Textual Practice 16(3), 2002, 473–490

Douglas Kerr
Orwell’s BBC broadcasts: colonial discourse and the rhetoric of
propaganda

This essay analyses the rhetoric of colonial discourse in a special, and

especially conflicted, case, that of the weekly news commentaries which
George Orwell wrote for broadcast by the BBC to British India in those years
of the Second World War when the subcontinent was threatened by Japanese
invasion.
From August 1941 to November 1943 Orwell worked as a Talks
Assistant, later Talks Producer, in the Indian Section of the British
Broadcasting Corporation’s Eastern Service, based in London.1 The Indian
Section broadcast to its subcontinental listeners a mixture of news, news
commentary, features and arts programmes. Orwell worked very hard during
his time at the BBC, though without much enthusiasm. The army had
rejected him when he tried to enlist in 1939, not surprisingly on the grounds
of health, and he had been frustrated in his efforts to Ž nd more rewarding
war work. Reviewing a revival of Chu Chin Chow at the Palace Theatre in
the summer of 1940 had seemed a particularly futile and humiliating
way to spend your time in a historical crisis (12:215–16).2 And so when the
offer came from the BBC, Orwell accepted it faute de mieux. He laboured
at it conscientiously for more than two years, in his longest stint of full-
time employment since leaving the Burma Police in 1927. When he left,
it was for two main reasons. First, his BBC duties left him no time for
sustained work on his own writing projects (the moment he quit the BBC
in November 1943, he began drafting Animal Farm).3 Second, the BBC’s
own research in India had revealed, rather late in the day, that there were
few radio sets in the subcontinent that were able to receive the broadcasts
from London, and that the number of Indians listening (or ‘listening in’)
to the English-language programmes of the Indian Section was in all likeli-
hood pitifully small.4 ‘What caused Orwell to leave was his realization that
he was wasting his time and, as he had a puritanical belief that time was given
us to be productively employed, he found that at first galling and then
intolerable.’ 5

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236021016343 5
Textual Practice

There was another reason for Orwell to feel unhappy about his BBC
work, and this was a matter of principle. Although the BBC was a corporation
and not a department of government, there was never a possibility of its
being independent in wartime, and long before 1939 it had been widely
understood that radio would have an important role to play in informa-
tion and propaganda once the war came. The BBC, like the print media,
came under the supervision of the Ministry of Information, housed in the
University of London Senate House and later to serve as a model for the
Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Scripts were vetted twice in
advance, for policy and security, and a switch censor monitored all broadcasts,
ready (at least in theory) to interrupt transmission if there was any deviation
from the authorized script. The policy to which broadcasts had to conform,
with regard to India, was that it was imperative for Indians to remain loyal
to the King-Emperor in this time of crisis, and especially after the entry of
Japan into the war with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which
placed all Britain’s eastern possessions under threat. In 1942 as the victorious
Japanese army swept across southeast Asia and up through Burma, there was
serious concern in London that the loss of India might mean the loss of the
war. Orwell seems to have shared that view, and assented to its consequence,
which was that the chief function of BBC broadcasting to India at this time
was to keep Indians loyal to the Raj. His dilemma was that this imperative
went directly against his own conviction, born of his own service in the forces
of the Empire in Burma and developed over a decade of increasingly radical
political thinking, of what he called ‘the inherent evil of imperialism’ (10:
508). A condemnation of Empire was the Ž rst principle of a political identity
formed not on the road to Wigan Pier but on the road to Mandalay. ‘If
I thought that a victory in the present war would mean nothing beyond a
new lease of life for British imperialism,’ he had written early in 1940 during
the Phony War, ‘I should be inclined to side with Russia and Germany’
(12:122–3). Now, in his ofŽ ce in the Eastern Service of the BBC, Orwell
found himself a functionary of an ideological state apparatus dedicated to
the survival of the British empire in the East which he had been excoriat-
ing for more than a decade. ‘It was the commitment to anti-fascism that
sustained Orwell through the compromises of principle that he was obliged
to make as a propagandist.’6 The BBC Eastern Service in wartime was
an organ of colonial discourse, propagating the word, and the worldview, of
the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people. Orwell’s news
commentaries are texts of that discourse which particularly repay attention
for their complicated modality, as the voice of the Empire at war (‘London
calling!’), the state, the institution of the BBC, and the compromised yet
determined author himself.
Much of Orwell’s work in the Indian Section was in the making of
features and arts programmes, and for this he was able to assemble a very

