Braj Nandan Rai is used to finding journalists at his door. ‘‘They come from all parts of the world, but things have hardly improved here,’’ says the slightly-built 50-year-old English school teacher. Though the wooden frame that holds up the roof is still intact, Rai’s home in Motihari, a dust bowl with decaying colonial buildings and ugly, unplanned concrete eyesores in Champaran in northern Bihar, is steadily giving way. The walls have cracks in them and there is the smell of decay inside. But this is the house where George Orwell was born. Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903, lived the first year of his life in Champaran where his father was a British civil servant. A huge shed, now slowly falling apart, was once a warehouse for indigo that travelled all the way from Champaran to England’s textile mills. It was from here that Gandhi launched his Satyagraha, protesting the exploitation of indigo farmers by the Imperial masters. The house was allotted to Rai, who works at Motihari’s Gopal Sah Vidyalaya, more than 20 years ago but he did not know its significance till 2002. In any case, he had not heard of George Orwell. ‘‘I did not know I was living in a place of such historical importance,’’ he says, recalling the sudden visitors he had from ‘‘some foreign countries’’ some time in 2002. ‘‘They brought a lot of photographs. After comparing it with my house for a long time they decided it was the place they were looking for,’’ says Rai. It took at least a year more before Rai, an English graduate, found out who Orwell actually was. Orwell’s father, Richard W Blair was an opium agent in Champaran when opium trade was the fulcrum of the British Empire in the 19th century. Orwell’s childhood photographs, which show him in the arms of his Burmese dai in front of the house, must be more than a century old. His mother Ida took him to England before his first birthday. Richard stayed on in India and Eric, who grew up in England, later joined the Indian Imperial police in Burma, but returned to England as a severe critic of imperialism in 1928. Both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were written in the 1940s and Orwell died on January 21, 1950. From 1984 onwards, researchers and journalists from across the globe have been visiting Motihari to locate Orwell’s birthplace. In 2002, a team of US researchers finally found it, and Braj Nandan Rai’s leaking quarters suddenly became an international attraction. Some Orwell fans in Bihar were excited about the new discovery, and his birth centenary in 2003 was celebrated by a small group at the site. ‘‘Even then, hardly any one in the locality knew that this was Orwell’s birth place or who Orwell was,’’ recalls 35-year-old Manuvant Chaudhary, one of the organisers. The local Rotary Club then took the initiative to erect a plaque identifying the house. ‘‘We are trying to raise some funds to protect the house as a museum for Orwell,’’ says Satyajit Bose, assistant secretary of Motihari Rotary Club. However, this June 25th, the Orwell memorial had no visitors. ‘‘I had kept some sweets expecting some visitors. Finally I had to take it to school,’’ says Rai. Champaran today is plagued by Left extremism, rising kidnappings, ravaging floods and exploitative social relations. Orwell’s writing was never inspired by the birth place he never visited; but his satire is alive and kicking. Sixty years after his caricature of the rise and fall of the Socialist dream, Bihar has equivalents for all his characters—except perhaps Boxer, the horse that drained its blood for a common cause. For one, Bihar has a disproportionately large number of ‘more equals’ taking away all the fodder.
