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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
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- [01:00]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
- [01:04]
William Dalrymple
At me, William Durumle.
- [01:06]
Anita Anand
Very exciting. We're embarking on a four chapter miniseries 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.
- [01:33]
William Dalrymple
Orwell is, I think, the most fascinating figure because he gets so much right. I spent a lot of my teens and twenties 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, you know, 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. They have this sort of clairvoyance about them. Did you feel that when you were growing up?
- [02:24]
Anita Anand
I totally did, but I mean, I wouldn't even say they haven't come to pass. I would say, you know, they're coming.
- [02:27]
William Dalrymple
To pass even now.
- [02:28]
Anita Anand
Well, they are. I mean, you know, 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, 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. Sort of tilt at it or cry out about it are often denounced. So, I mean, I found his writing utterly gripping. When I was growing up, I loved a 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. And one of his biographers, D.J. 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 then need for secular morality that would somehow replace a value system built on the belief in an afterlife. So, 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. There are prizes from him, all prizes indeed. But 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. Thought 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, D.J. taylor, his biography, says, like Dickens, Orwell is not merely a popular writer who 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.
- [05:19]
William Dalrymple
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 in the time of the Vietnam War. People were looking at the newsreels saying, 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. 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. First of all, in this episode, we're going to look at his attitude to imperialism and colonialism, where, again, he's sort of hundreds of years ahead of his contemporaries, while Evelyn Waugh is looking at the colonial world and writing that the going was never so good. It's Orwell that immediately sees the fettered, 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 and 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. And 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.
- [07:22]
Anita Anand
And if you. 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 empirepod uk.com empirepod uk.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, well, George Orwell. He wasn't born George Orwell, was he? He was Eric Blair at the very beginning.
- [07:57]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [08:06]
Anita Anand
Apologies to all Erics out there. So where was he born, then? Where was George, Eric born?
- [08:13]
William Dalrymple
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. And it was the centre of the British opium growing areas. And Amitabh Ghosh, in his wonderful book about the opium trade, said the 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 War series. But he's from this classic colonial family, like myself, Lowland Scots in origin. Unlike 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.
- [09:46]
Anita Anand
Give you an idea of time, I mean, he was born on 25th June, 1903. The house, you can still visit the house, it'll surprise you. It's, it's classic colonial in style, but it's tiny. I mean it's not a huge great pile. Even though, as William says, you know, he's got wealth in the family, you know, sort of great grandfather being rather wealthy, running two Jamaican plantations. So his father was Richard Walmsley Blair, the tenth and final child of his parents. And you know, it's quite funny to hear, you know, 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 to join the government's India Opium department. And he has this rank of Assistant sub deputy Opium Agent. They actually had it on their cards fifth grade.
- [10:32]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [10:50]
Anita Anand
Fourth grade. Right.
- [10:53]
William Dalrymple
So he was a spectacularly unsuccessful and sounding rather uninteresting dad. And against this he's got this astonishing mum. Her family were boxwallers, were merchants and businessmen who had put down roots in Burma.
- [11:11]
Anita Anand
So I mean the mum has a name, her name is Ida and we should remember her name because she is a mother. Massive influence, isn't she, William? In little Eric's life? I mean, he sees a very strong woman who is political, who has now is a prominent suffragette at the time.
- [11:28]
William Dalrymple
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 Ma Su. So this colonial divide that seems so absolute at the time and you know, 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. And 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.
- [12:16]
Anita Anand
Well, everything's bloody complicated in the Orwell story because, you know, even though there's this sort of exotic backdrop to his Birth. I mean, he gets brought to England with his mother at the age of one. And so, you know, he's sort of. Even though there's this great sort of colonial sensitivity that he will later have in life, he does grow up a little separate. 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. But he does prove himself to be smart, doesn't he, William? Right from an early age, he does.
- [12:52]
William Dalrymple
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 baa baa black sheep, 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, and 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.
- [13:43]
Anita Anand
Just remind us who Cyril Connolly is.
- [13:44]
William Dalrymple
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.
- [13:53]
Anita Anand
Yeah. So you've got them in their little embryonic stage there, vying against each other, which I think is really neat. But 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 with, 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?
- [14:20]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. I mean, it still carries on today, and it 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 marquesses 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. And 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.
- [14:48]
Anita Anand
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.
- [15:10]
William Dalrymple
No, it was more complicated than that, wasn't it? It wasn't low middle class, it was lower upper middle class.
- [15:15]
Anita Anand
Lower upper middle class. You're right. It's more Orwellian than 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 cue, you know, all of these things that 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 revul is really clear. I mean, do you want to read a bit of it, William? Because he does write really well about how much he hated it.