474
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

impressive team of contributors, many of them his personal friends from the
worlds of literature, politics and journalism. The orientation of the Indian
Section to the arts and ideas was not only a re ection of Orwell’s own tastes
and professional contacts, and those of his superiors, but also a sign of the
decision, by those who made the Indian broadcasts, to ‘attempt to catch the
young Indian intellectual’, as Brander’s report puts it frankly (15:346).7 The
most vocal opposition to British rule in India over the previous twenty years
had come from well-educated middle-class Indians, and it was these people
whom the Indian broadcasts were determined to attract, through offering
a ‘highbrow’ programme content, in the hope of strengthening their ties
and therefore loyalties to Britain. Orwell’s arts and features programmes for
the BBC are certainly worth a separate study. This essay however is more
concerned with the news commentaries (also referred to as ‘newsletters’) he
wrote for weekly broadcast, some in English and some for translation into
Indian vernaculars. These texts are especially rich in ideological content
because their nature is both historiographical and hegemonic. They are
interpretations of the world events unfolding week by week in the most
critical months of the war, and offer their Indian listeners a view of those
events as seen from the imperial centre, a view that aims to convince Indians
that their own interest as a nation, as well as the cause of freedom around the
world, lies in their continued loyalty to the British in this time of peril. It was
certainly a strange contortion, whereby the anti-imperialist Orwell found
himself directing propaganda for the Raj at the most disaffected and anti-
British section of the Indian population. But it was a matter of priorities. Late
in 1942, when it was suggested that the hitherto anonymous and ‘editorial’
news commentaries should be broadcast over his own name, he noted that
his literary reputation in India probably arose ‘chie y from books of an anti-
imperialist tendency’ (14:100),8 and that in the broadcasts he had generally
taken an anti-fascist rather than an imperialist standpoint. ‘These commen-
taries have always followed what is by implication a “left” line, and in fact have
contained very little that I would not sign with my own name’ (14:101).
The broadcasts, then, participate in colonial discourse in being part
of that body of statements that shapes the relation between the colonial
power and its colonized subjects. Their author is George Orwell, journalist
and novelist, the writing subject of Eric Blair, a man whose provenance,
experience and views are present in all his writing. But the broadcasts are also
subject to a particularly complex set of determinations, inhabiting a sort of
magnetic Ž eld where a number of sometimes contending forces help to give
it shape. To the question of who speaks in an ideologically charged text of this
kind, the answer will always be in the plural. Any utterance beyond the
elementary is multi-authored, determined by a number of authorities –
linguistic, ideological, discursive, psychological – of varying force. To examine
the broadcasts as colonial discourse it will be useful to see what these are.

475
Textual Practice

One determination is the authority of the state, dispensed through

the Ministry of Information in the form of directives sent periodically to
BBC producers, monitoring of broadcasts, and the mechanism of censor-
ship whereby every broadcast was vetted in advance for conformity to
government policy, and for security. If there is a hierarchy of such operative
authorities, this one must rank among the highest; it is hard to imagine the
need to preserve essential military secrets, for example, being overridden by
any other consideration. Broadcasters might be advised how the government
wanted particular news items handled, and a dialogue of a sort might ensue.
For example, when Sir Stafford Cripps was sent to India to discuss proposals
for Indian independence with Congress leaders and others, Orwell was
instructed to give Cripps a build-up in his newsletters; but having proposed
to ‘build him up as a political extremist’, he was warned not to go too far in
that direction (13:229). The Cripps mission failed, relations with Congress
deteriorated, and when India was plunged into rioting after the imprison-
ment of Nehru, Gandhi and others, Orwell recorded in his war diary on
12 August 1942 that BBC staff had been sent an ‘appalling’ policy handout
from the Ministry about affairs in India, which declared the riots were of
no signiŽ cance, young Indians were taking part in them in the spirit of a
students’ rag, the situation was well in hand, and so on. The following day,
a reference to Nehru was cut out of an announcement, ‘N. being in prison
and therefore having become Bad’ (13:475). Orwell’s next newsletter
contained no mention of Indian affairs, the state’s participation in the
discourse being felt in this instance as silence. As far as the broadcasts were
concerned, Nehru had gone down the memory hole.
In Newsletter 10 (to give a different sort of example) broadcast on 14
February 1942 during the disastrous battle of Singapore, the authority of
the state is registered as the arbiter of what can and cannot be said. The state
never speaks directly, but expresses itself through the stylistic choice of a kind
of sober strategic realism, a command of the facts and a willingness to face
and share them fearlessly, which gives credibility to expressions of conŽ dence,
none the less, in the Ž nal outcome of the war. There is no direct appeal for
loyalty, for example, but the steadfastness of the common people of Britain,
subject as they are to rationing and austerity, is an example which speaks for
itself.

The ordinary people who have to put up with these restrictions do not
grumble, and are even heard to say that they would welcome greater
sacriŽ ces, if these would set free more shipping for the war effort, since
they have a clear understanding of the issue, and set much more store
by their liberty than by the comfort they have been accustomed to in
peace-time.
(13:180–1)

476
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

The sinister (or can it be comical?) construction of what ordinary people

‘are heard to say’ bleaches out the agent of this eavesdropping while giving
this exemplary pluck a sort of empirical status. Here at the same time is an
educative example for Indians, for the populace of the metropolis are
strategically conscious and have a clear understanding of the issue, and so
recognize that their own interests depend ultimately on the outcome of the
global conflict. The state is not pursuing a narrow national interest. Its
rationing policy is undertaken, and stoically accepted by its citizens, in the
interests of the world.
If the state, through the Ministry, was one institutional participant
in Orwell’s broadcasts, the BBC itself was another. As a national though not
a government broadcaster, the BBC’s interest coincided with or deferred to
that of the state on political matters; it may be properly described as an
ideological state apparatus. The expansion of the Empire Service into the
Overseas Service in November 1939 had been prompted partly by the need
to counter Axis propaganda, and to enable the BBC ‘with enhanced power
to convey to all parts of the world truthful news and a prompt, clear and
insistent exposition of British policy’.9 But neither the corporation nor the
state wanted the BBC to be thought of as a government mouthpiece, and so
the BBC’s participation in discourse such as Orwell’s newsletters is felt mostly
in rhetorical habits of judiciousness, restraint and a gentlemanly tone, a
commitment to veriŽ able facts, and an unwillingness to exhort or browbeat
the listener. Newsletter 10, mentioned above, written at one of the lowest
moments of the war from the Allied point of view, notes as a fact that the
main manufacturing centres of America, Britain and Russia are out of reach
of German and Japanese attack.

