302. Orwell: The Anti-Imperialist In India & Burma (Part 1)

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durumpil. Very exciting. We're embarking on a four-chapter mini-series today on one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. This is a man who started his life in Imperial Burma. He then goes on to write incredible critiques of totalitarianism that really seem prescient and describe things that are going on today in the world around us. And I'm talking about, well, you probably guessed it, things like Animal Farm and 1984. We are going to be talking about George Orwell. Orwell is, I think, the most fascinating figure because he gets so much right.

1:06I spent a lot of my teens and 20s reading those 1920s and 1930s writers who were very much the canon when I was at school and university. And already, they were all describing a world that had disappeared, that was dated. To read war was to read archaeology of bright young things, this whole world that was long, long gone. And the only one who seemed to be talking ahead of his time, to be prescient and seeing the future, was Orwell. And books like Animal Farm in 1984, although they were dark and although they were describing a world that thankfully never fully happened, they are well ahead of the visions of his contemporaries.

1:49They have this sort of clairvoyance about them. Did you feel that when you were growing up? I totally did. But I mean, I wouldn't even say they haven't come to pass. I would say, you know, come to pass even now. Well, they are. I mean, you sort of 1984 talks about rewriting history on the trot and it changing one day to the next. You know, we are living in a situation where AI can put out news coverage, which is completely conflicting and often confected from what was put out the day before. And entire swathes of the world will buy it because it's there, it's on screen, it looks official. And the ones who sort of tilt at it or or cry out about it are often denounced.

2:25So, I mean, I found his writing utterly gripping when I was growing up. I loved the dystopian fiction. Him and Huxley together, I read in tandem and, you know, what they were talking about at the time felt impossible and like a nightmare. But as we've grown older and time has gone by, they are not really so nightmarish and outlandish. So, you know, look, there are lots of biographies written about Orwell. I think about seven really good ones. One of his biographers, DJ Taylor, puts it really well. He says, at the heart of Orwell's worldview, it might be said, lies modern man's struggle to come to terms with the absence of God and the need for secular morality that would somehow replace a value system built on the belief in an afterlife.

3:06So, you know, that every single action of a man must be weighed for its own good or evil. Every person, every unit in this world matters. And that actually will put him on a collision course against totalitarianism, against a politics which he does buy into for a while. And we're going to get into all of that, you know, sort of communism, his flirtations with that, and then his disillusionment with that. So we're hoping to cover all of these things in this miniseries, but also the personal life of the man. Because, you know, it's very easy to venerate Orwell. He's on tea towels, he's on posters, you know, he's on t-shirts, quotes from him, or prizes indeed.

3:45But this is a man at the end of the day and a fallible man. And in the fourth podcast in this series, we are going to evaluate the man himself. And there are going to be some things brought up which are going to feel ugly. They're going to be difficult to put in that same bracket as a heroic writer. But I just ask you to stay with us because we are going to go through the work, the life, first of all, in these first two episodes, and the legacy of the man. And it's true to say, actually, no British writer, I think, has added so many words to the language. We use them all the time. I mean, just think about it.

4:16Thought Police. Big Brother. I mean, it's a TV series, but it's also mentioned all the time. Big Brother is watching you. Room 101, Newspeak. And so, I really think it's true to say no other writer of his generation has weathered as well. And again, going back to David Taylor, DJ Taylor, his biography says, like Dickens, Orwell is not merely a popular writer who's sold millions of copies of his works. He's someone who has quarried his way down into the heart of the human condition and by doing so managed to colonize the mental world of both his own age and the ones that followed. Taylor also says how that sensation that we have today of Orwell speaking to us is something that people have been having over the last 70 years since he died.

4:58In the time of the Vietnam War, people were looking at the newsreels saying, you know, it's as if Orwell had seen these. And he's sufficiently current that after the American election, when Trump was inaugurated, the sales of his novel 1984 went up by 900 % in one week. Oh, that's amazing. Which is extraordinary. And then, of course, just the word Orwellian, which is shorthand for so much of what we fear might happen in the world if everything goes wrong. And there are these different phases of his life, and we're going to be looking at them in four different episodes and his four, in a sense, great pluses and minuses.

