Excerpted from the introduction by the author – also the daughter of Bhisham Sahni – in the book titled Balraj and Bhisham Sahni, Brothers in Political Theatre, published by SAHMAT, second edition.The BBC’s Eastern Overseas Service had begun functioning in May 1940, just four months prior to the Sahni couple’s arrival. Its Indian section was confined initially to a ten-minute news broadcast in English and Hindustani. Plans were afoot for its expansion to include more Indian languages. Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari had drawn up a list of regular programmes such as Through Eastern Eyes, We Speak to India. In a remarkably short span of time Bokhari, with the help of Fielden, assembled a group of dedicated left-leaning, anti-colonial, anti-fascist liberal writers, journalists and intellectuals of all hues to collaborate There were the ‘starry-eyed communists’, the anti-Stalinist socialists, the Gandhians – all eager to lend their voices against Hitler’s fascism and support the anti-colonial movements.Kalpana Sahni, Balraj & Bhisham Sahni: Brothers in Political Theatre, SAHMAT (2012)Foremost amongst them was E. M. Forster who authored A Passage to India, the poets T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender, V. K. Narayana Menon, the scholar and musician well known in British intellectual circles for his doctoral thesis on W. B. Yeats. Others included Ayana Deva Angadi, the writer and political activist; the poet Cedric Dover, and Tambimuttu, the Ceylonese Sinhalese poet, editor and publisher, Venu Chitale, and Princess Indira Devi of Kapurthala. Balraj ji and Dammo ji became a part of a vibrant international group of fellow travellers – a warm and argumentative environment teeming with creative idea and possibilities.§The expansion of the Indian section commenced. Its frequencies and airtime increased, the number of employees in the Eastern Section shot up from 1472 in 1940, to approximately 10,000 by the end of 1941. Programmes were being offered in Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi. With this dramatic increase, Zulfiqar Ali Bokhari required an assistant, and he suggested the name of the poet Stephen Spender. The Board declined his candidature on grounds that he was not born and brought up in India and thus unfamiliar with the target audience. Bokhari next recommended Eric Blair – an Indian-born Englishman with an Imperial Police Service record in Burma. He was approved.One cannot help but wonder whether the British bureaucracy and their Intelligence Service were not aware that Eric Blair was the same person as the writer George Orwell who had so harshly attacked the British colonial government in his novel, Burmese Days (1934) – which they themselves had banned for sale in India? Or was it, as Orwell later commented, that his government was in dire need of a calibre of intellectuals who could then be persuaded to endorse the British government’s policies? What we do know for certain from the recently declassified archives of the MI5 is that the British Intelligence services spied on their own leading British intellectuals, all suspected of communist affiliations. George Orwell was spied upon as a communist for fifteen years till he died in 1950.At the time of his appointment in the BBC in 1941, Eric Blair or George Orwell was thirty-eight years old. A well-established writer, he had already authored four novels, three non-fiction books, countless essays, book reviews, served in the British police force in Burma, and fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist rule. Balraj Sahni at JNU. Photo: Author provided.Leo Tolstoy’s words, ‘I cannot not write’ and ‘I cannot remain silent’ are both applicable to Orwell. A deep humanist, a committed socialist, an anti-imperialist to the core, an anti-Stalinist, anti-authoritarian, Eric Blair felt duty-bound to raise his voice against injustice and this time it was against Fascist Germany in 1940. Deemed medically unfit for military service, Eric Blair decided to wield his pen to get across his anti-fascist message to audiences worldwide. He loved humanity and felt it was his moral duty to reveal suffering, to expose lies and untruths. Having experienced censorship, a ban on his works, he had no illusions about his new place of employment. Eric Blair joined the Indian section of the BBC Overseas Service as a Talks Assistant on 18 August 1941.Upon joining, Orwell was required to undergo a two-week induction course or training programme for new employees. It involved mastering script-writing techniques like the ‘art of persuasion’ to reach out to global audiences, sugar-coating uncomfortable truths or, in short, learning the ways of spinning ‘palatable tales’ to seduce listeners. The participants were taught the subtle ways in which language could be manipulated, made ambiguous in order to convince