READING AND REFLECTION SEMESTER 3

   

      

                         Animal Farm is George Orwell's satire on equality, where all barnyard animals live free from their human masters' tyranny. Inspired to rebel by Major, an old boar, animals on Mr. Jones' Manor Farm embrace Animalism and stage a revolution to achieve an idealistic state of justice and progress. A power-hungry pig, Napoleon, becomes a totalitarian dictator who leads the Animal Farm into "All Animals Are Equal / But Some Are More Equal Than Others" oppression.

Written by: George Orwell

Type of Work: novel

Genres: political satire; allegory

First Published: August 17, 1945

Setting: Mr. Jones' Manor Farm

Main Characters: Old Major; Snowball; Napoleon; Squealer; Boxer; Mollie; Benjamin; Moses; Jones; Frederick; Pilkington

Major Thematic Topics: animalism; mob rule; virtue; religion as a drug; distortion of reality; death; false allegiance; political corruption

Motifs: rebellion; power; communism

Major Symbols: Cold War; the barn; the windmill

The three most important aspects of Animal Farm:

• Animal Farm is an allegory, which is a story in which concrete and specific characters and situations stand for other characters and situations so as to make a point about them. The main action of Animal Farm stands for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the early years of the Soviet Union. Animalism is really communism. Manor Farm is allegorical of Russia, and the farmer Mr. Jones is the Russian Czar. Old Major stands for either Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin, and the pig named Snowball represents the intellectual revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Napoleon stands for Stalin, while the dogs are his secret police. The horse Boxer stands in for the proletariat, or working class.
• The setting of Animal Farm is a dystopia, which is an imagined world that is far worse than our own, as opposed to a utopia, which is an ideal place or state. Other dystopian novels include Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Orwell's own 1984.
• The most famous line from the book is "All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." This line is emblematic of the changes that George Orwell believed followed the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia. Rather than eliminating the capitalist class system it was intended to overthrow, the revolution merely replaced it with another hierarchy. The line is also typical of Orwell's belief that those in power usually manipulate language to their own benefit.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

In 1929, when Jawaharlal Nehru as Congress President gave the call for ‘Poorna Swaraj’ or total independence from British colonial rule, January 26 was chosen as the Independence Day. In fact, Congress party continued to celebrate it 1930 on wards, till India attained independence and January 26, 1950, was chosen as the Republic Day – the day India formally became a sovereign country and was no longer a British Dominion. powered by Rubicon Project

So how did August 15 become India’s independence day? Well, Lord Mountbatten had been given a mandate by the British parliament to transfer the power by June 30, 1948. If he had waited till June 1948, in C Rajagopalachari’s memorable words, there would have been no power left to transfer. Mountbatten thus advanced the date to August 1947.

At that time, Mountbatten claimed that by advancing the date, he was ensuring that there will be no bloodshed or riot. He was, of course, to be proven wrong, although he later tried to justify it by saying that “wherever colonial rule has ended, there has been bloodshed. 

Based on Mountbatten’s inputs the Indian Independence Bill was introduced in the British House of Commons on July 4, 1947, and passed within a fortnight. It provided for the end of the British rule in India, on August 15, 1947, and the establishment of the Dominions of India and Pakistan, which were allowed to secede from the British Commonwealth.

Mountbatten later claimed, as quoted in Freedom at Midnight, that “The date I chose came out of the blue. I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event. When they asked had we set a date, I knew it had to be soon. I hadn’t worked it out exactly then — I thought it had to be about August or September and I then went out to the 15th August. Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender.”

On August 15, 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address, which later came to be known as the Jewel Voice Broadcast.But how did Pakistan get independence on August 14? Actually, it didn’t. The Indian Independence Bill gave August 15 as the date of independence for both the countries. The first stamp issued by Pakistan mentioned August 15 as its independence day. In his first address to Pakistan, Jinnah actually said, “August 15 is the birthday of the independent and sovereign state of Pakistan. It marks the fulfillment of the destiny of the Muslim nation which made great sacrifices in the past few years to have its homeland.”

In 1948, Pakistan started marking August 14 as its independence day, either because the ceremony for the transfer of power in Karachi was held on August 14, 1947, or because August 14, 1947, was the 27th of Ramadan, a very sacred date to the Muslims.

Whatever be the case, 73 years on, India and Pakistan celebrate their hard-fought independence with patriotic fervor. The dates, in any case, hold far less significance than the mission to deliver the fruits of independence to the vast multitude of people in the two countries.