5:39First of all, in this episode, we're going to look at his attitude to imperialism and colonialism, where again, he's hundreds of years ahead of his contemporaries, while Evelyn Moore is looking at the colonial world and writing that the going was never so good. It's Orwell that immediately sees the fetid, dark, censored, authoritarian nature and exploitative nature of imperialism, which seems very current today. But it was not immediately obvious to people who were enjoying going on P &O cruises and sailing through the tropics and arriving to grand balls in government house, either in Calcutta or in Colombo or in Yemen or wherever it was.

6:16And then there's the second phase where he's writing about fascism, and that's going to be the second episode about Spain, talking about the Spanish Civil War, which is such an incredible moment in Orwell's life. Homage to Catalonia, his book that came out of that. Then we're going to look at the era of his anxiety about the totalitarian nature of communism with Animal Farm in 1984. And then in the final episode, we're going to look at his flaws of his personal life. And this is very much leaning on the work of the wonderful Anna Funder, whose work Wifedom, Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life, is going to be guiding us and she's going to come on and tell us about that.

6:52And if you want to hear all four of these, and I think they're really interesting and it kind of helps actually to listen to them one after the other. You can just binge in one go. Join Empire Club. That's empirepoduk.com, empirepoduk.com, and you get them all in one big flood. And I think it's kind of useful because these aren't four, I mean, it feels like they're four different people we're talking about, but this is one man and one man's life. But William, let's start with Bihar in India and Eton, which is not in India, but in Windsor. And tell us how these were two real foundation stones in what made George Orwell, but he wasn't born George Orwell, was he?

7:25He was Eric Blair at the very beginning. And he has this lovely quote. He says, People always grow up like their names. It took me nearly 30 years to work off the effect of being called Eric. Apologies to all Erics out there. So where was he born then? Where was George stroke Eric born. If you want to look at the roots of how complicated this man is and how he manages to change his ideas so completely at different times in his life, you've only got to see the complexity of his childhood because he's born in Bihar, as you say, in what today and has been for a couple of centuries, one of the most backward and rural and violent parts of India.

8:07And it was the center of the British opium growing areas. And Amitav Ghosh in his wonderful book about the opium trade, said a direct link between the two. He says, there's no question that the violence of the particular regime, which ruled Bihar in order to grow opium industrially for sale to China, and the harshness of that regime, which is very different to the style of British rule elsewhere, is what has made Bihar as backward and as violent as it is today. And he was born into this world. We discussed this briefly when we were doing the Opium Wars series, but he's from this classic colonial family, like myself, lowland Scots in origin.

8:49Unlike my family, he has slave owners who ran Jamaican plantations way back. And there is this sensation that Orwell grows up with that his family had been on a sort of downward trajectory from 18th century wealth. And they still had the sort of big 18th century paintings in the house. But it was a very small house that barely fitted all this stuff. And it was a life where his wife would have to pawn the family silver in order to get out to Spain and this sort of thing. Just to give you an idea of time, I mean, he was born on the 25th of June, 1903. The house, you can still visit the house. It'll surprise you.

9:21It's classic colonial in style, but it's tiny. I mean, it's not a huge, great pile, even though, as William says, he's got wealth in the family. He's a great-grandfather being rather wealthy, running two Jamaican plantations. So his father was Richard Walmsley Blair, the 10th and final child of his parents. And it's quite funny to hear that it's supposedly a loveless marriage that produces 10 children, so they loved each other 10 times at the very least. And he's born in 1857 and he's sent to India at the age of 18 to join the government's India Opium Department. And he has this rank of assistant sub-deputy opium agent.

