfer of power because he was confident of swaying the other League leaders, and Partition might have been avoided.
    23. Roy Bucher prepared two funerals for Gandhi. The first was in Yeravada Jail in 1942, but Gandhi ‘declined to attend’ after somehow surviving his 21-day fast! His actual funeral was also prepared by Lt. Gen. Sir Roy Bucher.

    Freedom at Midnight

  • The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian

    Neha Dixit

    ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X’ is the kind of book that forces one to look at one’s privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.

    It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless – the people whose desperate toils to survive we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.

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  • Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

    Annie Jacobsen

    It was in a show called Hunters that I first heard about Operation Paperclip. Even before WW 2 ended, and though there were common organisations among Allies, the race was on between the would-be victors to get Nazi science and tech to their own countries. This expanded to the Nazis who were working on such projects. Originally called Operation Overcast, the then rechristened Operation Paperclip was the US version, which ran between 1945 and 1959, and as a part of which more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the U.S. and more often than not, given government employment. The American Dream!

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  • We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic

    Khyati Pathak

    Every day we look around and blame the government for not doing the things they are supposed to do, and for being overbearing on things like taxation. We The Citizens is a wonderful little book (176 pages) that explains why things are the way they are. Full of wit and wisdom on subjects we don’t think about enough, but are important. I think the authors have done a great job of making the complex interplay of state, market, and society understandable, and that includes the illustrations that elevate the narrative many a times. A graphic narrative that decodes how public policy works (and could work) in the Indian context.

    The state is good at employing force, but isn’t very efficient. The market is good at driving efficiency, but is not concerned with ensuring equity. Society is best suited to deal with behavioural changes, but it is prone to majoritarianism. The entire system is a maze of checks and balances to achieve progress while not allowing any of the elements to go out of control. The book delves into how each of these function, and should function.

    The state, for instance has a toolkit of at least eight things from doing nothing to nudging to playing umpire to marginally/drastically changing incentives and so on but doesn’t always employ the right one. Munger’s “Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome” brilliantly manifests in these explorations. The book provides an excellent framework to think about this based on axes of extent of intervention and state capacity. The government can fail in many ways, and the taxpayer pays for these mistakes. The best part about the book is how it uses examples to (literally) illustrate these mistakes, and how they can be avoided. All delivered with some fantastic humour.

    Why are we a democratic republic and not just a democracy? Because while democracy gives the state legitimacy on coercion, the republic (constitution) guarantees the rule of law. What is the difference between a nation, state and government? The nation is an imagined community, where people don’t know each other but are still willing to sacrifice for. On the other hand, a state is a political entity. The government is the temporary manager of the state. What are public and common goods? Public goods are goods that are non-excludable and non-rival. (e.g. a lighthouse which everyone can use and its usage by one person doesn’t mean another cannot use it) On the other hand, common goods are non-excludable but rival (e.g. fish in the sea). This is why only the government produces public goods. These are the kind of significant nuances that the We The Citizens uncovers.

    I cannot stress how accessible this book is. Plain English, relatable examples, and frameworks that can be applied even in other contexts. Like many good things in life, I discovered We The Citizens courtesy the better half. I’d highly recommend this to anyone even remotely curious about how the ‘system’ works. If you’re not, this can actually get you interested.

    We, The Citizens

  • The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

    Joseph Henrich

    As an anthropologist, Joseph Henrich realised that much of the published work (and hence commentary) on human psychology (and social sciences at large) were based on work with experimental subjects who were based in or around Western universities. And when attempts were made to replicate these results with people in Africa/Asia, some of them even elites, it came to light that the subject pool was biased. They were WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic – and though only a small part of the species, are disproportionately represented in culture and thinking. How did this happen? That’s what The Weirdest People in the World is all about.

    He sets the stage with the influence of Protestantism in this. Its credo of the individual’s personal relationship with God spurred the belief that a person should read the Bible (sola scriptura), increasing literacy in the process. But beyond this, he points out that religious convictions shape decision-making, psychology, society and culture at large.

    But what is the WEIRD psychology? Broadly individualism and personal motivation (self focus, guilt over shame, dispositional thinking – based on intent not context, low conformity, self regulation and control and patience, time thrift, value of labour, desire for control and choice); impersonal pro-sociality (impartial principles, trust, honesty and cooperation with strangers and impersonal institutions, emphasising mental states in moral judgment, not revengeful but willing to punish third parties for not sticking to principles, reduced in-group favouritism, free will, belief in moral truths like physics principles, linear time), and perceptual and cognitive abilities and biases (analytical over holistic thinking, attention to foreground and not surroundings, endowment effect, overconfidence on own abilities)

    To understand how people became WEIRD, he brings up the importance of cultural learning in evolutionary psychology. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioural information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction.” From our own motor patterns to projectile technology and food processing to grammar and social norms. Cultural learning adaptively rewires our brains and biology to calibrate them for navigating our culturally constructed worlds. This is cumulative cultural evolution.

