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  Burmese Days

  George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, in modern Bihar, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service. He grew up in Oxfordshire and was a King’s Scholar at Eton from 1917 to 1921. Between 1922 and 1927, he worked for the Indian Imperial Police; after returning to England, he spent some years living as a tramp and casual manual worker, episodes that informed Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933 under his newly chosen pseudonym ‘George Orwell’. His first novel, Burmese Days, which drew on his imperial experience, appeared in 1934. Between 1935 and 1940 he published three more novels and three non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a Republican volunteer. In 1936 he married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, who died in 1945. At the beginning of the Second World War Orwell, turned down for military service due to ill health, joined the Home Guard. From 1941 to 1943 he worked as a talks producer for the BBC Eastern Service, after which he became literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune for two years, to which he also contributed a column ‘As I Please’. Throughout the war he wrote a large number of occasional articles and periodical essays. Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm, was completed by the end of February 1944 but not published until August 1945, when it enjoyed enormous success. From 1946 he spent long periods on the isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides working on the novel that became Nineteen Eighty-Four and struggling with worsening tuberculosis; the novel was published in 1949, again to great acclaim. Confined to a sanatorium, he married his second wife, Sonia Brownell, late in 1949; he died of a tubercular haemorrhage in January the following year.

  Rosinka Chaudhuri is Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC). Her published books include Freedom and Beef-Steaks: Colonial Calcutta Culture (Orient Blackswan, 2012) and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Literary Culture (OUP, 2013). She has most recently edited An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose (OUP, 2018).

  oxford world’s classics

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  Oxford World’s Classics

  GEORGE ORWELL

  Burmese Days

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  rosinka chaudhuri

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

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  Editorial material © Rosinka Chaudhuri 2021

  Chronology © Stefan Collini 2021

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

  First published as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2021

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of George Orwell

  Map

  BURMESE DAYS

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  Only what does not fit in can be true.

  Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

  Burmese Days is not so much a novel about Englishmen in British India, or indeed a depiction of colonial Burma, as it is about human character, conflict, and desire as they play out in a landscape irradiated and corrupted with the author’s awareness of complicity in the perpetration of imperialism. It should find its place today alongside the great modern novels of the twentieth century; that it has not done so yet is surprising in the light of postcolonial studies and increased inclusivity in reading and studying habits. The fault might lie to a certain extent within the book, for it is the ambiguity of the text, something about the slippery nature of colonial experience itself, swinging pendulum-like between horror and empathy, recoil and beauty, which has made Burmese Days not fit into programmatic agendas of restitution and renewal. The realism and precise historical detail the narrator gives us in Burmese Days, coupled with the uncomfortable identification in the mind of the reader of its protagonist Flory with Orwell himself, creates a certain discomfort that does not make for easy reading. This is not political satire at one remove from us; instead, it seems a rather too literal recounting of the horrible business of empire from someone who knows. For this reason (although there are other literary reasons), the novel is an important text both for the lay reader and for the Orwell aficionado. For the latter it is necessary to recognize that without a consideration of what the novel says—and what Orwell says—about this first violent exposure to the nature of oppression, one cannot understand his politics. For the general reader too it is time now to reread Burmese Days—not just as a story of colonial experience, but as a description of the human predicament, as a novel that imparts to its readers some quality of the uncanny, some embodiment of an elusiveness that resides at a distance from the plot. In a sense, then, the plot is not the point here (it rarely is). What it’s all about is not what happens within it, but the experience of its happening.

  Critics have followed Orwell himself in adopting a dismissive tone towards this book, the first novel he wrote (though not the first he published). As a consequence, Burmese Days is hardly discussed today. The present-day Orwell is, in fact, a custodian of Englishness—he can be found at the entrance to the BBC; newspaper commentators quote him regularly; one anthology of his work is entitled Orwell’s England. Whatever made him foreign and ill at ease in the milieu he lived in has been smoothed away during this gradual metamorphosis. Yet Burma formed Orwell the critic and writer as much as Britain did, and gave him his first powerful sense of imperialism’s nefariousness.