9:59They actually had it on their cards. Fifth grade. And the reason I think that this house in Bihar is so small and ramshackle is that Orwell's dad was clearly not a success in the opium department. Because at the end of his career, he has risen one rung to sub-deputy opium agent fourth grade. Fourth grade. So he was a spectacularly unsuccessful and sounding rather uninteresting dad. And against this, he's got this astonishing mum. Her family were boxwallows, were merchants and businessmen who had put down roots in Burma. So, I mean, the mum has a name. Her name is Ida, and we should remember her name because she is a massive influence, isn't she, William, in little Eric's life.

10:50I mean, he sees a very strong woman who is political, who has naus and is a prominent suffragette at the time. Runs a literary salon, performs feminist plays, is arrested for her militant activism and may have had Burmese blood. This is one of the crucial new discoveries that Anna Funder has made. And there were certainly mixed-race cousins, which is really interesting. Her uncle, George Limousin's birth certificate from 1860, mentions a Burmese woman named Masu. So this colonial divide that seems so absolute at the time, and there are whites-only clubs and whites-only roads and all the usual racist paraphernalia of the Raj around in Burma at this time, but these divides are not so complete.

11:35And there are also records of the young Orwell giving preference to people who were possibly his cousins. So the whole complicated racial game going on. Well, everything's bloody complicated in the Orwell story because even though there's this sort of exotic backdrop to his birth, he gets brought to England with his mother at the age of one. And so even though there's this great sort of colonial sensitivity that he will later have in life. He does grow up a little separate from it. I mean, he only sees his dad and probably his dad doesn't bother to talk to his children if he's anything like the dads of those ages about, you know, the colonial activity, but only during sort of the sporadic returns from India.

12:16But he does prove himself to be smart, doesn't he, William, right from an early age? He does. And his mum is pushing him. I mean, at this period, children of colonial officials very rarely went to school in India. In fact, only if they were openly mixed race would they usually be sent to an Indian school. So the choice is either the kids get sent back on their own, as happens to Kipling, and we have that Baba Blacksheep, which when we come to Kipling, we will be dealing with. This horrific tale of him being sent to almost like a sort of penal family to grow up in great suffering. Or in the case of Orwell, his mum comes too.

12:54And really, I think he's quite keen to get away from dad, who's a bore and a failure. And she's feisty. And so she takes young Eric home and crams him. And there is great success. He comes second in the Harrow History Prize. The first prize goes to Cyril Connolly, who will become his friend for the rest of his life. Just remind us who Cyril Connolly is. Cyril Connolly, a big writer and critic of the 1920s and 30s, very much of that sort of generation of war, Huxley, Ian Fleming, and so on. Yeah. So you've got them in their little embryonic stage there vying against each other, which I think is really neat.

13:28But then he does sort of go on. And, you know, actually that essay, even though he came second, that he came second to Cyril Connolly, where he gets extra notes from the examiner saying, you're very good, aren't you? This is very, very good work. But he goes on then to earn scholarships, both to Wellington School and then to Eton, where he was something called a King's Scholar. Now, a King's Scholar, that is a big deal, isn't it, William? Yeah, I mean, it still carries on today and basically gives you a free education. And so it means that in this school, which is the sort of pick of the elite of the elite and filled with dukes and marquises and crowned heads from abroad and all that sort of thing, even today, that you have this group of King scholars who are often from quite modest backgrounds, but absolutely brilliant.

14:09And they have enormous privileges, often very silly ones. At the time when Orwell was at Eton, he would be served first in the shops, for example. Which would have made him so popular with his rich, rich peer group. And he would have had a hard time, I'm sure of it, because he described his own social class later as being lower middle class, which is such an Orwellian thing to say. It's like not working class. I can't bring myself to write poor because I will have seen poverty by the time I'm thinking back and looking at this. But lower middle class. So he knew he was a have not. No, it was more complicated than that, wasn't it?

14:41It wasn't low middle class, it was lower upper middle class. lower upper middle class you're right it's more or well anything you're absolutely you're absolutely right but you know you've got a boy here who will not fit in one of these things is not like the other one of these things is first in queue you know all of these things it was really great on his peers and he does write an essay about it eventually doesn't he such such were the joys he writes and i mean the revulsion is really clear i mean you want to read a bit of it william because he does write really well about how much he hated it.

