As the international controversy and debate surrounding the Big Brother anti-Indian racism continues it is often forgotten that it was a person from India who actually invented and coined the concept of “Big Brother” in the first place. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by the penname George Orwell, was an Anglo-Indian author born in 1903, India. It was in his last and most famous book Nineteen Eighty-Four that he created “Big Brother”. It was the book that finally made him famous but unfortunately he was to die only a year later aged only 46.

As in the Channel 4 programme, it is in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that we are in a world where Big Brother is always watching you – watching everyone in fact. Watching you while you work, while you talk, while you sleep, always watching and listening. But Orwell’s book was more than just mere cheap entertainment – it was and remains a powerful commentary and critique on the evils of the totalitarian state, exemplified by the (then) USSR and other communist states. While Channel 4’s Big Brother thrives on showing us the nastier side of human nature – partly created by artificially confining people from completely different social and cultural backgrounds into an enclosed space and partly exaggerated by only showing the “juicy” bits of the 24-hour supervision – Orwell’s novel is an altogether different experience.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in London in the year 1984 and tells the story of Winston Smith and his rebellion against “Big Brother”. Britain has been renamed “Airstrip One” and is part of Oceania – one of three superpowers – and is ruled by “The Party” in a totalitarian police state where all freedoms have been taken away. There are cameras and microphones everywhere – in the streets, in the workplace, in every house and even in the countryside – to make sure that everyone is monitored at all times. People disappear, sometimes people reappear, children are encouraged to spy on their parents, newspapers and books are rewritten to suit the party line. Orwell introduces us to the idea of “doublethink”, where people are programmed and hypnotised by the media to hold two mutually contradictory views and effectively switch between them in order to let the party control everyone. And it is the mythical, godlike and all-powerful Big Brother who controls everything.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was translated in Hindi and distributed in India by the well-known historian, writer and publisher, Sita Ram Goel. He often cited Orwell as an important influence in his career as a writer and activist against the horrors of Communism. He was reported to have said that if every Hindu reads only one fictional novel in their lifetime then this should be the one.

Orwell was himself influenced by Marxism for a time but campaigned against Communism once he had witnessed the reality for himself. He became a staunch anti-Stalinist and his views are reflected in the novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four where he effectively tears apart the entire ideology. Although Communism has largely died out across the world, it is in India that Marxists still control the media and education of the country while the Communist Party itself is in government and in control of two Indian states. So in many ways, India has yet to learn from Orwell’s message. Perhaps the controversy surrounding the treatment of Shilpa Shetty will be the catalyst for change in the country of his birth.