Skip to main content

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The title of George Orwell’s celebrated novel could have been 2024 and its setting India.

Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the ruling party. Like anyone else in the country, he is also under the constant surveillance of Big Brother, the omniscient ruler of the country. Big Brother’s Party controls everything including the people’s history and language and even their thoughts. Certain words are banned from Newspeak, the official language. Even nurturing rebellious thoughts is criminal and ‘thought-crime’ is the worst. Winston works in the Ministry of Truth which is rewriting the history of the country. Even love is a crime and so Winston has to keep his love for Julia secret. Winston is trapped eventually by the spying police and is subjected to severe brainwashing. Finally he begins to love Big Brother and to have no feelings whatever for Julia whom he has betrayed.

My summary doesn’t do justice to Orwell’s great work. Frankly, I had never considered 1984 a great work until recently when my country began to resemble the country in the novel. I had never thought that there would ever be a country like the one Orwell had imagined in the novel. But alas!

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” That is from the novel. Any right-wing authority in my country today could have said it as well with slight modifications.

“’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” I hope you are aware of what our present government is doing to the history textbooks in schools and colleges.

The rewriting and manipulations and brainwashing are so effective in Orwell’s country that within 20 years people forget what was promised to them and what they had hoped for. Was life better before the Revolution? They can’t even remember the time before the Revolution!

Comrade Ogilvy is a hero in Big Brother’s country. He had died in battle, in heroic circumstances. Only, there never was any Comrade Ogilvy. “A few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs brought him into existence.”

The Mahatma will go as a villain and his killer will come as the hero. And a lot of new heroes will enter the textbooks. 


PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

Previous Post: Mona Lisa

Coming up on Monday: Octlantis

Labels:

Comments

  1. JaiApril 15, 2023 at 8:11 AM

    Absolutely on the dot Tom. Agree with every word. Goebbels used to say if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth. That is what is happening right now. History textbooks are being changed to brainwash young minds is meant for erasing historical figures of relevance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yamini MacLeanApril 15, 2023 at 8:14 AM

    Hari OM
    Oh yes, there is much to compare from that prescient work... YAM xx
    (ta for asking - am fine, just some big decisions in process which will be revealed along the way.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. CareenaApril 15, 2023 at 10:42 AM

    I often wonder if the present government will end up banning 1984 because it revels their MO and serves as caution to the citizens but then i shake my head because they've been able to take over so blatantly. Clearly they have no fear of cautionary tales. Maybe because they know low literacy in India can be used as a weapon...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 15, 2023 at 10:40 PM

      Low literacy is the real secret. Low thinking. No thinking, rather.

      Delete
  4. docdivatravellerApril 15, 2023 at 2:24 PM

    Changu textbooks won't change history. The next generation needs to know the truth.
    www.docdivatraveller.com

    ReplyDelete
  5. vanderloostApril 15, 2023 at 9:31 PM

    What we think our history is may be another rewrite. Who knows?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 15, 2023 at 10:13 PM

      Palimpsest. My post on letter P is on the way - about rewriting.

      Delete
  6. DeepikaApril 17, 2023 at 12:06 PM

    1984 had made a good read. But i will not comment on the political situation as i realise your and my views are different

    ReplyDelete
  7. Chinmayee Gayatree SahuApril 18, 2023 at 12:17 AM

    A great narration and I feel equally sad too

    ReplyDelete
  8. जितेन्द्र माथुरApril 18, 2023 at 1:23 PM

    I have read only the summary of 1984 and not the complete text of the book. All the same, your comparison of the same with the present situation and happenings in India is spot on. I have read Animal Farm penned by George Orwell only and after reading it completely the thought that came to my mind was that its plot also could be compared to certain developments in India post-independence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 18, 2023 at 5:09 PM

      Yes, Animal Farm can remind us of India. 1984 is more like India of the present time.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
11 comments
Read more