15:11He describes it as a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning. It consisted in being stronger, bigger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people, in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. What's quite interesting is that there you have absolutely all prose. He's only whatever he is at this point, 15 or 16. And there's that directness that you get in all those pros right from the beginning. But what's interesting is that maybe because he doesn't fit in socially, because he's not as grand as everyone else there, he slacks.

15:52And although he's got in with the scholarship, he begins to sink down the ranks of academic achievement pretty quickly. And by the time that he is 16 and 17, he's not even in the group that will go to Oxbridge. I mean, the whole point of an Eton education is that you then produce the elite, which gets sent off to not just Oxford and Cambridge, but specifically to sort of Balliol to do PPE and become prime minister. And instead, which is really interesting, young George Orwell, young Eric Blair, as he's known at this point, leaves without a diploma, doesn't go to university, and instead goes to the definitely non-smart Burmese police.

16:36There was a strong hierarchy in the Raj, and the ICS, the Imperial Civil Service, was the top rank. And this was the Olympian level to which you'd imagine bright Etonians aspiring to join. And at the bottom two rungs of the Imperial Service list, just up from being a squaddie in the army is the PWD, which is the public words department in charge of sewers and things. And equally low is the police. And this surprisingly is where King Scholar, young George Orwell joins. And so it's a bizarre choice. No one quite understands it. That may be a really bad choice, a life choice that he makes. He makes an arguably worse one.

17:18And he joins the police with a, I mean, there's no way around it. It's a Hitler moustache. If you look at pictures of young Orwell from 1922 to 1927, he's got just this unmistakable Hitler moustache. And it is a really sad thing, but a lot of men did at that time. It was seen as incredibly fashionable in the 1920s to have that kind of moustache. Anyway, we'll let that slide for a moment. But the kind of surveillance, the kind of fear that people had of imperial police, you can feel that that's all going into him and into his mind at this time. And it will then be regurgitated up in 1984. So he's there in the 20s in Burma.

17:59And we should say what Burma is at this time. It's still a province of India. So Rangoon had transformed from this old teak port into an imperial metropolis. You've got these great Victorian boulevards. You've got gardens where roses are forced to survive and blooms in tropical profusion, as they put it. Very, very beautiful place to be. It's attracting Armenian, Tamil, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese traders. In the 1920s, more migrant workers set sail for Burma than across the Atlantic Ocean. So it is the place to be, the Burmese dream. Not the American dream, it's the Burmese dream that is gripping people.

18:41And this is really quite important because, you know, today we often associate Burma with a military government, revolution, poverty. It's a backwater. And it takes quite a leap of the imagination to realise that it was actually much more prosperous in the 1920s than most of India. And at the centre of it was the logging trade and various extractive industries, particularly Burma Oil. BP starts its life as Burma Oil. And it's the same company that goes on to become the Anglo-Persian oil company that we dealt with in our Persia series. And it's making a ton of money. And because he's seeing the seamy side of life, because he's in police stations, involved in interrogations, because he's seeing people being beaten up and interrogated, He gets very quickly what perhaps his more privileged contemporaries do not see.

19:40They can be sitting in their clubs imagining this is all hunky-dory. But he understands very quickly that imperialism is about extracting what can be taken and oppressing in a totalitarian ways the people who live there. Yeah, I mean, there's also another aspect to this, which we covered with your brilliant son, Sam de Rimpel, which is when Burma is this prosperous in the 1920s and is this magnet for workers from everywhere else, this isn't always easy for the native Burmese population to swallow. They're seeing massive amounts of immigration, all of the rhetoric that goes with floods of people coming in, they're taking our jobs, there's nowhere to live.

20:19All of that is happening also in the 1920s. And he's there for that as well. So you see colonialism smack bang on top, the kind of depredations of taking wealth out of a country if you're a colonial power, but then also the kind of chaos that's simmering underneath when there's less to share between people who are underneath, how the othering of people takes place. So all of that is in the mix when you've got the formative years of Eric George Orwell. And he's posted in interesting places as well, isn't he, William? Because from Mandalay, which, the road to Mandalay to Qatar, he does learn a lot about the culture.