- [15:42]
William Dalrymple
He 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. And what's quite interesting is that there you have absolutely Orwell prose. He's only, whatever he is at this point, 15 or 16. And there's that directness that you get in Orwell's prose 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. And 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 bay Lille 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. There was a strong hierarchy in the Raj and the ics. The Imperial Civil Service was the top rank and this was the, you know, 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, I mean, it's a bizarre choice and no one quite understands it.
- [17:43]
Anita Anand
That may be a really bad choice, a life choice that he makes. He makes a arguably worse one. 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 this, 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, you know, 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 you have, he's there in the 20s in Burma, and 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 know, 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. You know, very, very beautiful place to be. It's attracting Armenian, Tamil, Bengali, Chinese, Japanese traders. And, you know, 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.
- [19:11]
William Dalrymple
And this is really quite important because, you know, today we often associate Burma with military government, revolution, poverty. It's a backwater. And it takes quite a leap of the imagination to realize that it was actually much more prosperous in the 1920s than most of India. And at the center 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. They could 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.
- [20:25]
Anita Anand
Yeah, I mean, there's also another aspect to this which we covered with your brilliant son, Sam Dalrymple, which is, you know, when Burma is this prosperous in the 1920s and is attracting, it's this magnet for workers from everywhere else, this isn't always easy for the native Burmese population to swallow. You know, they're seeing massive amounts of immigration, all of the rhetoric that goes with, you know, floods of people coming in, they're taking our jobs, there's nowhere to live. All 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, you know, so from Mandalay, which, you know, the road to Mandalay to Qatar, you know, he does learn a lot about the culture. He 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?
- [21:35]
William Dalrymple
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 in Burma, separated from his friends, not particularly enjoying his colleagues in the police force mixing with kind of a strange selection of odd bods. He 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 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, Orwell saw the underbelly of the empire. Not the triumphant bugles or bejeweled maharajas, but the drunken saabs pickled by heat and alcohol in mildewed clubs, the scarred and screaming Burmese in their prison cells. He 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, of this novel that he will write John Florey to, and this is the lovely quote from Orwell himself, to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile words.
- [23:15]
Anita Anand
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. And 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.
- [24:02]
William Dalrymple
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- [25:17]
Gary Lineker
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- [26:09]
William Dalrymple
It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored, every friendship can hardly exist, where 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. Now, 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, and this is what he recognizes colonial Burma to be. There is no freedom for the colonial Burmese. And 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.
- [27:22]
Anita Anand
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, 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, you know, the ones who hooted at him, who tried to trip him over as he walked past. And all of this leaves a lot of conflicting emot in this young man, he'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 like 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 sort of the specifics of the books in another episode, but you can see all that complexity, all that sort of self hatred and self questioning, all the tracks of that are kind of being laid down even at this early point.
- [28:57]
William Dalrymple
I think one of the things that his biographers wrestle with, and David Taylor is very aware of this, is the degree to which Orwell self mythologizes. And when he's writing later about himself in Burma, he projects backwards onto that early George Orwell a political sophistication and left wing anti colonial ideas that perhaps he didn't have at the time or which were only half developed at the time. And as that quote you just read shows, he was in a complicated position. It wasn't that he was entirely for the Burmese because the Burmese are hooting at him as he passes and he's the colonial policeman who is hated. And there's an essay he writes later which is a wonderful, wonderful essay which I read again yesterday called Shooting an Elephant. And it's him in the 1930s writing about his time as a particularly memorable moment as a young police officer. And as I say, I think at this point he's projecting backwards the clear anti imperial ideas he has by this point that he maybe didn't have at the time. And his rare letters from Burma do not have this level of anti imperial clarity that he has by the time that he writes this story, but this is what he writes in Shooting an Elephant. At that time I'd already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing. And the sooner I got chucked up, my job got out of it the better. Theoretically and secretly, of course, I was all for the Burmese and all, against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. It was a job that you see the dirty work of empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lockups, the grey cowed faces of the long term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who'd been flogged with bamboos. All these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down upon the will of prostrate people. But with another, I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into the Buddhist priest's guts. So he's at least admitting that there is this. And into this whole world comes this rogue elephant which is broken loose from.
