Opening paragraphs...................

George Orwell was burdened from birth by colonial guilt.  Motihari, in the state of of Bihar in northern India, was an unlikely place for this quintessentially English writer to be born.  The town itself, on the broiling, dusty plains between the Himalayas and the Ganges River, was a rough colonial outpost, "pleasantly situated on the east bank of a lake," with a jail, a school, public offices crammed with mildewed files and the headquarters of a troop of the Bihar Light Horse.  The local people barely survived by making cooking-oil, rugs and string moneybags.  The place and circumstances of his birth were crucial factors in Orwell's life.  He was brought up to believe in the righteousness of British rule in India, and in his late teens, became a colonial servant himself.  But his heritage contained the seeds of its own destruction.  He would later abandon this hateful job and condemn the evils of imperialism.

-Jeffrey Meyers,  Orwell:  Wintry Conscience of a Generation