people into believing half-truths and lies, like ‘war is peace’, and 2+2=5. Amongst Orwell’s fellow recruits in the course was William Empson, a poet and literary critic who, like the rest, saw through the course’s intent and purpose. He coined the disparaging title for this workshop, ‘The Liar’s School of the BBC’. It certainly resonates in today’s world. Bhisham and Balraj Sahni in Moscow in 1957. Photo: Author provided.Very soon Orwell followed up on that label by referring to the BBC as a ‘propaganda machine’ and that ‘all propaganda is lies’. On 21 November 1941, the first of Orwell’s weekly newsletters to India and South-East Asia was broadcast. He wrote about 104 or 105 of them. He also wrote 115 or 116 scripts for translation into Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Hindustani.Amongst the frequent and regular English speakers in the Indian section were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, William Empson, and Rebecca West. Orwell managed to persuade a close friend and writer Mulk Raj Anand, a committed Marxist, to join the section as a regular contributor. A fellow participant with Orwell in the Spanish Civil War, Anand had refused earlier overtures to join the Indian section on grounds that the BBC was a mouthpiece of the Raj, and only after Germany’s attack on the USSR did he agree to participate. Anand may have agreed but the British Secret Service thought otherwise about hiring a communist and Orwell had to put up a fight to get him into the BBC. Many years later Mulk Raj Anand summed up the Orwell he had known:This strange, un-British Englishman… a rare human being, stood for rights of men to be ensured everywhere, without the restrictions of the State anywhere. George Orwell genuinely believed in a shared reality, in breaking down barriers between cultures. He was brimming with ideas. Apart from the introduction of radio broadcasts of skits and plays, both European and Indian, poetry reading (by contemporary poets) and discussions, he envisaged a programme on ancient wisdom texts that have influenced mankind. They included The Koran, Upanishads, The Analects by Confucius, The Bhagavad Gita, and The New Testament. For the programme Voice, Orwell and Anand planned a rendering ‘of a hundred sayings’ of the poet Kabir, Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia on Buddha’s life, Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala, extracts from the Baburnama and the verses of Puran Singh, a contemporary Punjabi poet and scientist, influenced by Walt Whitman and Bhai Veer Singh. It was a genuine attempt at international bonding, of bridging the cultural divide.Balraj ji and Dammo ji were active participants in numerous collaborative efforts and experiments and discussions involving acting, script-writing, voice control and voice modulation, musical interludes, and the like. Moreover, Balraj ji often broadcast Orwell’s English language texts like The Meaning of Sabotage and Scorched Earth as mentioned earlier. One reason for this could have been the bullet injury to Orwell’s neck during the Spanish Civil War. It had affected his voice. Details of some broadcasting experiments are in Orwell’s 1943 essay, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’.Orwell introduced the Sahni couple to the Gate Theatre Studio’s avant garde theatre director, Norman Marshall, with whom they conducted a programme titled How it Works on the effectiveness of theatre. It was broadcast on 14 December 1941. Bhisham ji laments that, ‘Curiously enough, he spoke little about the writing work he had done in England, although he mentioned casually a couple of radio-plays that he had written and broadcast.’Amongst the BBC’s archival photographs there is one of Indian soldiers huddled around a radio set; another one is from Orwell’s edited book, Talking to India, with Balraj ji reading out the soldier’s message home. The caption reads, ‘Hello Punjab: A Soldier with Balraj Shani’. There were two and a half million Indian soldiers in the British Imperial Army during the Second World War, serving in France, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. By the end of World War II, nearly a million had lost their lives. In 1940, a special broadcasting programme, ‘Forces Messages’ (‘Hello Punjab’, ‘Punjab Calling’) was launched by the BBC, targeting Indian soldiers serving in the British army. It was meant to provide entertainment and encourage the soldiers to interact and send messages to their families scattered across India and other British colonies. The stated intention was to foster unity, loyalty and patriotism. Underlying it was the British government’s fear of desertions, revolt and a repeat of India’s 1857 Rebellion. Thus, it was imperative to placate these soldiers at any cost and that meant downplaying the truth about the war by disseminating biased information.