Orwell's decaying birth house may be destroyed

In 1903 George Orwell was born Eric Blair, in a small two-room stone colonial bungalow in a town named Motihari, which was then an outpost in the Indian wilderness. Orwell's father was a British civil servant who worked as a deputy clerk in the burgeoning (and then legal) opium trade between British India and China. Their house was small and humble, even for a region where the jobs for locals were few and far between, involving cottage industries in mat-making and cooking oil production.

Orwell lived in the house for his first year, after which he and his mother moved back to Oxfordshire, England while his father remained in India. The stone house where he was born has only barely been preserved for history at all.

Abandoned and empty, Orwell's house has served as shelter for wild animals and homeless people over the years. Its roof has caved in, and a tree is gradually demolishing one corner of the back wall. It would look like any other tumbledown wreck of the British colonial era, except that at one point a local Orwell enthusiast club persuaded the Rotary to place a sign (in both English and Hindi) indicating that this was Orwell's birth place.

Motihari today is a thriving urban area with a six-digit population. And the regional government has announced plans to knock down Orwell's house in order to build a park in memory of Mahatma Gandhi. But surely the local government can find a different place to memorialize Gandhi? The location has no specific ties to Gandhi, and was apparently chosen largely because it happens to be one of the few open, undeveloped plots in the district.

Then again, perhaps it would be darkly fitting if Orwell's house were to be bulldozed by the uncaring government, and dedicated to a man who - although certainly a notable historic figure - never actually visited the site during his lifetime.

Image courtesy Flickr/New Chemical History