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Douglas Kerr

Orwell’s BBC broadcasts: colonial discourse and the rhetoric ofpropaganda

This essay analyses the rhetoric of colonial discourse in a special, andespecially conflicted, case, that of the weekly news commentaries whichGeorge Orwell wrote for broadcast by the BBC to British India in those yearsof the Second World War when the subcontinent was threatened by Japaneseinvasion.From August 1941 to November 1943 Orwell worked as a Talks Assistant, later Talks Producer, in the Indian Section of the BritishBroadcasting Corporation’s Eastern Service, based in London.

The IndianSection broadcast to its subcontinental listeners a mixture of news, newscommentary, features and arts programmes. Orwell worked very hard duringhis time at the BBC, though without much enthusiasm. The army hadrejected him when he tried to enlist in 1939, not surprisingly on the groundsof health, and he had been frustrated in his efforts to nd more rewarding war work. Reviewing a revival of

Chu Chin Chow

at the Palace Theatre inthe summer of 1940 had seemed a particularly futile and humiliating way to spend your time in a historical crisis (12:215–16).

And so when theoffer came from the BBC, Orwell accepted it

faute de mieux

. He labouredat 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 forsustained work on his own writing projects (the moment he quit the BBCin November 1943, he began drafting

Animal Farm

Second, the BBC’sown research in India had revealed, rather late in the day, that there werefew radio sets in the subcontinent that were able to receive the broadcastsfrom 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.

‘What caused Orwell to leave was his realization thathe was wasting his time and, as he had a puritanical belief that time was givenus to be productively employed, he found that at first galling and thenintolerable.’

Textual Practice

16(3)

, 2002, 473–490

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 corporationand not a department of government, there was never a possibility of itsbeing 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 theUniversity of London Senate House and later to serve as a model for theMinistry of Truth in

Nineteen Eighty-Four

. Scripts were vetted twice inadvance, for policy and security, and a switch censor monitored all broadcasts,ready (at least in theory) to interrupt transmission if there was any deviationfrom the authorized script. The policy to which broadcasts had to conform, with regard to India, was that it was imperative for Indians to remain loyalto 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, whichplaced all Britain’s eastern possessions under threat. In 1942 as the victorious Japanese army swept across southeast Asia and up through Burma, there wasserious 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 forcesof the Empire in Burma and developed over a decade of increasingly radicalpolitical thinking, of what he called ‘the inherent evil of imperialism’ (10:508). A condemnation of Empire was the 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 anew lease of life for British imperialism,’ he had written early in 1940 duringthe Phony War, ‘I should be inclined to side with Russia and Germany’(12:122–3). Now, in his ofce in the Eastern Service of the BBC, Orwellfound himself a functionary of an ideological state apparatus dedicated tothe 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 thatsustained Orwell through the compromises of principle that he was obligedto make as a propagandist.’

The BBC Eastern Service in wartime wasan organ of colonial discourse, propagating the word, and the worldview, of the metropolitan centre to its peripheral subject people. Orwell’s newscommentaries are texts of that discourse which particularly repay attentionfor their complicated modality, as the voice of the Empire at war (‘Londoncalling!’), the state, the institution of the BBC, and the compromised yetdetermined 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

Textual Practice474

impressive team of contributors, many of them his personal friends from the worlds of literature, politics and journalism. The orientation of the IndianSection to the arts and ideas was not only a reection of Orwell’s own tastesand professional contacts, and those of his superiors, but also a sign of thedecision, by those who made the Indian broadcasts, to ‘attempt to catch theyoung Indian intellectual’, as Brander’s report puts it frankly (15:346).

Themost vocal opposition to British rule in India over the previous twenty yearshad come from well-educated middle-class Indians, and it was these people whom the Indian broadcasts were determined to attract, through offeringa ‘highbrow’ programme content, in the hope of strengthening their tiesand therefore loyalties to Britain. Orwell’s arts and features programmes forthe BBC are certainly worth a separate study. This essay however is moreconcerned with the news commentaries (also referred to as ‘newsletters’) he wrote for weekly broadcast, some in English and some for translation intoIndian vernaculars. These texts are especially rich in ideological contentbecause their nature is both historiographical and hegemonic. They areinterpretations of the world events unfolding week by week in the mostcritical months of the war, and offer their Indian listeners a view of thoseevents as seen from the imperial centre, a view that aims to convince Indiansthat 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 wascertainly a strange contortion, whereby the anti-imperialist Orwell foundhimself directing propaganda for the Raj at the most disaffected and anti-British section of the Indian population. But it was a matter of priorities. Latein 1942, when it was suggested that the hitherto anonymous and ‘editorial’news commentaries should be broadcast over his own name, he noted thathis literary reputation in India probably arose ‘chiey from books of an anti-imperialist tendency’ (14:100),

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 havecontained very little that I would not sign with my own name’ (14:101).The broadcasts, then, participate in colonial discourse in being partof that body of statements that shapes the relation between the colonialpower and its colonized subjects. Their author is George Orwell, journalistand novelist, the writing subject of Eric Blair, a man whose provenance,experience and views are present in all his writing. But the broadcasts are alsosubject to a particularly complex set of determinations, inhabiting a sort of magnetic eld where a number of sometimes contending forces help to giveit shape. To the question of who speaks in an ideologically charged text of thiskind, the answer will always be in the plural. Any utterance beyond theelementary is multi-authored, determined by a number of authorities –linguistic, ideological, discursive, psychological – of varying force. To examinethe broadcasts as colonial discourse it will be useful to see what these are.

Douglas Kerr

Orwell’s BBCbroadcasts

475

of 00

02 / 17 / 2011This doucment made it onto the Rising List!

husnaj

GOOD

reply06 / 04 / 2008

yoshitoma

This is really fascinating. I never knew that Orwell wrote material for broadcast on the BBC.

reply06 / 20 / 2007

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