- [31:20]
Anita Anand
Its moorings so, well, just a bit of the background of it. He doesn't want to shoot it, he doesn't want to do it. But all of the locals expect the white sahib to sort it out. And so he does talk about this. You know that it isn't necessary to shoot this creature. It could be caught, it could be lassoed, it could be taken away. But the crowd is goading him on and he needs to not look like a weakling. You know, a white officer as a weakling is a bad thing. And he admits in his own words he acted solely to avoid looking like a fool. And he says this one amazing line which I just think is so powerful. When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys. So he, because of the expectation of the Burmese around him, does this thing he doesn't want to do. So he has no freedom. But he's talking about all of these ideas of a freedom to choose and how one man's freedom to choose is utterly swept away, sometimes by the crowd, by expectation, by a power bigger than yourself.
- [32:20]
William Dalrymple
After he shoots the elephant, and he has this long description of how difficult it is to shoot the elephant, although he has an elephant rifle brought to him and he has five bullets, the elephant will not die. And he aims it at the head, he aims it at the heart. But the elephant continues to gurgle and die hideously, slowly, in terrific pain. The crowd are thrilled by this because they get to cut up the meat and take it home. And they've seen a bit of entertainment, they've seen an elephant brought down and he Writes at the end of this essay. Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing. For a mad elephant has to be killed like a mad dog if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans, opinion was divided. The older men said I was right. The younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Karingi coolie. Afterwards, I was very glad that the coolie had been killed. It put me legally in the right and it gave me sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
- [33:33]
Anita Anand
Yeah, and of course, you know, coolie, that pejorative that was often used by imperial powers to describe anyone who was brown basically, and did lifting, carrying work. I mean, the other thing about colonial power is that it often gets merged with masculine power. And there is that conflation in Orwell as well, because he does have sex with local women. And, you know, a lot of men at the time who worked for imperial power saw that as an intrinsic perk of working for the empire. So, you know, and it was something that really bothered women back home. There were huge campaigns, I think Josephine Butler ran one, to ban brothels, Indian brothels, not because necessarily for the welfare of the women who have sometimes been trafficked into these places and being coerced to be plumped outside containments of soldiers, but because it was pulling away British men from right and proper marriages. And he does sort of get pulled into that as well, doesn't he? I mean, he frequents brothels himself.
- [34:33]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, when he's posted to Moulmein, where many of his cousins, which is what's so intriguing, many of his Burmese cousins are living in his Anglo Indian cousins. He goes to the waterfront brothels. And this is one of Anna Funda's new discoveries, or certainly something that she substantiates, which is only alluded to by most of his male biographers. And she says that in Mulmain was an impoverished teacher who'd set up with three of her six form. So this is not a very attractive. This is Orwell definitely involved in the seemy side of this colony. And he's disgusted with himself. He does not like the man he's become. And he goes back home on leave after five years, which is a legal thing that you can claim home leave after five years on Colonial service, and he just refuses to return. And his father, who is now on the fourth grade of his deputy sub opium agent or whatever he'd risen to the dizzy ranks he'd risen to, is of course horrified and almost cuts him off at this point and is furious that he doesn't do what the father thinks to be the decent thing and go back and have this career as a policeman in Burma. But by this stage, it is indeed the sheer isolation and loneliness that he's felt in Burma that has made him into this bookish boy. And by this time he comes back to England in 1927 and resigns from the colonial police force. He knows he wants to be a.
- [36:02]
Anita Anand
Writer and, you know, he doesn't hang around either. And he knows he's good. He's had all these prizes for writing as a very young boy and now he has material to work with, violence, hypocrisy, colonialism, all of that kind of thing. But he starts also seeing echoes of that in his own country in Britain as well. So we'll come to that in a moment. That's going to be very important in a little while. All while, though, he's not going to brothels anymore in Britain, but he is having multiple affairs with several women. So that is a part of his personality too. In 1933, he writes down and out in London and Paris, where he's trying to, I suppose you could say, exercise sins that provided his birthright, the thing that puts him on the pedestal in the imperial pecking order. But it's his next book, Burmese Day, that he brings out in 1934, that really, I think, probably even puts him on people's radars as well. And that looks at his role in the colonial system.
- [37:04]
William Dalrymple
Yeah. And this is, of course, the moment, once he's back in England, that he adopts this new pen name, George Orwell.
- [37:10]
Anita Anand
Oh, yes, of course, we should say Eric gets left behind.