  In a well-known essay, ‘Why I Write’, Orwell began by explaining his ‘need to describe things’ from an early age, an
impulse that led to ‘the making up of a continuous “story” about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind’, which soon ‘ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw’.1 This sounds remarkably like what he said later of his account of Burma: ‘I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.’2 (The book’s title itself—Burmese Days—seems to gesture at a recording of lived experience, at the everyday, at simply the experience of days in Burma.) Regarding the type of book it was, and its style, Orwell was deprecatory: ‘I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound.’ Then he says, ‘And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.’3

  It is exactly, then, not the sort of book he became famous for writing, such as the political allegories Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). (It was the compulsion of the times he lived in, he said, that ensured that he ‘had been forced into becoming a sort of political pamphleteer’.) Reading Burmese Days, then, especially as it is so contrary to the rest of Orwell’s oeuvre, is an experience enriched by taking cognizance of the fundamental reasons he proposed as imperatives to all writers. Burmese Days, in fact, met almost all the criteria listed by Orwell as among the ‘four great motives’ existing in every writer. The first of these is ‘Sheer egoism’, followed by

  2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.. . . Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. . .

  3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

  4. Political purpose—using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.4

  ‘Perception of beauty’—both in the external world and in the internal arrangement of words on a page—the novel is replete with, while the ‘Historical impulse’ is present in the manner in which ‘things as they are’ are vividly portrayed for ‘the use of posterity’. As for ‘Political purpose’, no truer account of Orwell’s ‘political bias’ against imperialism and oppression is to be found than here, and if this vivid portrayal of the dishonesty, sleaze, and fraud involved in the running of an empire by brute force has not pushed ‘the world in a certain direction’ or altered ‘people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after’, then the fault for that lies not with Orwell or with Burmese Days. Rather, it lies perhaps with the British public’s genuine discomfort with the unpalatable underbelly of colonial rule as it was wielded at one time over three-quarters of the world. Intriguingly, Orwell returned to his memories of Burma at the end of his life while confined in a sanatorium with his disease at a critical stage, scribbling the idea for a novella titled ‘A Smoking Room Story’ set there.5 Burmese Days does more than just mark ‘his transformation from the disgruntled policeman who returned from Burma’, before the period of his ambivalent socialism in The Road to Wigan Pier and the radical politics of his participation in the Spanish Civil War—the conventional categorizations of the period before the last two novels.6 No student of Orwell should ignore it, as it forms, in a substantive way, the foundation of his political thinking.

  In the Service of Empire

  The first job of George Orwell—or rather, Eric Arthur Blair—was with the Imperial Police in British India, and he was posted in colonized Burma for about five years between 1922 and 1927, years that were formative to the man and the writer that he became. He was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bihar, to a family which had deep roots in the colonial services. His father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service and his mother, Ida Mabel Blair (née Limouzin), grew up in Moulmein, Burma, where her French father ran a business. (As difficult as it is to picture Orwell’s father travelling the district encouraging farmers to grow poppy rather than traditional food crops for the opium to then be sold in China, that was the remit of his job and so routine of colonial officers like him in India that, however venal it may seem today, at the time it was ‘legitimate’ work, work that did not excite much opposition or comment among members of his class.) His father’s family had once owned Jamaican sugar plantations and his grandfather had been ordained a deacon in Calcutta, while his mother’s family had run a thriving business in shipping and teak for three generations in southern Burma.

