When protests erupted in Ukraine’s capital Kiev last November, the city’s Independence Maidan (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) joined Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park as a site of national resistance in our time. During the last ten months, thousands of Ukrainians have rallied to this huge square in pro-Europe and anti-Russian demonstrations that have left over a hundred dead in clashes with police.

That “maidan” is the Arabic word for public square needs explaining to many Western readers, but India needs no such elucidation. In fact, Kiev’s Maidan, which began to be called “Gay Euromaidan” after protests extended to oppose Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay laws, even has an ideological twin in Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan, the site both of the Quit India Movement in the early 1940s and the annual Queer Azaadi pride march. Indians will also recognise several other Ukrainian words derived from the Arabic trade route, such as tsukor (sugar), halva, and kotleta (cutlet). (Chicken a la Kiev, that tasty butter bomb served at Mumbai’s Gaylord restaurant, is known in its native city as kotleta po-Kievski.)

Although India continues to support its powerful friend Russia over Ukraine (while piously urging both parties to a peaceful solution), there is a fascinating literary connection between India and Ukraine in which Russia has a central role to play. It concerns Animal Farm, George Orwell’s brilliant satire of the 1917 Russian Revolution, in which a farmyard of animals overthrow their oppressive human master only to end up being oppressed by a new ruling class of pigs—tyrannical czars essentially being replaced by tyrannical comrades. As one of the first novels to be used as Cold War propaganda, Animal Farm’s early translations included those into Ukrainian and Telugu. And though the provenance of these two translations couldn’t be more dissimilar, the stories of how they were produced provide an excellent snapshot of the tangled political anxieties of a freshly post-colonial, post-war world that had begun to freeze into the two camps of the Cold War.

Published in August 1945 after being rejected by innumerable publishers including TS Eliot’s Faber & Faber, Animal Farm’s fortunes turned when it sold sensationally in America. Suddenly alert to its potential to combat anti-Western propaganda emerging from the Kremlin, the British Foreign Office set up, in 1948, a covert branch called the Information Research Department (IRD) to commission translations of suitable literature for distribution in Britain’s former colonies. Ex-crown jewel India was high on their list. Of special concern was the armed peasant rebellion unfolding in the region under the Nizam of Hyderabad, a ruler as legendary for his wealth as the destitution of his people. In 1946, hundreds of villages had risen up in a revolt led by the Communist Party of India. Called the Telangana Rebellion, it would become the forerunner to, and ideological ally of, the Naxal movement.

Within months of the IRD being set up, an official named Celia Kirwan, who was also a friend of Orwell’s, visited the tubercular writer at his sanatorium to confidentially sound him out on “the best way of furthering our aims in India and Burma.” Kirwan’s report of the meeting, excerpted in Peter Davison’s George Orwell, A Life in Letters, shows Orwell had a nuanced understanding of the ground realities: “He did not think that there was a great deal of scope for propaganda in India and Pakistan, where Communism meant something quite different from what it did in Europe—it meant on the whole, opposition to the ruling class, and he thought that more good would be done by maintaining the closest possible links with these countries, through trade and through the interchange of students.”