The Allied Powers, therefore, are able immensely to outbuild the Axis
Powers, and in a year or two years bring together a force which will be
all but irresistible. But they have undoubtedly a difŽ cult time ahead,
and they may have a period when they are almost in conditions of
siege, and when resolution, calmness and faith in Ž nal victory, will be
at least as important as physical weapons of war.
(13:179–80)

This is a classic BBC statement in its apparently neutral commitment to

factuality, the absconding modality of the third-person pronoun (‘they have
undoubtedly a difficult time ahead’) and the loose disguise of its call for
action in the form of agentless nominalizations (resolution and the rest)
leading a proleptic narrative statement. The propaganda is to conceal the
propaganda.
In 1943 when Orwell edited Talking to India, a selection of broad-
cast scripts from the Eastern Service which was distributed in India, he

477
Textual Practice

instructively juxtaposed some examples of his own newsletters (frankly

described as ‘Five Specimens of Propaganda’) with the transcript of a ‘Talk
in English’ by Subhas Chandra Bose.10 Bose is stirring, oratorical. The
rhetorical contrast makes Orwell’s language seem impressively cool and
assured – in fact, hardly like ‘propaganda’ at all. The constitution and repu-
tation of the BBC dictated that its war propaganda was soft, its institutional
interest self-effacing, its ideological positions as naturalized as possible.
Meanwhile the BBC provided the technology and the medium, and the
institutional matrix, of the broadcasts, which had to conform to constraints
of timing, usage and genre (though producers were allowed some freedom
to develop the latter).
No other formal institutions made a signiŽ cant claim on the discourse
of Orwell’s broadcasts. He was subject to no orthodoxies. After his brief
membership of the Independent Labour Party lapsed, he owed loyalty to no
political party, nor had he ever been a member of a church. He thought of
himself as anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, a socialist and a democrat. He was also
a patriot, though not a nationalist, and had written The Lion and the Unicorn:
Socialism and the English Genius in 1940 to explain what he thought this
meant.11 These positions were not institutionalized in a particular party but
were principles, idiosyncratically interpreted in some cases, in which Orwell
felt a personal and emotional stake. These convictions, sometimes at odds
with ofŽ cial policy and sometimes not, are factors in the broadcasts. Without
a doubt, what Orwell found to say would also have been in uenced by the
views and styles of those with whom he had frequent conversation, notably
including broadcasters who were also his friends, such as William Empson
who was his counterpart in the Chinese Section of the Eastern Service, and
Mulk Raj Anand who wrote scripts and broadcasts for the BBC throughout
the war. Orwell made a point of telling listeners that he was ‘the only
European in the Indian section of the BBC’ (13:163), and when he produced
discussion programmes he took care to ensure that at least one Indian speaker
was always involved.12 This is the place to mention Zulfaqar Ali Bokhari, the
Indian Programme Organizer and Orwell’s immediate boss at the BBC, not
least because it was he who actually read out most of Orwell’s early newsletters
on air.13 All these news commentaries, until a change of policy in November
1942, were written in an impersonal style, anonymous, and broadcast in
an Indian voice, an accentuation that has a bearing on the discourse and
probably the reception of the texts. For example, we may consider the
modality of Orwell’s words in Newsletter 10 – ‘This is not an encouraging
picture, and we have deliberately put it at its worst, in order to get a realistic
and unvarnished view of the situation’ (13:179) – when spoken by an Indian
voice.
It seemed appropriate (though this policy was changed later) to make
the newsletters sound like a conversation, an Indian speaking to Indians.14

478
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

The producers in the Indian Section were uncomfortably aware that their
Indian audience, such as it was, was potentially hostile (14:214, for example).
It was reckoned that listeners to English-language broadcasts in India would
be mostly students, and it was among students that anti-British feeling
was strongest. ‘Many, perhaps most, Indian intellectuals are emotionally
pro-Japanese,’ Orwell wrote in July 1942, but he thought they were also
‘reliably anti-Fascist in proportion as they are Westernized’ (he was no doubt
thinking of his friend Mulk Raj Anand) (13:381). The English language,
he concluded, was a weapon that could be used to nurture and articulate
a sort of cultural united front, which could help to defeat Japan in Asia
and perhaps in due course deliver a socialist postcolonial India. In fact, he
spent much more time at the BBC writing and producing cultural and
educational programmes than he devoted to propaganda, and incidentally
brought to the microphone an impressive array of speakers that included, as
well as Empson and Anand, Stephen Spender, E.M. Forster, Herbert Reed,
T.S. Eliot, John Lehmann, V.S. Pritchett, Sean O’Casey and many other
writers, not to mention budding media stars like J.B.S. Haldane and C.E.M.
Joad.
The newsletters, however, were a constant. In his two years at the BBC
he wrote 104 or 105 for broadcast in English, and 115 or 116 for translation
into various Asian vernaculars (only a quarter of these survive). These were
not news bulletins, but a commentary on the week’s events, usually in the
form of an attempt to find their significance in the broader context of
the war.15 They may be thought of as standing in relation to news bulletins
as the weekly to the daily press. Orwell of course had made his living as a
commentator, and he brings to this radio genre many of the habits that
characterized his print journalism. His writing about the course of the war
in the newsletters – this is their main topic – was perhaps helped less by his
actual experience as a soldier in Spain in 1937 than by the fact that he had
monitored the newspaper reporting, and reviewed most of the vast number
of books published in recent years, which purported to narrate and explain
what happened in the Spanish Civil War.16 He adapted comfortably to the
genre, though when he began to read his own newsletters on air from
November 1942, there were changes of style and rhetoric which accompanied
the entry of personality into the discourse, but this had the effect of making
the broadcasts even closer to the kind of journalistic writing he had developed
in print media before joining the BBC.
It is not surprising that he thought of his radio work in terms of the more
familiar medium of print. When he devised ‘Voice’, a regular feature devoted
to reading and discussing poetry, he called it a ‘magazine programme’, and
in the Ž rst number he asked his listeners to imagine the publication in front
of them (‘One advantage of a magazine of this kind is that you can choose
your own cover design’), and to move through its twenty-seven and a half