  His birth in India was of no significance to either him or anybody else (unlike Kipling, as shown in his autobiography Something of Myself) except perhaps to those people in India who have struggled to preserve the home he was born in.7 As was typical of English families serving in India, before he was 2 his mother took him and his sister to Britain to be brought up. He returned as a very young man at the age of 19, when he was posted in Burma as an officer of the Imperial Police in British India. Christopher Hollis (both a critic and a contemporary of Orwell at Eton) wrote that this decision to come to Burma after Eton instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge arose out of a ‘deep need’ in Orwell ‘not to conform’; by all reports, Orwell ‘acquired a reputation’ in Burma ‘as someone who didn’t fit in’, not ‘a good mixer’, ‘bored with the social and Club life’.8 Orwell’s biographer Gordon Bowker wrote of his superstitious streak—he acquired a series of tiny blue circles tattooed on his knuckles there that remained for the rest of his life. The Burmese believe these protect against snakes, bullets, and black magic, but of course Orwell would also have known—and presumably not cared—that his fellow countrymen would not have approved.

  No other British writer has dwelt upon the unease of the colonizer’s position in the colony in quite the same way, and Orwell’s job as a policeman in colonized India at a time of growing unrest gave him personal knowledge about the conflicted nature of such a job. With the First World War coming to an end in 1918, the temporary truce Gandhi had agreed to with the British for the duration of the war also came to an end, and an intensification of Indian political protest followed almost immediately. The year 1919 witnessed the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre (about which there is a discussion in the novel) where 400 innocent Indian men, women, and children were shot and killed at a peaceful protest on British orders. The ‘Non-Cooperation Movement’ led by Gandhi in 1921–2 then created enormous unrest, with millions responding to his call for civil disobedience and indigenous manufacture aimed at crippling the functioning of the British government in India. In Burma too, the 1920s saw passive resistance on a mass scale, with student unrest peaking and village political units boycotting British goods and refusing payment of government taxes. The hateful relationship with the Burmese public Orwell describes needs to be understood in this context in order to appreciate his position as a colonial officer at this tumultuous time.

  Orwell has left two essays describing in the first person his experience of being in the service of empire, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, essays that have become classics in their own right. Of the two, ‘A Hanging’ (even though replete with details of the misery and inhumanity of British jails in India) is at its core a manifesto against capital punishment. The horror of taking a man’s life and the banality of it when performed as a routine execution is, in the end, more about man’s inhumanity to man—the colonial setting only adding to the barbarism of the act itself. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is more directly about the ethics of empire. In it, the difference between taking an ideological position (‘I had already made up my mind that impe
rialism was an evil thing’) and performing the role of a British police officer in a hostile environment that makes a mockery of those sentiments is held up to scrutiny. The story is set in Moulmein, in Lower Burma, where Orwell had been posted as subdivisional police officer and in the story he says it was where he discovered ‘the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act’.9 He confesses that he hated his job—‘hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.’ Yet the job needs to be done, the elephant needs to be shot, the pose needs to be maintained, the unpleasantness swallowed and ignored. Hating his job, however, did not mean loving the oppressed; that was impossible. ‘I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible,’ the narrator says. He continues:

  With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.10

  The narrator of the story and Flory in Burmese Days often seem one and the same person. In the novel, Flory’s acquaintance with Elizabeth—a conventional young woman who has travelled to India in penurious circumstances to find a husband—progresses stutteringly at the start, but soon ‘She was quite thrilled when he described the murder of an elephant which he had perpetrated some years earlier’ (p. 70).

  Orwell’s time in Burma as an imperial policeman undoubtedly set the tone of his lifelong understanding of the nature of oppression. Later in his life he reacted sharply in Inside the Whale to Auden’s phrase ‘necessary murder’. He wrote, going back to his time in Burma: ‘Personally I would not speak lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men—I don’t mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. . . . Therefore I have some conception of what murder means—the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells.’11 Of Britain’s role in Burma he wrote, highlighting the ‘economic exploitation’ and the ‘social misbehaviour of the British and the friction to which it has led over a long period’: ‘We have treated Burma better than we have treated some countries, but on the whole it is a sordid story.’12 Burmese Days was written after he returned to England at 24—though he may have begun it earlier—and had resolved never to return to his career as a member of the colonial police. ‘First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure,’ Orwell wrote later. ‘This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism.’13