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Journalism of Courage
The Champaran region in Bihar — known for being the launching ground for Mahatma Gandhi’s historic 1917 Civil Disobedience Movement — has another claim to fame: it is the birthplace of George Orwell, the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, who, before his death on January 21, 1950, did much to warn the world against the dangers of totalitarianism.
Before he became the literary legend who gave the world terms such as ‘Orwellian’, ‘Big Brother’, and ‘Thought Police’ — making Motihari in East Champaran a site of literary pilgrimage — Orwell was simply Eric Arthur Blair. And, it was, arguably, his tryst with the British Raj that catalysed his transformation from Eric Blair – the son of a colonial opium agent – to Orwell, the “democratic socialist” who critiqued imperialism and took a bullet to the throat fighting right-wing fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
“When he denounced tyranny and repression, he was not only pointing a finger at Stalin’s Russia. Even as the shadow of the Soviet Union looms behind his two most famous novels, they are equally informed by Orwell’s long-standing opposition to both British imperialism and European fascism,” writes Laura Beers, a Professor of History at the American University in Washington, DC, in her book, Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century.
Orwell was born in 1903 to Richard Walmesley Blair, a mid-level administrator in the British Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production of opium for export to China — a trade that devastated Indian farmers and Chinese consumers alike — and Ida Limouzin Blair, who was born to a French-British teak merchant family in Burma (now Myanmar). Ida grew up in luxury but by the time she met and married Richard, she was working as a governess — an early sign of the shifting social standing that would define the Blairs’ existence since the abolition of slavery in 1833 eroded their fortunes. The Blairs clung to their social cachet, exemplified by a portrait of Mary Fane, an ancestor of noble lineage (the daughter of an earl), which Orwell inherited. Professor Beers notes that his first wife Eileen Blair called the family “penniless but still on the shivering verge of gentility.” These dual influences — wealth and penury, power and decline — infused Eric’s formative years with a sense of dissonance he would later dissect in his writing.
A year after Orwell’s birth, his mother returned to England with him and his sister, Marjorie. His father remained in India until his retirement in 1912. “Though Eric retained no memories of India, colonial artifacts adorned the Blair household,” Professor Beers tells indianexpress.com. He later mocked this Anglo-Indian nostalgia in Coming Up for Air, writing: “As soon as you set foot inside the front door you’re in India in the [1880s]…the everlasting anecdotes about tiger-shoots and what Smith said to Jones in Poona in ’87.”
After completing prep school at Eton, Orwell returned to the East, joining the Indian Imperial Police, recounts Professor Beers. “Offered his choice of postings within the sprawling British Raj, Orwell chose Burma — a place that already had personal resonance through his mother’s Anglo-French family, who had been teak merchants there,” says Professor Beers. His decision seemed to follow a pragmatic logic that had guided his family’s choices for generations.
In her book, Orwell’s Ghosts, Beers observes, “A man bred to social dominance but without vast financial means could live like a king in the Raj, as opposed to existing like a member of the lower-upper-middle class at home.”
For five years, Orwell served in a role that epitomised colonial authority — administering justice, suppressing dissent, and maintaining imperial control. The experience profoundly disillusioned him. “Those years in Burma had a very formative influence on his view of the world because they impressed upon him how little freedom there is, not just for South Asians, but also for the English-Scottish Britons in India. He felt informal censorship also operates on white men in India as if you say or think the wrong things it can have a negative impact on your career,” Professor Beers adds.
For Orwell, the imperial system’s greatest indictment lay in the profound loneliness it imposed — not only on the oppressed but also on those tasked with maintaining it. Reflecting on his time as a sub-divisional police officer in Moulmein, Burma, Orwell said, “I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”
Caught in an atmosphere of simmering resentment, Orwell became the target of everyday hostility. Anti-European sentiment, though subdued, manifested in petty acts of defiance: tripping him on the football field, spitting betel juice, and jeering insults. “The sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere…got badly on my nerves,” Orwell confesses in his 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant.
Yet this hostility deeply unsettled Orwell because, privately, he had already decided that “imperialism was an evil thing” and aligned himself, at least in principle, with the Burmese people. His job as an imperial officer, however, placed him squarely on the side of the oppressors, exposing him to what he called “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters”: the wretched prisoners in stinking lock-ups, convicts with scarred buttocks from brutal floggings, and the pervasive dehumanisation of colonial rule.
