Orwell’s Burmese Days

Eric Blair (George Orwell)
during his tenure in the Burma Provincial Police
(third from left, top row)

Reading Burmese Days for my Governance and Civil Society course has given me the acute and somewhat unpleasant feeling of being back in senior high school, even though the prose of Burmese Days carries with it the quite refreshing memories of Orwell’s charmingly terse, often quite blunt literary mannerisms, critiques of language and cynicism about society – in this case, the British Raj, rather than the Soviet Union. In the ‘unseemly squabble […] over the corpse of George Orwell’ (as Mr David Lindsay once put it), one of the things that the late Mr Christopher Hitchens and his language-abusing neocon water-bearers at, say, Harry’s Place so often forget is that Mr Orwell was as implacable an enemy of imperialism, however ‘well-intentioned’, as he was of political authoritarianism – a facet of his work which comes out most strongly in a work like Burmese Days.

The entire novel is essentially a tale of unrequited and ultimately frustrated love, but the broader implications of John Flory’s pining after Elizabeth Lackersteen are seen in the way in which they relate to each other, to the other Europeans and to the Burmese and Indians, who are always in the background and occasionally starkly in the foreground. It is a tale of frustrated love between Flory and England, between Flory and his own life as much as between the two protagonists. It is clear, even as Mr Orwell is placing all of the typical contemporary defences of the British Raj in the mouth of (for example) Dr Veraswami, the local physician, that he detests it with a passion – in the way in which it not only deprives the people it subjugates of basic dignity and legal rights, but also in the way it practically mandates the British to live in isolation and to live in a nest of convenient lies. The despicable, bitter (and, in Ellis’ case, violent) racism of many of the members of the European Club is only the most blatant and easy example of this, but one sees it also in Flory – who espouses all of the high egalitarian ideals of British society at its best, but abuses the natives (such as Ma Hla May, his sometime mistress) and seeks escape from the contradictions of his life by pursuing a relationship with a shallow, insensitive and self-centred girl in the hopes that she might be able to understand him. In the background lurks a coldly, efficiently corrupt schemer of a local magistrate whose sole ambition in life is to gain entrance to the European Club, regardless of how many of his countrymen he has to trammel down in pursuit of that goal – as Flory stands in his way, U Po Kyin conspires to have him removed as well. His success in that pursuit serves as the punchline of the novel, the ultimate condemnation of British rule in Burma.

It seems to me that the outlandishness of the characters, their exaggerated mannerisms and linguistic turns, the exoticisms of the Burmese backdrop of Burmese Days are all very deliberate. Mr Orwell is no stranger to caricature, whether well-received or not. In this case, though, it serves to bolster his point rather than to detract from it. In spite of the palpable influences of Mr W Somerset Maugham, this isn’t The Painted Veil, with some great self-realisation lurking at the end of the main character’s mishaps and prejudices. Indeed, the primary characters end up either dead, displaced or exactly in the same place they were, having learned nothing at all. In this form of ‘we can’t go on like this’ pessimism, it is quite prescient of his better-known novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

An important book, even if not exactly pleasure-reading. Even I enjoy a return to my high-school days every once in a while, though.