WE TEND TO invoke George Orwell when discussing freedom of thought, opposition to tyranny, or the rights of the working class. These were recurring subjects in the author’s expansive oeuvre and preoccupations in his private life. What is often overlooked, though, is Orwell’s fraught relationship to British colonialism and how it came to shape his complex political beliefs.
Orwell was born in a little brick bungalow in a city called Motihari on June 25, 1903. His father was a civil servant of the most dismal variety: he helped oversee opium production for the British Raj, the Crown’s governing system that had taken “British India” off the hands of the East India Company half a century earlier.