20:56He learns both Burmese and Hindustani, which is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu. But even though he's learning all these things, he doesn't quite fit in, does he? He doesn't like it. And from the moment that he arrives, he gets a reputation as an outsider, as someone that's sitting in his room reading. And this is where he begins this massive campaign of reading, which he hadn't really done at school. He wasn't regarded as a particularly literary boy when he was at school. But Burma, separated from his friends, not particularly enjoying his colleagues in the police force, mixing with a kind of a strange selection of odd bods.

21:33He goes to the local Karen church, which is an ethnic group of hill tribes who've converted to Christianity, and he makes friends there. The fact that he has, as you said, learnt pretty fluent Burmese means that he can converse with the local Burmese far more, obviously, than the most colonial officials. And there's a very nice line in the introduction to his first novel. There's a gorgeous passage in the introduction written by Emma Larkin. And she says, as a policeman in Burma, all saw the underbelly of the empire, not the triumphant bugles or bejeweled Maharajas, but the drunken Sarbes pickled by heat and alcohol in mildewed clubs, the scarred and screaming Burmese in their prison cells.

22:18He witnessed firsthand the devastating effects of repressive government, and it troubled him deeply. Unable to share his views with the enthusiastic empire builders around him, he retreated like the hero of this novel that he will write, John Flory, and this is a lovely quote from Orwell himself, to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile words. I mean, that's gorgeous. The other thing that happens is that if you were in any doubt as to whether this man was perhaps leaning to one side a bit too much, even to this day, Burmese people often have their knuckles tattooed. It's a thing.

22:58And he had his own knuckles tattooed as well. You know, these little blue circles on his knuckles. You can see it in the rural areas even now. And it's meant to be a protection against bullets and snake bites. And, you know, it's meant to ward off evil. And he does this. So to anybody looking from outside, this would be Eric Blair, George Orwell going native. Join us after the break when we find out what happens next.

23:32It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. Every friendship can hardly exist. Every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator, but you are not free to think for yourself. And that's not 1984. That is Orwell in his first novel, Burmese Days, inspired by this period, working for the police force. And this is the moment when Orwell first encounters a totalitarian society. This is what he recognizes colonial Burma to be. There is no freedom for the colonial Burmese.

24:23And although Orwell himself later coins the phrase double think, meaning the acceptance of contrary opinions or beliefs at the same times, especially as a result of political indoctrination, it is his experience in Burma, not in sort of Eastern Europe or in fascist Spain, or seeing how the Stalinists operate in the 1930s. It's in colonial Burma that he first gets this. But he also experiences something else. Just because you embrace a cause doesn't mean the cause necessarily embraces you. Because he also writes about how he knew that often when he walked past, Burmese people were baiting him. They were insulting him.

25:01And in his words, they hooted after me when I was at a safe distance. and the hostility that he faced from the very people that he most sympathized with on this posting, it took a severe psychological toll on him. And he wrote about this weird dissonance, this sort of breaking apart of what you think and what you feel and what everyone else thinks you feel, being caught between, in his words, hatred of empire, the empire that he served, and his simultaneous rage against the evil spirited little beasts who tried to sabotage his jobs, the ones who hooted at him, who tried to trip him over as he walked past.

25:37And all of this leaves a lot of conflicting emotion in this young man, who's still a young man, let's not forget, and feeling, and this is again a quote from Orwell himself, all for the Burmese and all against the British as a normal byproduct of imperialism. And yet, feeling this terrible separation and loneliness and pain and the frustration of being misunderstood. And all of that, which again, if you have read anything of Orwell, you will see all of these things channeled into people like Winston Smith. We'll get into the specifics of the books in another episode, but you can see all that complexity, all that self-hatred and self-questioning, all the tracks of that are being laid down even at this early point.