The Proudest Day: India's Long Road to Independence

by Anthony Read (Author), David Fisher (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1997

  $3.27

  At midnight on 14 August 1947, Britain finally granted independence to the peoples of India, without a single shot being fired in anger. Bathed in the rosy glow of retrospect, the birth of modern India and Pakistan has come to be regarded in the west as a great achievement, the proudest day in Britain's history , as predicted by Lord Macauley in 1835. But how justified is the romantic popular image? Was Indian independence a noble gesture by a benevolent colonial power or was freedom wrested from the British by Indian nationalists after more than a quarter of a century of bitter struggle? The Proudest Day examines whether the winning of freedom in India was a triumph or a tragedy.