Editor of Empire

In 1941, in the quiet colonial outpost of Motihari, a British officer named Edward Blake was tasked with overseeing the local newspaper—The Imperial Herald. His job wasn’t journalism. It was narrative management. Every week, his team took reports from across Bengal—about protests, famines, and small mutinies—and rewrote them for the Crown.

"Famine?" he’d say, sipping tea. "No, no, let’s call it a ‘seasonal adjustment.’" "Peasant uprising?" he’d chuckle. "Make it a ‘local disagreement’."

But one report bothered him.

It came from a young Indian apprentice in the press named Arvind. Tucked between print orders, Arvind had written an anonymous piece describing how British indigo planters poisoned village wells to push farmers into selling land.

Edward read it twice.

“This will never be printed,” he muttered, tearing the sheet.

But Arvind had copied the article—on onion-skin paper—and sent it to underground presses in Calcutta.

Months passed. The story spread like fire. People began protesting. British officers scrambled to control the backlash.

Edward, humiliated, was reassigned to a desk in London.

Years later, long after independence, an old Arvind sat in a university library in Delhi. A student approached him with a smile. “Sir, that story about the indigo wells—it was in our syllabus. Was that you?”

Arvind didn’t answer. He simply pulled out a faded piece of onion-skin paper, still smelling faintly of ink.

Moral: 

Truth buried is not truth erased. And even the smallest voice can echo into history when it refuses to be silenced.

Inspiration:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. - George Orwell