George Orwell, and the “beastly” connection between India and Ukraine
When protests erupted in Ukraine’s capital Kiev last November, the city’s Independence Maidan (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) joined Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park as a site of national resistance in our time. During the last ten months, thousands of Ukrainians have rallied to this huge square in pro-Europe and anti-Russian demonstrations that have left over a hundred dead in clashes with police.
That “maidan” is the Arabic word for public square needs explaining to many Western readers, but India needs no such elucidation. In fact, Kiev’s Maidan, which began to be called “Gay Euromaidan” after protests extended to oppose Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws, even has an ideological twin in Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan, the site both of the Quit India Movement in the early 1940s and the annual Queer Azaadi pride march. Indians will also recognise several other Ukrainian words derived from the Arabic trade route, such as tsukor (sugar), halva, and kotleta (cutlet). (Chicken a la Kiev, that tasty butter bomb served at Mumbai’s Gaylord restaurant, is known in its native city as kotleta po-Kievski.)
Although India continues to support its powerful friend Russia over Ukraine (while piously urging both parties to a peaceful solution), there is a fascinating literary connection between India and Ukraine in which Russia has a central role to play. It concerns Animal Farm, George Orwell’s brilliant satire of the 1917 Russian Revolution, in which a farmyard of animals overthrow their oppressive human master only to end up being oppressed by a new ruling class of pigs—tyrannical czars essentially being replaced by tyrannical comrades. As one of the first novels to be used as Cold War propaganda, Animal Farm’s early translations included those into Ukrainian and Telugu. And though the provenance of these two translations couldn’t be more dissimilar, the stories of how they were produced provide an excellent snapshot of the tangled political anxieties of a freshly post-colonial, post-war world that had begun to freeze into the two camps of the Cold War.
Published in August 1945 after being rejected by innumerable publishers including TS Eliot’s Faber & Faber, Animal Farm’s fortunes turned when it sold sensationally in America. Suddenly alert to its potential to combat anti-Western propaganda emerging from the Kremlin, the British Foreign Office set up, in 1948, a covert branch called the Information Research Department (IRD) to commission translations of suitable literature for distribution in Britain’s former colonies. Ex-crown jewel India was high on their list. Of special concern was the armed peasant rebellion unfolding in the region under the Nizam of Hyderabad, a ruler as legendary for his wealth as the destitution of his people. In 1946, hundreds of villages had risen up in a revolt led by the Communist Party of India. Called the Telangana Rebellion, it would become the forerunner to, and ideological ally of, the Naxal movement.
Within months of the IRD being set up, an official named Celia Kirwan, who was also a friend of Orwell’s, visited the tubercular writer at his sanatorium to confidentially sound him out on “the best way of furthering our aims in India and Burma.” Kirwan’s report of the meeting, excerpted in Peter Davison’s George Orwell, A Life in Letters, shows Orwell had a nuanced understanding of the ground realities: “He did not think that there was a great deal of scope for propaganda in India and Pakistan, where Communism meant something quite different from what it did in Europe—it meant on the whole, opposition to the ruling class, and he thought that more good would be done by maintaining the closest possible links with these countries, through trade and through the interchange of students.”
Despite these reservations, Orwell assented to the Telugu translation. Janamanci Ramakrsna’s Pasuvula divanam: Uha kalpitameina peddakatha was rushed through in a matter of months. The IRD also financed an Animal Farm cartoon series that was printed in the Times of India Delhi edition and in cities from Hong Kong to Rio. The Telugu translation was followed by a Malayalam one, and after Orwell died in 1950, his estate sanctioned translations in several other languages including Bengali and Gujarati.
The origins of the Ukrainian translation are refreshingly different. It preceded the IRD’s command performances and was an act of resistance worthy of this allegorical masterpiece. In April 1946, Orwell received a letter from a young Ukrainian journalist named Ihor Shevchenko asking for translation permission. When Shevchenko first read the novel, he had been astounded that a celebrated English socialist had dared portray Stalin as a pig with a moustache at a time when most Western intellectuals were loyally ignoring Stalin’s tyranny in gratitude for his role in defeating that other fascist moustache. Shevchenko began to orally translate and read out scenes to groups of Ukrainian war refugees, two million of whom lived in the displaced persons camps spread across Germany. These were people battered by Stalin’s megalomaniacal farm collectivisation drive as well as the 1933 Holodomor (hunger genocide) in which three million had starved to death. To them, Animal Farm wasn’t propaganda—“the mood of the book,” wrote Shevchenko, “seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind.”
