Lost Classic – Burmese Days, by George Orwell

The start of George Orwell’s career was not a happy one. In his essay, Shooting an Elephant, he writes: “As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear.” A young Eric Blair had joined the Indian Imperial Police in 1922 and was stationed in Burma for five years. His revulsion at the cruelty and injustice of the authoritarian regime of which he was a part would become a recurrent theme in his writing, culminating in his seminal novel, 1984. But while he hated his job, he loved many things about Burma and its people. This contrast is perfectly expressed in Burmese Days, Orwell’s first novel, published in 1934, a book that has been overshadowed by his later works and somewhat forgotten.

Uplifting it is not. But the novel’s brutal honesty and humble humanity make up for it. The clipped clarity of the prose, the vividness of description and the deftly drawn characters make it compelling reading.

Orwell himself put it best in his essay, Why I Write: “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 my words were used partly for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days… is rather that kind of book.”

Set in the claustrophobic, gossiping Burmese town of Kyauktada, sandwiched between the jungle and the Irrawaddy river, it develops in two interweaving strands, both rife with petty scheming and cynical social climbing. The first details the villainous plotting of the tyrannical U Po Kyin, a mid-ranking magistrate who has bribed, extorted, blackmailed and raped his way to a position of some regard.

But his sights are set higher. He covets the approval and status of the Europeans and sets out to ruin Dr Veraswami, the front runner to be the first non-white member of the British club. U Po Kyin sullies the doctor’s good name with a string of anonymous letters and blames him for a fake uprising which he himself has orchestrated.

The main strand follows the self-pitying, self-loathing John Flory, a timber-merchant in his mid-thirties who has lived in Burma for 15 years. He despises the banal chatter and unthinking bigotry of his fellow Europeans and views the British Raj as a moribund project of plunder. Unusually for a European he is friends with a native, Dr Veraswami, who cherishes his friendship with a white man and the prestige it affords him. The hideous birthmark on Flory’s face also marks him out as different.

Flory’s stultifying existence of booze, women and lonely anguish is interrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, the unmarried niece of a locally stationed English couple, the Lackersteens. Flory falls for her pathetically and absolutely, unable to see that she is a shallow, naïve snob.

His standing in the eyes of Elizabeth yo-yos from hero of the hour (saving her from a water buffalo, shooting a leopard) to untouchable wretch (taking her to a native dance, being revealed to keep a Burmese mistress).

The cowardly Flory is then usurped by the callous, ambivalent Verrall, a young aristocrat who rides into town and wins Elizabeth’s affections, only to lose interest and leave her. At the story’s climax, and with Elizabeth’s hand in marriage all but guaranteed, U Po Kyin’s cross-hairs turn towards Flory with devastating effect.

The novel revolves around the British club, the social centre of the town. It is a dingy, mildewed place where colonial bores complain about the heat and the natives and pickle themselves with lukewarm whisky sodas.

Orwell is at his most astutely perceptive and excoriating in his portraits of the mediocre scandalmongers that inhabit the club, driven to continually justify themselves by the creeping fear that, by exploiting and subjugating the country’s people, they are no better than common thieves.  They hark back to the good old days of thrashing servants and play the role of pukka sahib (true gentleman), a concept revealed to be hollow and despicable in Orwell’s caustic and darkly amusing narration.

Between them the expats exemplify the full spectrum of disparaging attitudes towards the native population. Macgregor, the well-meaning but pompous Deputy Commissioner, “had no prejudice against Orientals; indeed, he was deeply fond of them. Provided they were given no freedom he found them the most charming people alive.”

Mr Lackersteen and Maxwell are lazily complicit in a default form of racism that straddles indifference and hostility. Mrs Lackersteen epitomises the memsahib mentality, “living twenty years in the country without learning a single word of the language.”

Then there’s the rabidly violent Ellis, seething with hatred for the natives and the British-imposed laws that prevent him from boiling them in oil. But Orwell is always even-handed in the treatment of his characters who are delicately and plausibly drawn. They highlight unthinking racism as a cornerstone of the imperial project, rather than a mere by-product, and “a thing native to the very air of India.” What is sadder is the complicity of the natives in their own subjugation, perpetuating the colonial attitudes foisted upon them by their white masters. Dr Veraswami is deeply uncomfortable when Flory bad-mouths his fellow Europeans and the British Raj they prop up. He leaps to their defence, contrasting the public-school spirit with the ignorance, poverty and inferior “Oriental character” of his fellow countrymen.

The story, despite its unappealing cast, is engrossing. Orwell’s “purple passages” feel like time off the leash, his reward to himself for describing in such uncompromising detail the moral ugliness of so many Burmese and British. He gives sumptuous descriptions of the flora and fauna – “gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom… pink Chinese rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind.” When Flory kisses Elizabeth, the moon – “a white-hot coin” – covers the leaves of a frangipani tree with a “freight of solid light, like snow”.

Orwell’s evident love for Burma saves it from being a depressing read. We care about the cruelty and injustice of Empire because we see that there’s something worth saving from it. But Orwell’s relationship with Burma and its inhabitants was complicated. As a policeman, he was often tormented by the Burmese. In Shooting an Elephant, he admits that “in the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves.”

Throughout Orwell allows for ambiguity of interpretation that is absent in his later works. He is careful to ensure that the reader can appreciate why Elizabeth responds in the way she does when Flory decides to take her to a native dance. The “feral reek”, the sweat, the dirt and the erotic contortions of the dancer are viscerally detailed. Even though we see Elizabeth as haughty and narrow-minded, her disgust is understandable.

Through Flory, Orwell describes the unique state of isolation and exile of the Anglo-Indian – “the solitude, the melancholy. Foreign trees, foreign flowers, foreign landscapes, foreign faces.” But the root of Flory’s loneliness is not love or lust, though these play a part. It lies in the need for a companion of thought that Orwell must have shared, a desperation to freely articulate a festering resentment towards the system he helped to maintain.

Like Flory, Orwell had been a misfit during his time in Burma, at odds with the braying, gung-ho imperialists he was surrounded by. He consigned himself to living “silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds.” The enforced uniformity of opinion in Burma – “a world in which every word and every thought is censored” – is a theme that Orwell would continually revisit.

Flory tells Dr Veraswami about his frustration in having to uphold “the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them… it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine.” But everyone, natives included, are corrupted by and caught up in the imperial system that incentivises their behaviour. U Po Kyin’s malevolence is driven by his desire to enter the British club himself, to gain prestige among the oppressors. Flory’s blackmailing mistress, Ma Hla May, only cares about his money and status.

Orwell would later write about his guilt at being a cog in an “unbreakable tyranny”. What returned to him, again and again, were the “faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my stick in moments of rage.”

He quit his post in disgust in 1927 and returned to England where he found that the plight of the working class echoed the injustices he had witnessed in Burma. He set about submerging himself in the oppressed substrata of society. These experiences would provide the material for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Orwell’s London publisher worried that the characters in Kyauktada (in reality Katha) had been too realistically and savagely described. The fear of libel action delayed the British publication of Burmese Days until 1935. But Orwell’s defence of his caustic depiction of colonial society was simple: “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.”