From: Eric Blair, Indian Section
Subject: Weekly News Commentary
To: Eastern Service Director
Confidential
15 October 1942
With reference to the suggestion that I should write and broadcast the weekly news review [to India] in English over my own name, i.e. George Orwell. The four speakers who are at present doing this in rotation have contracts up to 7 November, after which I will gladly take this on. But there are one or two points which it would be better to define clearly beforehand.
If I broadcast as George Orwell I am as it were selling my literary reputation, which so far as India is concerned probably arises chiefly from books of anti-imperialist tendency, some of which have been banned in India. If I gave broadcasts which appeared to endorse unreservedly the policy of the British Government I should quite soon be written off as “one more renegade” and should probably miss my potential public, at any rate among the student population. I am not thinking about my personal reputation, but clearly we should defeat our own object in these broadcasts if I could not preserve my
position as an independent and more or less “agin the government” commentator. I would therefore like to be sure in advance that I can have reasonable freedom of speech. I think this weekly commentary is only likely to be of value if I can make it from an anti-Fascist rather than imperialist standpoint and avoid mention of subjects on which I could not conscientiously agree with current Government policy.
I do not think this is likely to cause trouble, as the chief difficulty is over Indian internal politics, which we rarely mention in our weekly news commentaries. These commentaries 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. But I can imagine situations arising in which I should have to say that I could not in honesty do the commentary for that week, and I should like the position to be defined in advance.14
14. The B.B.C. authorities were agreeable to Orwell’s proposal. He had joined the Eastern Service (Indian Section) of the B.B.C. in the summer of 1941.
39. Letter15 to T.S.Eliot
15. Text taken from a carbon copy.
Dear Eliot,
I wonder if you would like to take part in a programme on Tuesday November 3rd. We have a magazine number once a month which is called “Voice” and pretends to be a magazine in broadcast form. Where it is possible we try to get poets to read their own work. We usually arrange each number round a central theme and we think next time of having an American number. You are I think the only American poet at present in England, though there may perhaps be others, in which case I should be glad to hear about them. In any case we would like it very much if you would take part and read something of your own, either one or two poems taking anything up to five minutes in all.
The other people who will probably be taking part are Herbert Read, William Empson, myself and Mulk Raj Anand,16 though we will try to dig up some American writers if we can. Please do this if the date is at all possible for you. It will only mean giving up the morning of that particular day.
Yours sincerely,.
[Geo. Orwell]
Talks Producer Indian Section
16. Mulk Raj Anand (1905- ), Indian novelist and critic who broadcast for the Indian Section of the B.B.C.
during the war. He was appointed Chairman of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1966.