March 17, 2002

GEORGE Orwell’s seminal satire, Nineteen eighty-four, on the decaying English society of the mid-20th century, was in imminent danger of “losing its shelf-life”, as one of his critics described it, until the apocalypse of last September 11 revived its prophetic vision and timeliness on an immense scale.

George Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, in 1903, at Motihari, India, was the son of a lowly English colonial civil servant. He thus had something in common with another illustrious English sage and author, Rudyard Kipling. However, unlike Kipling who sanctified colonialism as the “white man’s burden”, Orwell developed an early congenital loathing for colonialism because of his father’s employment in the Opium Department. It was that abominable colonial outfit which had opened a vast market for Indian opium in China and forced millions of Chinese into addiction.

Even his schooling at Eaton — that snobbish citadel which incubated colonial rulers in hordes — did nothing to polish Orwell’s rough edges. His field exposure in Burma, between 1922 and 1927, with the Indian Imperial Police, further exacerbated his abhorrence of colonialism in all its dimensions and manifestations. That experience also inspired his first novel, Burmese days in 1934.

By the time he doffed the mantle of colonial service in 1927, Orwell had become a convinced detractor of totalitarianism, which to him was but another face of colonialism. It was this conviction that took him to Spain, then embroiled in a civil war, in the mid-30s. He fought as a volunteer on the side of the Republicans, who were communists by just another name. A fellow traveller in that titanic struggle against the fascists was Ernest Hemingway. We have no way to know if the paths of these two revolutionaries of the literary world ever crossed in Spain. However, Hemingway’s flourishing pen produced epic portrayals of that era in For whom the bell tolls, and A farewell to arms, both classics of the twentieth century English novel.

But Orwell had no such success with the pen. His account of that experience, Homage to Catalonia went unheralded, just as his life suffered in poverty and personal misery. Fame and glory came to him only in the last 4 years of his life, with the publication of his other celebrated satire, Animal farm in 1945. But by then a life of toil and sweat had taken its toll and he had been terminally afflicted with tuberculosis, an incurable disease in those days. Nineteen eighty-four, written in 1948, appeared in print in June 1949, just six months before Orwell’s death in January 1950.

In becoming a belated hero, Orwell, once again, shares a unique niche with the doughty Winston Churchill who would have gone down in history as a failed politician had it not been for the second world war. Churchill basked long and happily in glory and became an icon. For Orwell, the sun eclipsed after a very short blaze. But he remains an undisputed pillar of twentieth century English novel by virtue of his two sterling novels.

Jeffrey Meyers, himself a reputed biographer, has lent a unique, present-day, perspective to Orwell in his recent book, Orwell: wintry conscience of a generation. It is a fascinating account of a tortured soul which went through so much of suffering in a life span of only 46 years. Meyers, deftly handling his complex subject, has separated the person from the persona, but done justice to both.

Meyers debunks the dismissive critique of some of Orwell’s detractors that he was haunted by the cold war polemics and thus targeted a totalitarian society like the Stalinist Russia. But Orwell’s canvas was his native Britain, and much as he may have written with his knowledge of Nazi Germany or General Franco’s Fascist Spain, Orwell had his foot firmly planted in the exploitative colonial culture of Pax Britannica which he had amply experienced, both as a child and as an adult in India and Burma.

Orwell’s intellectual fright of a rampaging colonial mentality, that he witnessed at very close range, made him instinctively conscious of what moral degradation totalitarianism could sink to, in the guise of maintaining discipline amongst the subject people. War had ended by the time he got down to writing Nineteen eighty-four and Imperial Britain was on the retreat from far flung colonies. Orwell’s incisive mind and a unique prophetic vision could see that the colonial mentality would not die down with the evaporation of the colonies. He feared the colonial mindset replicating itself in the mother country. His fertile imagination and facile pen teamed up to conjure a penetrating indictment of totalitarian rule.

Orwell’s Oceania is an island-nation like his native England. It is, however, in thrall to ‘The Big Brother’, an autocratic ruler who keeps watching all his people with the help of the video eye. He is served by a cabal of machiavellian, snooping and conniving advisers. The name of the game is to keep the haunted people of Oceania perpetually in fear of the ‘enemy’ waiting to pounce on them. For survival, therefore, Oceania must remain at war with its rivals in order to keep the vandals away.

Orwell had the insight to know that a totalitarian state would usurp personal liberties and freedoms in the name of ‘security’. He wrote, back in 1940 when the world was in the jaws of war: “We are moving into an age of totalitarianism...an age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous person is going to be stomped out of action.” A notorious character of Nineteen eighty-four, a principal adviser to the Big Brother, by the name of O’Brien, tells a thoroughly sceptical and disillusioned Winston, the novel’s hero: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.”

Anyone doubting the vintage freshness of Orwell’s vision would just have to look at the muzzling of free expression in the ‘land of personal freedoms’ in the aftermath of September 11. Duped and dazed Americans have little idea how fast, and how comprehensively, their personal freedoms are being whittled away in the name of security. For the moment, they are quite willing to part with their freedoms — just as the bewildered masses of Oceania did — because of hyped security concerns. As another reviewer of Meyer’s said , “Each time I hear terms such as ‘collateral damage’ or ‘holy war’, I recall the ministry of information (or disinformation) in Oceania.” What he didn’t say is that CNN and its ilk are doing, in this age and time, exactly what the disinformation arm of Oceania was expected to do.

Orwell not only gave our age a perspective to judge against, howsoever wintry that perspective may be, he also gave the English language some new expressions which have since become global in use. Words like “Big brother is watching”, “thought-police”, “double-think”, “unspeak”, “unperson”, “the memory hole” et al. are now in everyday use, and the users don’t even know who they should be indebted to for this universal lingo.

Finally, Meyers unravels the mystery behind the perplexing title of 1984. Many a critic had been at sea to explain why Orwell chose this title? Meyers found the clue to it in a letter Orwell wrote to a contemporary of his, Malcolm Muggeridge, in 1948. Orwell said he was lost for a title for the book that Muggeridge had called Utopia in reverse. “Perhaps I might just reverse today’s date,” wrote Orwell, “1948 to 1984.”

 

Orwell: wintry conscience of a generation

By Jeffrey Meyers

W.W. Norton

ISBN 039304792X

398pp. £19.95

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