V V: Why Orwell matters

In the past … the idea of rebellion and the idea of intellectual integrity were mixed up. A heretic – political, moral, religious or aesthetic – was one who refused to outrage his own conscience... [Nowadays] the dangerous proposition [is that] freedom is undesirable and intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness ... [But] to write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox… The enemy of clear language is insincerity.”(George Orwell,“The prevention of literature”, 1945).

Why has George Orwell become so relevant today? His life was filled with more than its share of unpleasantness and danger, nor were his contemporary critics particularly kind to him. But history has treated him well, proving him right about the key issues of the twentieth century. In the bipolar political climate of the 1930s and 1940s, when intellectuals of the left and the right were ganging up with either of the Big Two, Orwell saw the choice between Stalinism and capitalism as no choice at all —that the real struggle was between freedom and tyranny and that politics was not a matter of allegiance to a party or camp. What he did believe in was his own sensibility — or what he described as “his power of facing unpleasant facts”. Orwell was a prolific writer — six novels and innumerable essays were brought together in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters in four volumes. Now A Life in Letters (Penguin, Rs 399) rounds off his entire body of writings. Some basic themes dominated Orwell’s writings.

 

First, the importance of language was spelt out in his classic essay, “Politics and the English Language”. This essay anticipated what we now debate under the rubric of psychobabble, bureaucratic speech and political correction.

Second is his work on the English question as well as related matters of regional nationalism and European integration. Recall his observation that while “India is potentially a nation, as Europe, with its smaller population and great regional homogeneity, is not”. This should obviate acres of print about whether there will ever be a United States of Europe.

Third is his interest in popular culture and in what is now called “cultural studies”.

Fourth, objective or verifiable truth fascinated him.

Put all these four factors together and what emerges that attracted writers and critics is the importance he gave to English prose and political honesty. The pressures of monopoly and bureaucracy, “of corporatism and conservatism”, limiting and narrowing the range of what is published are well known. But the corruption in public life, to begin with, was not because of the structures of capitalist power but because of debasement of language in everyday life.

As he put it in “Politics and the English Language”, “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic consequences; it is not due to bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on infinitely. A man may drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It is ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Orwell was a shrewd political observer but his observations were based on direct experience of the underworld where he often found himself in the Imperial Police. While working as a policeman in Burma he experienced the complexities of the Empire and its insidious effects on the coloniser and the colonised alike, which are beautifully described in Shooting an Elephant. He is drafted by a Burmese mob to kill a giant elephant on heat. As he strides towards the elephant pressed by the expectations of the crowd he first understands that he may not be as free to decide to describe his own actions as he thought before hand.

It was always his personal experiences that formed the basis of his writings; there was nothing phony about it. While fighting in the Spanish Civil War along the anarchists of Catalonia he witnessed the wickedness of Stalinism; and in Paris, London and the various mining towns of northern England where he immersed himself in life at the lowest rungs of society, he saw the pitfalls of attempts by both the Church and the State to elevate the poor.

In trying to pin down Orwell’s passion for “liberty and intellectual honesty” you are reminded of Hamlet’s lines:
This above all: to thine own self
be true,
And it must follow, as the night
the day,
Thou canst not then be false to
any man.

Could there be a better epitaph for Orwell?