Burma

George Orwell’s years as a colonial policeman in Burma in the 1920s preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Straight out of Eton, he was thrown into a world that mirrored the public school with its rivalries and floggings; except that now it was the Burmese people who were being flogged. He wrote about it repeatedly: in his 1934 novel Burmese Days, several essays, and passages devoted to Burma in The Road to Wigan Pier. Even on his deathbed he was writing notes for a novella about Burma entitled A Smoking Room Story.…

George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, published in 1934, drew substantially on the five years he served in the Indian imperial police force at various stations along the Irrawaddy a decade earlier. You suspect, however, that his alter ego in that novel, John Flory, was a good deal more seasoned than the young writer, still called Eric Blair, had been when he arrived in Mandalay in 1922. Flory was cast as a teak merchant in his mid-30s; Blair was unvarnished and 19 and just out of Eton. Similarly, Orwell’s two…

In 2003, a cohort of journalists from Western publications landed up in Motihari, a small town on the India-Nepal border, about 150 km north of Bihar’s capital Patna. They were looking for the house in which Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his nom de plume George Orwell, was born, a hundred years before. A view of the house in Motihari, Bihar, where George Orwell was born. (Sanchit Khanna/H) Most Motihari residents then hardly knew that Orwell, author of novels such as Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen…

Often referred to as “the forgotten army” of the second world war, the British Fourteenth Army, comprising units from Commonwealth countries, served in the Burma campaign. Ninety thousand west African soldiers fought as part of the 81st and 82nd divisions. Nigerians made up more than half the force.Inspired by her grandmother’s tales about the young men from her village who went to war and didn’t come back, Rosanna Amaka’s second novel explores the little-known plight of these fighters and their subsequent treatment by…