In the special preface Orwell wrote for the Ukrainian edition, published in 1947—his only published introduction for the novel—he explained how his Indian connection had shaped his thinking. His father had been a low-ranking agent in the Opium Department of Bengal, whose job was to oversee the cultivation and shipment of opium to China, and his mother a lively schoolteacher. They had met and married in Nainital, lived in Gaya for a few years, and then moved to Motihari, where Orwell was born, quite literally amidst farmyard animals and opium warehouses.
Taken back to England by his mother when he was still a baby, the first proper word he is supposed to have uttered is “beastly,” writes Orwell’s biographer, Gordon Bowker. Later, his five years in the Imperial Police in Burma as a young man radicalised him against imperialism. “It did not suit me and made me hate imperialism,” he wrote in the preface to the Ukrainian edition . He also disclosed to his readers how a single image had jolted him into analysing Marxism from an animal’s point of view: “I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”
Circulated samizdat style by an underground press, the thin, stapled book was pointedly titled Kolhosp Tvaryn (The Collective Farm). Sadly, barely 2000 copies survived; the rest were confiscated by American soldiers who solicitously turned them over to their Russian allies. Ironically, a few years later the Americans would try every trick possible to slip anti-Soviet material past the iron curtain. According to the scholar Andrew N Rubin’s Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture and the Cold War, Animal Farm would become one of the most rapidly, and diversely, translated novels in history.
The more pressing question is why an anti-imperialist like Orwell who condemned propaganda as “disgusting hypocrisy” allowed his novel to be used in this dubious fashion, especially, say, in India, where he was aware of the feudal oppression the people were up against. It certainly wasn’t the money—he waived his royalties to the Telugu, Ukrainian and Farsi editions to make them affordable to poor readers.
The likely answer is that his loathing of communism overrode whatever qualms he might have had. Rescuing Socialism from Stalin’s murderous trotter was his objective, and, as he wrote in a letter to his agent, if “Conservatives, Catholics, etc.” hijacked the book, so be it. After all, he had applied the same logic to justify his role as a producer in the BBC’s India section during the war. Asked to make his news broadcasts under his pen name, George Orwell, rather than his real name, Eric Blair, so that Indian listeners familiar with his anti-imperial novel Burmese Days (banned by the colonial Government of India) would trust what he said, Orwell agreed. An Axis victory, he argued, would “postpone Indian independence far longer than the most reactionary British government would ever wish or be able to do.” He thus explained away the arrests of Gandhi and Nehru and even praised “the wise and large-minded speeches” of Stalin. But he hated having to do this and after two years quit in disgust.
While Orwell cherished the Ukrainian translation, the Telugu one was also special for being the only translation in his lifetime to retain the subtitle he had given his novel, “A Fairy Story.” As a child he had devoured ghost stories and the Beatrix Potter books, and was delighted when friends’ children read Animal Farm as a straight fable.
Orwell’s book isn’t the only “beastly” link between India and Ukraine; there is also Vikram Seth’s Beastly Tales From Here and There. Of the ten rhymed folk tales in this slender and delightful book of rhymes, there are two each from India, Greece, China, Salman Rushdie’s Land of Gup, and the Ukraine.
One of India’s most catholic writers, Seth was undoubtedly aware of Ukraine’s rich heritage of folk tales, which they are hoping will be considered by UNESCO for its Intangible Cultural Heritage List. Like India, this Slavic country has a long history of being ruled by external powers, and many of its folk tales are allegorical lessons on outwitting predators through nimble thinking and a clever use of resources. In ‘The Cat and the Cock,’ a cat outfoxes a fox with his fiddle and saves his friend the cock from the stockpot, and in ‘The Goat and the Ram,’ the two ruminants manage to send a trio of wolves slinking fearfully away. As is usual in folklore, happy endings are inescapable. Quite different from Orwell’s bleak fairy story, where the fate of the animals is summed up in the wise and bad-tempered words of Benjamin the donkey, the only beast of burden who refuses to believe in glorious revolutions. “Life,” he says, “would go on as it had always gone on—that is, badly.”