479
Textual Practice

minutes’ time as if it were printed space (‘Now please turn to page four’)
(13:459–69). But there are important differences between airtime and the
printed page. Radio speech is both more ephemeral and more demanding
than writing. It leaves no iterable record, it dictates the speed and rhythm of
its reception. Writing can be possessed, set aside, taken up, reread, skimmed.
But radio speech interpellates on its own terms, if it engages at all, through
an oral medium in which the speaker – let alone the writer – is always absent.
It is invisible language, news from nowhere, embodied in neither script nor
speaker. This spectral quality of words ‘on air’ (at that stage in the technology
of broadcasting) has implications for modality and discourse. The anony-
mous commentaries spoke in a voice that was not that of a person, though
it had an accent, which was Indian. Being disembodied and apparently
context-free, but also globally knowledgeable and authoritative, it was both
thoroughly naturalized and uncannily oracular.
Having considered questions of authority, rhetoric, genre and medium,
I turn now to intertextuality. Newsletter 10, like Orwell’s other broadcasts,
stands in relation to other texts which play a part in shaping it. News
commentaries depend on news (most news itself is created out of earlier
news) and it is clear from his diaries that Orwell was a voracious consumer
of the news media, which  ourished in wartime though hampered by the
paper shortage.17 The BBC was an information-gathering as well as a broad-
casting organization, and staff had access to the reports of its Monitoring
Service which translated and transcribed radio broadcasts all around the
world. It is this invaluable journalistic resource that underwrites the authority
with which the strategic gaze of the newsletters sweeps the globe, for the ears
if not the eyes of the BBC were everywhere. But in practice the Monitoring
Service was probably less useful as a source of facts than as a record of the
propaganda of both friends and enemies. It meant, for example, that Orwell
was one of the few writers in England to have actually followed the pro-
fascist broadcasts Ezra Pound made in Italy (16:81). After Hitler’s invasion
of Russia, which turned the USSR overnight from an enemy into an ally of
Britain, Orwell relayed Soviet reports of their military successes in his
newsletters to his Indian audience, although privately he was sceptical. ‘From
studying the German and Russian wireless I have long come to the conclusion
that the reports of Russian victories are largely phony’, he confessed in his
diary (13:229). Some fruits of the BBC’s global vantage were not for export.
The most important body of discourse to which Orwell’s broad-
casts relate may be described as contratextual. This contratextual material
comprises enemy propaganda which might be reaching India, and many of
Orwell’s newsletters engage with this discourse antagonist directly.18 As we
have seen, counter-propaganda was an important part of the brief of the
BBC’s overseas services, particularly urgent in the case of India where loyalties
could certainly not be taken for granted.

480
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

The strategy of the newsletters is to engage in dialogue with the

countertext by analysis and refutation. Orwell gives his Indian listeners a
counsel of vigilance. India’s borders are secure, so that this may seem like
somebody else’s war, but they have already been invaded by words.

Meanwhile, even when there is a lull in the actual Ž ghting, there is

one kind of war that never stops for an instant, night or day, and that
is the propaganda war. To the Axis powers, propaganda is an actual
weapon, like guns or bombs, and to learn how to discount it is as
important as taking cover during an air raid.
(13:126)

The Germans and Japanese, ‘adepts at propaganda’ (and it seems it is only

in their hands that propaganda is ‘an actual weapon’), work to divide and
confuse their enemies by lies, misleading rumours, threats, bribes and false
promises. Orwell reassured his listeners that they could remain untouched
by Axis propaganda if they only followed a simple and unfailing rule. ‘This
is, to compare what the Axis powers say they will do with what they are
actually doing’ (ibid.). It was this critical service that the newsletters were
careful to provide, and they did so on the basis of that unparalleled access to
the real events of the world, for which the BBC was famous. The main issue
here, and certainly the most sensitive one, was the Japanese claim to be setting
the East free from Western domination and economic exploitation. Japanese
propaganda was selling ‘the picture of a war of Asia against Europe’ (ibid.).
One of Orwell’s strongest themes, regularly revisited, is this claim and its
incompatibility with the facts – most glaringly, with the years of Japanese
aggression against China.

