86 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
which in Orwell's case resulted not in an isolated individual, but in what was to be a widely imitated style'. (Politics and Letters, NLR Edition, 1979).
Alok Rai distances himself both from those critics—most of them of conservative political opinion—who have read Orwell as truth, plainly told, and from those who have analysed him within the ambit of conservative literary canon. However, unlike some leftwing critics like Isaac Deutscher and Terry Eagleton, he attempts to reclaim Orwell from the confines of Cold War and anti-socialist propaganda by reading the trajectory of Orwell's work in its political-cultural location against the grain. While misgivings remain about the possibilities of reclamation, such a reading provides new and compelling insights into the nature of what the author calls the Orwell problem.
In the apparent contradictorines of Orwell's writings, Alok Rai seeks out its underlying unity and locates it in Orwell's self-division and ambivalence, his avowed radical challenge overawed by his inherent, deep-rooted conservatism. This ambivalence informs Orwell's 'reading* of the world and colours his conceptualisation of the questions of class, anti-imperialism and socialism.
Orwell recognises the economic injustice inflicted on the working class, but does not perceive its distinct role in the economic organisation of capitalist society. In fact, the sense of economic injustice is accompanied, even overshadowed, by an extreme feeling and affirmation of the social, cultural distinctions between classes as reflected in manners and accents, tastes and prejudices, which he mystifies into predestined, immutable differences. The emotions which he accuses others of harbouring are, in fact, his own, and where he selfconsciously admits such emotions, he is aware of their importance in defining his own sense of identity. For example, in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he confesses:
Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West— the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.
Similarly, his ^professed anti-imperialism is fraught with its own negation. Undoubtedly convinced that England's economic advance was based on the bitter exploitation of its colonies and forthright in his articulation of this conviction, he was equally forthright in defending the continuing existence of the British Empire and in opposing independent government in, for example, Burma, on the specious plea that it was a small, backward nation which could not govern itself. This perverse logic was also extended to characterise Chechoslovakia