Not many would picture a connection between George Orwell, the English author of 1984 and Animal Farm and the state of Bihar, yet they share a historic connection that manifests in more than just geographical ways. On June 25, 1903, Eric Arthur Blair, the man who would one day redefine dystopian literature, was born in Motihari, Bihar.
It’s a curious footnote in literary history, one that somehow manages to be both obscure and incredibly telling. Orwell didn’t spend much time in India; he lived here for barely a year, but his early life was shadowed by the kind of imperial machinery he’d later come to dismantle with his pen. His father, Richard W. Blair, was an opium agent; a sub-deputy collector for the British Raj and was stationed in Motihari to oversee poppy cultivation and collect opium bound for China. The Guardian reports that the property where Orwell was born included a large warehouse used for opium storage, surrounded by a few cottages and a modest three-room bungalow.
Motihari itself is no stranger to history. Just over a decade after Orwell’s birth, it became the starting point for Mahatma Gandhi’s Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 — a pivotal civil disobedience movement born out of resistance to the very same oppressive agricultural demands that Orwell’s father once administered. Whether it was indigo or opium, it all came from the soil, and through the exploitation of India's people.
Though Orwell left India with his family soon after, it’s hard not to imagine that he later fully absorbed what his family had been part of. Perhaps it were those that roots pushed him toward the sharp-eyed critique of empire and power we find in his work. His novels might not name Motihari, but the ghosts of that system — the surveillance, the control, and the dehumanization, certainly echo loudly throughout them.
In a weird symbolic twist of fate and a foreshadowing of his own fiction, pigs would often wander the grounds of the abandoned house he was born in. Even horses, goats and dogs, like the characters from his book, took shelter in what was once a colonial bungalow according to BBC. But in 2014, the Bihar government decided to reshape this monumental site that birthed the author. With a budget of ₹59.5 lakhs, the site was restored and turned into a modest museum.
Today, the Orwell Birthplace Museum stands on a 2.48-acre campus in Motihari. It includes the restored bungalow, a few outbuildings, and ironically, a warehouse once used for opium. Visitors can walk through the space and contemplate how this unlikely corner of Bihar connects to one of the 20th century’s most formidable literary minds. The bungalow is the only known museum in the world that is dedicated to George Orwell.
There’s something poetic about his ties to India. The author didn’t grow up in this country, but his life began in a place saturated with colonial power. Motihari may not have shaped Orwell directly as he left before his memory could fully take root, but perhaps the ghosts of empire lingered long enough to cast their shadow across his imagination. And perhaps that beginning planted the seed for a writer who would spend his life dissecting the machinery of power, oppression, and control.
Learn more about the museum here.
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