    It started off with kinship altruism, which other primates too possess, and extended to pair bonding and marriage, which is the most primeval of the institutions we have created. Preferred sexual access and a guarantee of paternity in return for protection and providing for the family. This paternity certainty and norms to cement it is where we start differing from most other primates. This also creates in-laws (affines) forming connections with more people who are not genetically related. From there on, basic communal rituals like dance, drills etc also bind people together with “mind hacks” through mimicry and a suggestion that others are like us and have an affection for us.

    The next big shift was agriculture, which necessitated securing and holding lands. This needed co-operation and gave an edge to those communities with more social norms – rituals, beliefs etc. Fierce competition between groups generated a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity. And so, though farming was less productive and even less nutritious than hunting and gathering at an individual level, between sedentism and productivity of the unskilled (young) labour, farmer communities just reproduced more quickly and removed/assimilated hunter-gatherers.

    Further inter-group competition led to clans which were kin-based institutions. These then became chiefdoms and premodern states. Built on norms and beliefs. And then non-kin based institutions developed between the elites and others to create stratified societies. e.g armies, tax collection.
    In the meanwhile, religion, based on our supernatural beliefs and worldviews, started scaling cultural evolution by creating ‘doctrinal’ rituals – prayers, hymns, parables etc and being transmitted by successful people – prophets and community leaders. These gave people a sense of unified commitment (conforming) and further evolved with identity markers- dresses, ornaments, taboos etc. By powerfully shaping behaviour and psychology, religion played a key role in forming higher-level political and economic institutions.

    Thus begins another central point in the book – the role of the Church (and its MFP – Marriage and Family Program) in creating WEIRD people. The Church systematically started breaking the foundational kin-based societies using prohibitions and canon laws (marriage, adoption, divorce, polygamy, wills etc) over many centuries in Europe, ‘threatening’ people with divine retribution (in the afterlife) and excommunication (immediate). By allowing rich patrons to ‘pay’ with money and church-building, the Church continued to grow at the expense of the kin networks.

    With more and more people marrying and working outside the kin network, cultural evolution started favouring a psychology that was more individualistic, analytically-oriented, guilt-ridden (as opposed to shame – guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation while shame depends on societal standards and public judgement) and intention focused (in judging others) as opposed to being bound by tradition, elder authority, and general conformity.

    An important part is how monogamy became a norm though logically polygynous works for both men and women (because women could be second wife to the best hunter rather than only wife to an average hunter). It evolved because it can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition an altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men’s psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long term investments and steady economic accumulation. Basically a testosterone-suppression system to reduce intra group competition. Between this and suppressed fertility (increased age of marriage, no pressure from kin, education for women) nuclear families started to focus on investing in their child – nutrition and education.

    These changes also led to urbanisation as people travelled to places where they could find mates, vocation etc and expanded impersonal networks (trust in strangers as opposed to interpersonal kin networks) based on interests and worldviews, leading to universities, guilds and charter towns, who competed with each other to attract people. A pre cursor to the transition to political parties in later centuries. Another factor at play was wars. Though intuitively, one might think it derails progress, it actually builds intra group bonding and spurs technological advancements.

    A rising middle class started demanding more rights, freedoms and privileges, leading to refinement of ideas, and acceptance of concepts like ownership and laws. Between this, impersonal networks and commerce, attributes like patience, time thrift (fascinating how clocks developed and changed the notion of time – wages per hour, need for efficiency, common market hours, contracts), self-regulation and positive-sum thinking (everyone can gain by advancements, I don’t need to be selfish or envious) began being appreciated as qualities one would want in self and other people, in order to distinguish themselves and prosper. These mindsets explains the kind of representative governments, laws, and the innovation and economic growth since then. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was fuelled by the expanding size and interconnectedness of Europe’s collective brain. In the political sphere, Protestantism, also a part of the larger religious cultural evolution, encouraged democratic institutions. Unlike the hierarchical Church, it requires communities to develop self-governing religious organisations using democratic principles. The cultural evolution can also explain things like patent concentration (in countries and regions) and economic characteristics at large in the contemporary era.

    I can now easily see how the same principles apply to even India in the last say, five decades – better connectivity, educational institutions, urbanisation, reduction of kin bonds, and how that makes the 1% in the country closer to WEIRD than their own ancestors. This is a fascinating book supported by a ton of data and studies, and my only complaint is that like many other academics, Henrich too succumbs to the tendency of extensive usage of the latter at the risk of the narrative flow (instead of an appendix). But I’d still recommend it and between this, “Being You” (reality as a controlled hallucination and the brain only seeking to survive/control), and “The Master and His Emissary” (the hijacking of the narrative by the left brain especially since the Industrial Revolution), there emerges a phenomenally insightful view of the brain, its motivations and the interaction with cultural evolution. I really must repeat all these three soonest!

    The Weirdest People in the World is a fascinating read and is in my favourite reads of 2024.

    The Weirdest People In The World | Joseph Henrich