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When Establishment memorialises Orwell

ByHT Editorial
Jan 14, 2025 08:21 PM IST

To honor George Orwell’s 75th death anniversary, the Royal Mint released a special 2-pound coin celebrating his novel 1984, reflecting on his complex legacy.

To mark the 75th death anniversary of George Orwell (1903-1950), the British writer, the Royal Mint released a special 2-pound coin on Tuesday. The coin commemorates Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel, 1984. This memorialisation, perhaps, completes the institutionalisation of a public intellectual who, in his lifetime, had a troubled relationship with the British establishment.

This photo, provided by The Royal Mint on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025, shows a portrait of George Orwell and a new £2 coin. (The Royal Mint/PinPep via AP) (AP) PREMIUM
This photo, provided by The Royal Mint on Monday, Jan. 13, 2025, shows a portrait of George Orwell and a new £2 coin. (The Royal Mint/PinPep via AP) (AP)

Orwell was a child of the Empire. He was born in Motihari in 1903, and spent his first four years in India. His childhood was mostly spent in private boarding schools in Imperial Britain and after completing school, he joined the Indian Imperial Police and served in Burma, then part of British India, for five years. He returned to Britain in his late 20s to become a writer. The pursuit of letters started with his attempt to declass — many in his family served the imperial establishment — by discovering working-class life in the poorest areas of London and Paris. He wrote about this experience in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in London and Paris, two of his earliest non-fiction works. Life in Burma turned Orwell against the Empire — he said, “in order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it — and the engagement with the poor, made him embrace socialism. His experience of the Spanish Civil War, recounted in Homage to Catalonia, led to his disillusionment with the official Left. Animal Farm and 1984, his celebrated novels, were the last hurrah of an anti-fascist writer who was deeply suspicious of all forms of authority and power. Orwell said the dystopian world he created in 1984, distinguished by a totalitarian State indulging in surveillance and censorship, would never be replicated but warned that something similar could become a reality.

Orwell would surely have been amused at the celebration of his work, that too by the Royal Mint. That, perhaps, is the fate of every successful anarchist intellectual — from Mahatma Gandhi to Che Guevera, the Existentialists to Beatniks, all have been tamed into memorabilia by the Establishment. That, too is Big Brother at work.

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