Orwell’s internal conflict was sharp and agonising. “I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible,” he writes.
Asked about Orwell’s critique of colonialism, Manju Jaidka, former professor and Head of the Department of English, Panjab University, Chandigarh, says,” Underlying his creativity was a strong disapproval of the expansionist designs of the British Empire, as evident in his writings about Burma. The short essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ may seem innocuous enough, but it is a comment on the tyranny perpetrated by British colonisers, with the elephant serving as a metaphor for England — a ‘must’ elephant (mast haathi in Hindi), a brute gone crazy. Orwell also acknowledges the other side of the master-slave relationship and sympathises with the predicament of the white man. His words, ‘When the white man turns tyrant …. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.’ are telling.”
Orwell’s Burma years culminated in his decision to resign in 1927. He would later say, “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness I cannot make clear.”
Orwell’s five years in Burma temporarily shelved his literary ambitions, but, as journalist Dorian Lynskey writes in The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984, the experience profoundly shaped his worldview. Burma became Orwell’s “aversion therapy,” Lynskey writes, a crucible in which he developed a disgust for the abuses of power and the hypocrisy that masked them.
Orwell’s time in Burma produced one novel, Burmese Days, and two searing essays, “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant,” but beyond it, it instilled in him a visceral understanding of imperialism’s corrupting force. “In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it,” Orwell famously argued — a statement Lynskey admits is a fallacious generalisation but one that was undeniably true for Orwell. Witnessing firsthand the moral and psychological toll of colonial rule, Orwell briefly adopted anarchist views before rejecting them as “sentimental nonsense.”
Returning to England in 1927, Lynskey writes that Orwell carried what he later described as “an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.” This sense of culpability spurred him to seek out discomfort and hardship, immersing himself in the lives of the impoverished. “How can you write about the poor unless you become poor yourself, even if it’s temporary?” he asked a friend. The result was a period of deliberate self-imposed privation: Orwell became a tramp in England and a dishwasher in Paris.
Orwell’s nostalgie de la boue (a yearning for the gutter) culminated in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which marked the debut of the name ‘George Orwell’. The pseudonym — chosen partly to shield his family from embarrassment and partly as an act of reinvention — was derived from the River Orwell in Suffolk.
It was in Burma’s oppressive heat, amid the contradictions of colonial rule, that Eric Blair began his metamorphosis into George Orwell — a writer determined to confront power in all its guises.
Even after leaving British India and until one year before his death, Orwell kept abreast of the political happenings in India. In his 1949 essay Reflections on Gandhi, Orwell wonders whether pacifist methods would be useful against totalitarian regimes. “It is difficult to see how Gandhi’s methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again,” he writes.
Orwell also observed that the British saw Gandhi as useful. “Strictly speaking, as a Nationalist, he was an enemy,” Orwell wrote. “But since in every crisis he would exert himself to prevent violence — which, from the British point of view, meant preventing any effective action whatever — he could be regarded as ‘our man.’”
While Orwell credited Gandhi with achieving the peaceful withdrawal of British rule, he writes that this was aided by the Labour government’s policies, and that a Conservative government, particularly one led by Churchill, would likely have acted differently.
Seventy-five years after his death, George Orwell remains a towering figure, with his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, topping bestseller charts as recently as 2017 and 2021. The release of a commemorative £2 coin, engraved with the chilling phrase “Big Brother is watching you,” is a testament to Orwell’s lasting relevance and prescience.
Is the proverbial Nineteen Eighty-Four on the horizon? Professor Beers suggests not quite: “I don’t think that we are living in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four in many 21st-century societies. However, one must remember that shortly after it was published, Orwell called it a parody and a warning. He didn’t set Nineteen Eighty-Four in Russia; he set it in England, warning what could happen to any society, including England, if liberties and rights aren’t safeguarded.”
“What I like about George Orwell is the wide range of his writing and how he veils social and political criticism under the veneer of satire. His works are unforgettable and have acquired the status of classics of literature. However, I am unhappy about the fact that Orwell is no longer given the importance he used to get in university departments. There may be many reasons for this, but the loss is great. We need books like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm (and Huxley’s Brave New World) to remind us of the dangers of totalitarian regimes,” says Jaidka.