Even in the present war, they are Ž ghting far more against Asiatics
than against Europeans. In the Philippine islands the resistance to
Japanese attack is kept up mainly by Filipinos, in Malaya by Indians
as much as by the British, in the Dutch East Indies by Javanese and
Sumatrans. One of the opening acts of the war was the wanton
bombing of Rangoon by the Japanese, in which hundreds of innocent
Burmese were killed. Moreover, in those Asiatic territories which the
Japanese have ruled over for a long time, we can see what their
behaviour actually is towards subject peoples.
(13:127)

As a shield against Japanese blandishments, the Indians are offered infor-

mation. The opposite of Japanese propaganda is not British propaganda,
but the veriŽ able facts. This enables Orwell to engage with the countertext
in a rhetoric which is not pro-imperial (exhorting loyalty to the Raj) but

481
Textual Practice

anti-imperial (warning of Japanese designs on India). The Japanese propa-

ganda offensive gives Orwell both the content and strategy for his broadcast,
appealing to India for solidarity in resisting imperialism without ever
mentioning British imperial rule in India. Here is a coincidence between
the interest of the state (keeping India on side) and Orwell’s loathing of
imperialism (of the kind Japan was undoubtedly in icting on much of East
Asia) bizarrely coming together to make a case for the continuation of the
present relationship between Britain and India – without actually making
that case, since British rule of India is not mentioned here. The choice is not
between two forms of persuasion, or even two forms of political authority,
but between Japanese words and the actual facts of the matter. Facts clinch
the British case to India and, being themselves indisputable, they naturalize
it. It is a good example of the non-propaganda propaganda practised in the
BBC and supported by its reputation for truth-telling.19 Orwell did prefer
truth to propaganda and he did believe that India was better off under British
rule than it would be under the Japanese. But the consequence is an implicit
endorsement of a picture of the British Empire in India in a traditional
paternalistic light, with the helpless people of the subcontinent sheltering
under the bountiful shadow of Britain’s superior power and dependable
knowledge – a classically ‘Orientalist’ picture.
While the broadcasts engage directly with their countertext, they are in
often covert relation with another body of statements, which I will call
paratexts. These are the writings Orwell was doing in other outlets and for
other audiences while he worked for the BBC broadcasting to India, writings
to which for the most part the Indian broadcasts are blind. The wartime
diary is an example which can cast a different light on some of the topics of
the newsletters. Told to ‘build up’ Cripps when his mission to India was
announced, Orwell obliged in the newsletter of 14 March 1942. Sir Stafford
Cripps, he said, ‘has long been recognized as the ablest man in the British
Socialist movement, and he is respected for his absolute integrity even by
those who are at the opposite pole from him politically’ (13:224). He went
on to praise Cripps’ record of vigorous anti-fascism in the 1930s, allowing
himself a dig at ‘the too cautious policy of the Labour Party’ and, by
implication, of the National Government, and ended with a flourish.
‘Everyone in Britain is delighted to see such an important mission as the
one which Cripps is now undertaking, conferred upon a man whom even
his critics admit to be gifted, trustworthy and self-sacrificing’ (13:225).
Orwell did, as a matter of fact, have a high opinion of Cripps, but the
optimism of the broadcast newsletter is not shared by the entry in his diary
the same day.

The actual date of Cripps’s departure for India was not given out, but
presumably he has gone by this time. Ordinary public opinion here

482
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

seems gloomy about his departure. A frequent comment – ‘They’ve

done it to get him out of the way’ (which is also one of the reasons
alleged on the German wireless). This is very silly and re ects
the provincialism of English people who can’t grasp that India is of
any importance. Better-informed people are pessimistic because the
non-publication of the government’s terms to India indicates almost
certainly that they are not good terms.
(13:228–9)

The diary is constrained by no institutional authority, and its cynicism

about the mission’s outcome is likely to be closer to Orwell’s own feelings at
the time than the semi-ofŽ cial optimism of the newsletter. Still, the diary is
no romantic self-communing, since Orwell did have a vague plan to publish
it at some later date, so it does have an embryonic orientation to some British
reading public: it is more in the nature of a dramatic aside than a soliloquy.
A later comment in the diary reads the eventual failure of the Cripps mission
as demonstrating ‘the fact that the Indian intelligentsia don’t want indepen-
dence, ie. responsibility’, and expresses some satisfaction that the breakdown
of negotiations is to the discredit of both the British ruling class and the
Indian nationalists (13:276). Such sentiments are kept out of the Indian
broadcasts, naturally, but the publication of Orwell’s Collected Works allows
them to be read in paratextual complementarity – and with some irony
too, in the light of Orwell’s advice to his Indian listeners to be alert to the
inconsistency of Axis propaganda, saying different and contradictory things
at different times, or to different audiences.
The BBC itself was far from monolithically super-efficient in this
respect, even within the Eastern Service, as an example will show. Orwell
regularly alleged in his newsletters in early 1942 that the Japanese were
plotting to attack the USSR (which was at war with Germany but not with
Japan). He did not actually believe this, but his reasoning was as follows.
If Japan attacked Russia, he would be proved right. If Russia attacked Japan,
he could say this was under provocation, and that the Japanese started it.
And if nobody attacked anyone, this would prove that the Japanese were too
frightened of Russia to try to attack it (13:229). This seemed  awless, until
he discovered that the Chinese Section of the BBC, down the corridor, was
following a different line.

