This farm was once Orwell's home

MOTIHARI: Nagendra Kumar, a Hinditeacher officiating as Gopal Sah Vidyalaya's principal, walked in through thearched gateway to take possession of his official residence in the late 1990s.A devout Hindu, Kumar had even consulted an astrologer for anauspicious time to enter the house. The stone inscription on thewalls of the crumbling structure read: "P.W.B. 2/12". For theuninitiated, it means Public Works Building, establishing government ownershipof the premises. The low stone arch with iron gates supplements local beliefthat the place once used to be a British jail. But incarcerated inthis decrepit home is the childhood of one of the world's literary giants.Welcome to George Orwell's home.Currently, a leased property ofGopal Sah Vidyalaya, it was formerly called Hackock Academy in the memory of theBritish collector of Champaran."The acting principal peeped througha window and threw his towel inside, marking his entry into the house. However,he must've been too scared to move in,'' said Braj Nandan Rai, the man whocurrently occupies the nondescript house. Through the window one cansee layers of dust, windblown dry leaves, grass and twigs littering thecob-webbed room. Standing in the court yard, Kumar must have senseda jungle around him, with perhaps a cobra hissing danger. With Kumar refusing toenter it, the house was further allowed to go to seed until Rai, an Englishteacher, moved in three years ago. Rai, who teaches Wordsworth,Shakespeare and Tennyson, was perhaps undeterred by the sight of pigs, buffaloesand goats around him. Not just that, the place also had plenty ofdogs to fill in the gaps. But Rai quickly unleashed the cleaning brigade.Working on the Animal Farm gradually, he managed to save it fromcrumbling. He then began what was a quiet and content life tilljournalists, several from overseas, came calling. "I was baffled," Rai said,adding in his thick Bhojpuri accent, "I then came to know that Orwell Sahib wasborn here." The teacher has since learnt to live with hacksdisturbing his solitude. He also learnt about George Orwell, the legendaryauthor born here on June 25, 1903. He was named Eric Arthur Blair.His father Richard Walmesley Blair, the son of a Vicar, was posted as the deputysubagent in the opium department here. Blair's mother Ida was the daughter of aBritish teak merchant in Burma. "Initially, there was a lot ofconfusion regarding the house of Orwell's birth,'' Rai said, recalling theflurry of debate amongst curious visitors."Then I saw twophotographs in a b o o k brought by a British journalist. Both the picturesshowed baby Blair in the courtyard of this very house. In one, he is seen withhis mother Ida 'glowing in a (Victorian) frock', while in the other, he is withan unidentified Indian ayah.''According to sources, the localpremises were under the charge of opium collectors after the jail was shifted.Opposite Blair's crumbling house stands the old opium warehouse, which had beenused as the Vidyalaya's hostel for some time. An elderly local saidtill some years ago, no one knew of the Orwell connection. "And when it came tolight, nothing came out of it. Is this not like an instance of thebureaucratised state Orwell wrote about in his book "Nineteen Eighty Four''?The debris of the Orwell birth place in the midst of a virtual"animal farm'' here suggests nothing else.'' But all's not lost.While it would be a far cry to expect the creation of Shakespeare's "Stratford''here, the Rotarions of laketown Motihari have kindled hope. "We haveinitiated a movement to restore Orwell's Motihari home,'' Rotarian DebapriyaMookherjee said, adding that they were planning "a plaque outside the house withthe writer's life history, a museum and a library with Orwell's works and therestoration of his house to its original grandeur''. The plaque sureis well visible.