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.

[1] Her date of birth is given as 28 December 1910 in the 1939 England and Wales Register,[2] and as 1912 in Sahitya Akademi's Who's Who of Indian Writers (1961).

[1] There she met the Afrikaaner teacher Johanna Adriana Quinta Du Preez, who was impressed by Chitale's interest in theatre.

[1] At the onset of the Second World War in 1939, they were both at the University of Oxford; Chitale registered as an external student while Du Preez was studying journalism.

[5][6][b] There, her contemporaries included Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand, Balraj Sahni, and Princess Indira of Kapurthala.

[6][7] Every month she wrote and delivered a programme preview, which Orwell edited, and regularly read out translated scripts in Marathi, her mother tongue.

[6][8] In 1941, in one programme titled "The kitchen in wartime: some suggestions for doing without meat", Chitale gave her suggestion of a vegetarian alternative to sausage and mash and spoke of what she thought an Indian housewife might do in Britain with the limited availability of ingredients and fuel;[9] in another, she talked of "appetising curries".

[12][14] In 1943, Chitale contributed the chapter on the European refugee children's exhibition in E. M. Forster's, Ritchie Calder's, Cedric Dover's, and Hsiao Ch'ien's book Talking to India.

[6] BBC producer Trevor Hill later recalled in his memoirs Over the Airwaves, that during his early years with the BBC's Overseas Services at 200 Oxford Street, when he was still in his teens "the person I knew best and enjoyed working with was a diminutive, cheerful young Indian woman from Poona, Venu Chitale.

And I did this in company of English friends who lived for ideals, whether they were humble or elevated did not matter.Chitale left Liverpool for Bombay on 4 December 1947, on the RMS Empress of Australia.

[22] That year she assisted Pandit with refugee women and children in the camps set up in Delhi following India's Partition.