‘At the stroke of midnight when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ proclaimed Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in his Tryst With Destiny speech. Perhaps making it the moment that would be forever ingrained in our minds when we think of India’s independence from the British Raj.
While we have all seen the footage of that speech, there was a lot more that was happening on August 15, 1947.
On such event was the reception at India House in London where M.K. Vellodi - the retiring High Commissioner for India welcomed all guests including the High Commissioner of Pakistan and spoke referring to the heavy responsibilities now transferred to India. He also paid tribute to those who worked for independence and read messages from the King George VI and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
The footage for this India House Reception was in recent times made available on Youtube along with a dozen other clips from the August of 1947 by a newsreel archive company called British Pathé’s archive. Their collection consists of over 3500 hours worth of historical footage that was shot between 1896 to 1976 and has over 85,000 videos of those events.
You can see other archival footage by British Pathé here.
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