- [37:12]
William Dalrymple
He leaves Eric behind. Eric, with his Hitler moustache, is now the rather handsome George Orwell who's come back and finds immediate success as a writer, minor immediate success, but he's published and Burmese Days, which you mentioned, anita, which is 1934. That's a full seven years after he's left Burma. By the stage that this book is written, everything has percolated and he's transformed his experiences in Burma and his understandings of the seemi side of empire and the exploitative nature of empire and the degree to which it imposes a sort of totalitarian regime on the colonized into this Remarkable novel, which is unlike future novels in some ways. For example, there are wonderful purple passages of description of the Burmese landscape which we don't get in, you know, 1984, Animal Farm or any of the later books. But it is an absolutely prescient destruction of this colonial world. And all sorts of things are admitted in here that almost certainly are part of his life.
- [38:17]
Anita Anand
It's about a character called John Florey, who's a British timber merchant, which had.
- [38:21]
William Dalrymple
Been the job, incidentally, of his mother's family. They were timber merchants.
- [38:24]
Anita Anand
Timber merchants, okay. So, I mean, Florey, like the Orwell that we've just been talking about, is, you know, respectful of local culture. He really wants to be liked by them. He likes the things he's seeing and hearing. He learns the language, you know, he sort of imbibes the culture and he cares about it. But he feels, and this is Orwell's own quote, that he's trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better parts of his character. And he sort of writes things like this. You know, he admitted he'd kicked his servant, though he was fond of his houseboy, whom he taught to wake him up by tickling his feet. You know, sort of like strange little admissions like that, which is so personal, you can sort of assume that that's what happened in his real life, I think. But it does talk about the systemic injustices of colonialism too, doesn't it, William? And it's all of the Orwell food groups come up in here.
- [39:13]
William Dalrymple
It's very dark novel. And it ends with Flory circling downwards through these clubs into sort of drunkenness and ultimately suicide. The book ends with Flory committing suicide, shooting himself. And so this was not a happy moment in Orwell's life, but it does set him up. And as you hinted when you were talking about the Road to Wigan Pier, I think the fact that he's now very much on the side of the oppressed, which wasn't a given when he went out to Burma, forms the trajectory that he will pursue in his next phase in life when he becomes now this very left leaning socialist. He's interested in the working classes, the underbelly of the country. And this is very much the Orwell who will take up the Republican cause and go and fight in Spain.
- [40:03]
Anita Anand
And one of these really interesting little tidbits, if you've read 1984, you'll remember that these great states which are forever at war, one of them is Oceania. And it's been suggested Oceania is exactly imperial India, you know, that kind of intellectual subjugation that takes place in Oceania is the template that imperial India provides him. And there are arguments made that Animal Farm is also partly based on his experience of Burma, the oppressive Raj, institutional crushing of people, rather than an ideology. Good men can be corrupted if there is an imperial order. You know, so you've got pigs who eventually are corrupted by the system. And like I said, we won't talk too much about the books right now, but these are the things that are in the pig trough, if you like. They feed these images that will come up later in his books. And what's the legacy, would you say, within Burma itself or all Wells works? I mean, do they read it? What do they think of it?
- [40:57]
William Dalrymple
They do. I mean, one of the things that all takes away from his time as a policeman in Burma is how power corrupts. That power corrupts. Even those with initially noble intentions, like his hero, John Florey. When you go to Burma today, they very much see animal farm in 1984 as about them. They think of these as Burmese books. And there's a joke that Orwell wrote not one novel about Burma, but three as well as Burmese days. Animal Farm and 1984 are part of the same trilogy. This is how the Burmese look on it. So it's very interesting. We are all brought up to read it in the west as a fable about Stalinism and Russia, and that was certainly how the CIA projected it out and circulated it. But you can argue, and many of his biographers do, that it's as much about imperial British tyranny as it is about Stalinist tyranny.
- [41:48]
Anita Anand
Yeah, well, look, in the next episode, we're going to be looking at George Orwell's next chapter of life, if you like. And that is very much centered around the Spanish Civil War. If you don't want to wait, you don't have to. You can access the next three episodes right now of this Orwell miniseries. It's just really for the price of a pint in the pub. One pint in one pub per month. That's how much it costs to join the Empire club. So it's empirepoduk.com, that's empirepoduk.com you get full book lists for the episodes. The weekly newsletter which William always extols. And it's a good reason, because it's very, very good, isn't it, William?
- [42:23]
William Dalrymple
It's full of all sorts of interesting research and it's got wonderful images. But. But the key thing is, I think that if you join the club. You keep this whole show going. We rely on you. And we would love you to become a member and become part of our community.
- [42:36]
Anita Anand
Yeah, and also we give you bonus episodes as well. I mean, as if there was anything more you needed. You get bonus episodes that nobody else gets. So that's all there for your delectation and delight. Listen, till the next time we meet. It's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand, and.
- [42:50]
William Dalrymple
Goodbye from me, William Durmple.