Empson tells me that there is a strict ban by the Foreign OfŽ ce on

any suggestion that Japan is going to attack the USSR. So this subject
is being studiously avoided in the Far Eastern broadcasts while
being pushed all the time in the Indian broadcasts. They haven’t yet
got onto the fact that we are saying this, we haven’t been warned and
don’t ofŽ cially know about the ban, and are making the best of our

483
Textual Practice

opportunity while it lasts. The same chaos everywhere on the propa-

ganda front.
(13:239)

They order these matters better in Oceania (in Nineteen Eighty-Four),

where Winston Smith’s job is to erase inconsistencies of fact and policy day
by day, to ensure the totalitarian ideal of a frictionless monological discourse.
The propagandists in London in wartime were still some way from that
utopia of discourse. Orwell, for example, was talking to America in terms that
were sometimes at odds with what he was saying to India. His regular London
letters for Partisan Review in the USA, like his writing for Tribune, could
count on a well-informed and quite intimate readership hospitable to left-
wing views.20 He could conŽ de his belief to this audience that Stafford Cripps
had ‘made the mistake of entering the government and the almost equally
bad one of going to India with an offer which was certain to be turned down’
(13:305). But now, in May 1942, with the war going badly, Orwell believed
that a ‘revolutionary situation’ existed at home, and that there was a chance
that Cripps would emerge as a popular leader, quitting the government and
proclaiming a revolutionary policy – in which case he might yet play a crucial
role in the end of Empire. This produces a strategic reading of the state of
the world and the war for the American readers of Partisan Review startlingly
different from the analyses expounded for the listeners of the Indian
newsletters.

To some small extent things have happened as I foresaw. One can

after all discern the outlines of a revolutionary world war. Britain has
been forced into alliance with Russia and China and into restoring
Abyssinia and making fairly generous treaties with the Middle Eastern
countries, and because of, among other things, the need to raise a huge
air force a serious breach has been made in the class system. The
defeats in the Far East have gone a long way towards killing the old
conception of imperialism. But there was a sort of gap in the ladder
which we never got over and which it was perhaps impossible to get
over while no revolutionary party and no able leftwing leadership
existed. This may or may not have been altered by the emergence of
Cripps. I think it is certain that a new political party will have to arise
if anything is to be changed, and the obvious bankruptcy of the old
parties may hasten this. Maybe Cripps will lose his lustre quite quickly
if he does not get out of the government. But at present, in his peculiar
isolated position, he is the likeliest man for any new movement to
crystallise round. If he fails, God save us from the other probable
alternatives to Churchill.
(13:308)

484
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

This exciting prognosis seems not to have bothered the censor who
monitored mail sent to the USA, but it may be imagined that it would
not have been well received if offered as part of a BBC broadcast to India.
Orwell kept his hopes for a ‘revolutionary world war’ from his Indian
audience; but they were not incompatible with the promotion of an anti-
fascist alliance between Indians and the people of a Britain mobilized against
tyranny.
The paratexts raise a difŽ cult question about the consistency of Orwell’s
political disposition towards India and the Empire. The broadcasts, as we
have seen, took place in an institutional matrix that determined their agenda
in advance. This was, in brief, the use of the instruments of colonial
technology, knowledge and authority, to inform and entertain an Indian
audience while trying to secure their loyalty in wartime. Orwell was quite
ready to assent to this hegemonic agenda for the time being, since in his view
the defeat of the Axis powers took precedence over everything else. Besides
victory, but in his view impossible without it, was a list of other political
desiderata, including an end to European rule in the East as soon as this
could be safely accomplished, a domestic socialist revolution of the sort
imagined in The Lion and the Unicorn in 1940, and some kind of interna-
tional federation to supersede the destructive nationalisms of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.21 This other agenda is almost entirely unheard in
the broadcasts, though its components are often at issue in the paratextual
writing Orwell was engaged in during his time at the BBC. He was probably
telling the truth when he claimed that his newsletters for India in fact
contained very little that he would not sign with his own name (14:101). The
problem lay in what they were not able to say, and this accounts for the sense
of liberation he described when he did Ž nally leave the BBC, late in 1943,
to become literary editor of Tribune where his regular column was called
‘As I Please’. None of these other political desires is quite incompatible with
the main agenda of the broadcasts, though each is placed further down the
order of precedence. Their presence in the paratextual writings, of which the
broadcast texts are discursively unaware since they exist in a separate and
watertight segment of the public sphere, does not make Orwell a hypocrite.
Everyone says different things appropriate to different contexts. But it put
him uncomfortably close to the position he remembered occupying in his
earlier incarnation as a servant of colonial discourse, as a young man in the
Imperial Police in Burma. Burmese Days declares that ‘it is a corrupting thing
to live one’s real life in secret’.22 Orwell was not keeping his views secret, but
he was keeping them separate.
One alarming paratext, from the diary, needs to be mentioned and
has to be quoted fully. It sits very uncomfortably with the broadcasts’
cultivation of a relationship of respect and solidarity between Indians and
English.

485
Textual Practice

Talking to Wintringham[23] about the possible Russian attitude

towards the Cripps negotiations (of course, not being in the war
against Japan, they can’t have an ofŽ cial attitude) I said it might make
things easier if as many as possible of the military instructors etc. who
will later have to be sent to India were Russians. One possible outcome
is that India will ultimately be taken over by the USSR, and though
I have never believed that the Russians would behave better in India
than ourselves, they might behave differently, owing to the different
economic set-up. Wintringham said that even in Spain some of the
Russian delegates tended to treat the Spaniards as ‘natives’, and would
no doubt do likewise in India. It’s very hard not to, seeing that in
practice the majority of Indians are inferior to Europeans and one can’t
help feeling this and, after a little while, acting accordingly.
(13:276)

