The end of the British Empire in India came about at the appointed hour: precisely at midnight when the calendar turned from 14 to 15 August in 1947. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ Nehru declared. The certainty of the appointed moment was reflected in his use of the simple future affirmative. If there is one thing a revolution never offers, it is temporal certainties. Revolutionary moments are defined by the ‘unpredictability of emergences’. Revolutionary time is experienced, by both participants and observers, as rapid and chaotic. Nehru's confidence conveyed that this was not the case here. The Indian people were not awakened by the tumult of a revolutionary upheaval, but the disciplined alarm clock of a transfer of power. The certainty, however, was only about the appointed hour of a formal transfer of power. ‘[The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving,’ Nehru continued, ‘[s]o that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today.’