Venu Chitale | |
|---|---|
 Venu Chitale at the BBC, 1944 | |
| Born | 28 December 1912 Shirol, Kolhapur, Kolhapur State (present-day Maharashtra, India) |
| Died | 1 January 1995 (aged 82) Mumbai, India |
| Pen name | Weenoo |
| Occupation | BBC Radio broadcaster, secretary to George Orwell |
| Language | English, Hindustani, Marathi |
| Education | |
| Notable works | In Transit (1950) |
Venu Dattatreye Chitale, also known as Leela Ganesh Khare (28 December 1912 – 1 January 1995), was an Indian writer, BBC Radio broadcaster, and secretary to George Orwell during the early years of the Second World War.
Chitale was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India, and was in England between 1934 and late 1947. In 1940, after assisting with volunteer work in a local air raid precaution unit in Oxford, she moved to London to work with Orwell, then BBC Radio's talks producer. She became a broadcaster for both the India section of the BBC's Eastern Service, where she read news and gave recipes in Marathi, and the BBC Home Service, where she taught British listeners vegetarian cooking at a time when meat was rationed and in short supply.
Around 1944, Chitale began working for Krishna Menon at the India League in London. Towards the end of 1947, after India's independence, she returned there and assisted Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit at refugee camps set up in Delhi following the Partition of India. Her first novel, In Transit, was published in 1950.
Chitale's life is recorded in a chapter in Vijaya Deo's Sakhe Soyare, a book in Marathi. In 2017, the BBC produced a video about her.