This passage is in the manuscript diary but was omitted from the typed
version; it was never intended for publication. How are we to take this
statement about the ‘inferiority’ of most Indians? In his published writings
throughout his career Orwell was quite consistent in repudiating the
biological determinism of racism.24 Indeed, as the war progressed he returns
frequently to this theme, under the pressure of events ranging from the news
of Nazi genocide to the presence of black American servicemen in London.
On the other hand, he certainly believed in cultural determinism, in the way
that the social conŽ gurations of class, money and prestige could condition
re exes in the individual that might never be unlearned. The ‘inferiority’ of
most Indians to a European in a colonial context – British or, as it might be,
Russian India – was then a registration of the fact that in such a context,
relations would inevitably be in most cases asymmetrical, the Indian having
less power, money, prestige and so on, and one result of this being the
foreigner falling into the overbearing habit of treating the other as a ‘native’
– bullying or patronizing. Seen in this way, it is a repetition of an idea present
in Orwell’s earlier writings about colonialism, in ‘A Hanging’, Burmese Days,
‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘Marrakech’, ‘Not Counting Niggers’ and elsewhere,
where he analyses the pernicious effect of Empire on both participants in the
transaction. That this ‘inferiority’ would dissolve with the end of Empire is
one of Orwell’s most powerful anti-imperial arguments. The possession of
an empire had made it difŽ cult for the British to regard people of other races
as fully human beings. With the end of Empire this terrible handicap might
be removed. Orwell found it hard to envisage a postcolonial world in detail
but the one people he was sure would beneŽ t from it was his own.
Even so, that sentence, even in a non-communicative context, is
alarming. Although I do not believe it is a racist statement, prima facie it is
a statement about the inferiority of Indians to Europeans, and I doubt it

486
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

could have been made by someone whose position was completely coherent
on this matter. It is to say the least a disturbing moment, and a further
impediment to any attempt to read Orwell’s political and emotional attitude
to India as consistent and frictionless. In truth his writing on Indian subjects
in these years is more like a debating chamber of different views. British India
is a capitalist ramp – the standard Leninist position (see e.g. 18:143). India,
like Burma, is a weakling in a hostile world, and needs the protection of
a benign imperial power – the conservative view (15:48). India must be
set free, but the time is not quite right – the liberal line since the 1830s
(15:211). Churchill is a reactionary fantasist (16:272). Gandhi is a
reactionary fantasist (15:214). Colonized ‘natives’ are inferior (13:276). If
they knew their own strength they could set themselves free in a moment
(11:420). Imperialism is unjustiŽ able (15:34), nationalism is no panacea
(15:212–13). The Indian intelligentsia do not want independence (13:276).
India must be given the right to secede (13:188). Britain should immediately
declare India independent (15:213). India cannot be independent (15:211).
Britain clings to its Empire for the plunder it provides (13:153); economi-
cally, it cannot afford to go on doing so (17:340). We have wronged the
Indians, and we have helped to awaken them (13:381). India must support
its imperial master in ‘the world-wide struggle of the free peoples against
aggression’ (14:95).
Orwell’s great polemics at this time, in essays like ‘Politics and the
English language’, insist eloquently upon clarity of expression and consis-
tency of viewpoint, but it can be seen that his own positions here, if not
exactly what would be called doublethinkful in Newspeak, are hardly models
of coherence. This remains the case even after due acknowledgement that
he was writing fast about difŽ cult issues in turbulent times. And it is not
really sufŽ cient to say that much of his writing at this time had a primary
propaganda purpose and was under pressure from official institutional
discourse to Ž lter out certain views as inappropriate, even illicit. He was not
obliged to say anything he dissented from; and he worked at the BBC
voluntarily. His writing in the war years certainly re ects a muddle about
India. That confusion was widespread in British attitudes to India at this
time, re ected in the Cabinet of a National Government that included the
Tory imperialist Churchill and the socialist anti-imperialist Cripps, for
example. But the confusion was also in Orwell himself. It is not just that as
a writer he inhabited different and conflicting discourses, but that these
discourses inhabited him. It was from his uncomfortable recognition of his
own dividedness that his identity as a writer grew; indeed, he saw it as vital
to that identity since an exploration of that dividedness was his subject. The
second part of The Road to Wigan Pier considers the determinations of class,
provenance and early history, and also the inner dynamic, forced by practical
and intellectual experience, which unsettles these determinations but never

487
Textual Practice

obliterates them. For Orwell, as for the writer-anti-hero Gordon Comstock

in the most dialogical of his novels, the struggle of discourse (language and
worldview) which he observes in the outer world is also going on within, in
the context of an individual history.

Notes

1 For Orwell’s BBC career see William Empson, ‘Orwell at the BBC’, in
M. Gross (ed.), The World of George Orwell (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1971), pp. 94–9; Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 3rd edn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); W.J. West, Orwell: The War Broadcasts
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); W.J. West, Orwell: The War Commentaries
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985); Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorized
Biography (London: Heinemann, 1991); Stephen Ingle, George Orwell: A
Political Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Peter Davison,
George Orwell: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Jeffrey Meyers,
Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (New York: Norton, 2000).
2 Volume and page references to Orwell’s writing in the text refer to The
Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison, 20 vols (London: Secker
and Warburg, 1998).
3 It has been argued that increasing problems with the censor in 1943 were
making it harder for Orwell to make the kind of programmes he wanted to
make at the BBC. See West, Orwell: The War Broadcasts, pp. 44–55. The
argument has also been made that the anti-Soviet Animal Farm is a sort of
atonement for Orwell’s involvement in Allied (including pro-Soviet)
propaganda while at the BBC. See C. Fleay and M.L. Sanders, ‘Looking into
the abyss: George Orwell at the BBC’, Journal of Contemporary History,
24 (1989), p. 514. I do not Ž nd either argument very compelling.
4 See the Report on Indian Programmes by Laurence Brander, the BBC’s
Eastern Service Intelligence OfŽ cer, 11 January 1943 (15:343–56). English-
language programmes directed at an Indian audience were characterized by
Brander as ‘our most damaging failure’ (15:346).
5 Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life, p. 119.
6 Fleay and Sanders, ‘Looking into the abyss’, p. 506.
7 A similar policy was followed by the Chinese Section. ‘William Empson has
worn himself out for two years trying to get them to broadcast intelligent stuff
to China, and I think he has succeeded to some small extent’ (15:166).
8 Indeed, his novel Burmese Days (1934) was banned in India throughout this
time.
9 Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: Volume 3: The
War of Words (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 346.
10 Bose was a nationalist and former Congress leader who threw in his lot with
the Axis. Early in the war he broadcast anti-British propaganda to India from
Germany, and later raised troops to Ž ght alongside the Japanese against the
British forces defending or occupying India.
11 ‘Compared with the task of bringing the real England to the surface, even the
winning of the war, necessary though it is, is secondary. By revolution we
become more ourselves, not less’ (12:432).
12 This was a sensitive point for obvious reasons. In the collection of broadcast

488
 Douglas Kerr Orwell’s BBC broadcasts

scripts in Talking to India, which Orwell edited, the Table of Contents marks
with an asterisk the thin majority of thirteen out of twenty-Ž ve contributions
‘written and broadcast by Indians or other Asiatics’, and also prints cheery
photographs of predominantly Indian faces at the microphone.
13 Bokhari was committed to the retention of India within the Empire, and
‘defended British imperial rule’ (Fleay and Sanders, ‘Looking into the abyss’,
p. 505). He was to go on to become Director General of Pakistan Radio.
14 The issue of ‘voice’ was a vital one for Orwell, as may be seen from the extra-
ordinary importance given to questions of accent in The Road to Wigan Pier.
Domestic broadcasting was dominated by the upper-class tones of ‘BBC
English’, or what Orwell engagingly called ‘Stripetrouser’ (16:124). ‘What he
felt to be the inadequacy and offensiveness of this ofŽ cial voice was of course
an issue of particular concern in the years of the Second World War, when
radio broadcasting was full of ofŽ cial voices while Orwell’s mature position
on language was shaping’ (Roger Fowler, The Language of George Orwell
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 23). But Fowler has little to say about
Orwell’s own broadcasting experience. One of the best studies of Orwell is
Lynette Hunter’s George Orwell: The Search for a Voice (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1984).
15 ‘The primary purpose of news commentaries is propaganda’, asserts a
conŽ dential BBC memorandum written by the Assistant Controller of
Overseas Programmes in February 1942 (Fleay and Sanders, ‘Looking into the
abyss’, p. 508).
16 The idea developed (but also resisted) in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the past
itself has no existence, other than as a story told by the powerful in their own
interest, derives not from Nietszche but from Orwell’s reading of accounts of
the Spanish Civil War, many of which he knew to be  agrantly dishonest. In
‘Looking back on the Spanish War’ he complained: ‘I am willing to believe
that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to
our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully
written’ (13:504).
17 The Daily Worker was the only newspaper to be banned in Britain in the war
years. It soon reappeared under a different title and was sold on the streets
without interference, but it had ceased to be a daily and lost most of its
circulation (13:108). The ban lasted for twenty months and was lifted in
August 1942. While at the BBC, Orwell said he read four or Ž ve morning
newspapers every day and several editions of the evening papers, besides the
daily monitoring report (13:240).
18 The Government of India had a Counter-propaganda Department which was
kept busy containing a vigorous campaign of Japanese radio propaganda
spreading rumours, threats and disaffection. Much sabotage in India,
according to Brander, was ‘inspired by Saigon radio, just as it is inspired by us
in Europe’ (15:343).
19 This reputation was not undisputed, and appears not to have extended to All
India Radio, established in consultation with the BBC as a department of the
Government of India’s Ministry of Industries and Labour. P.S. Gupta (Radio
and the Raj 1921–47 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi for the Centre for Studies in
Social Sciences, 1995), p. 34) says that in the early years of the war, colonial
subjects in India were more inclined to believe the propaganda of the other side
than of their imperial masters.
20 For Orwell’s writing for Partisan Review, see John Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics

489
Textual Practice

(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 93–100, and Peter Marks, ‘Where he

wrote: periodicals and the essays of George Orwell’, Twentieth Century
Literature, 41(4) (1995), pp. 266–83.
21 He deŽ ned ‘nationalism’ broadly: it could indicate an aggressive and
unthinking loyalty to an institution or ideology as well as to a nation, and it
always involved hostility towards some other group. See his important essay,
‘Notes on nationalism’, written at the end of the war in 1945 (17:141–57).
22 ‘So he [Flory] had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret
thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks with the doctor [Veraswami]
were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good man, understood little
of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in
secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.’ George Orwell,
Burmese Days, 1934 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 70; also 2:70.
23 Orwell’s friend Tom Wintringham had commanded the British Battalion of
the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.
24 See 16:435–6 for one example.

490