Ninety years on from Orwell’s classic Burmese Days, Myanmar is still a place of beauty and corruption

The central character in George Orwell’s novel Burmese Days is Flory, an expatriate timber merchant. He becomes reluctantly addicted to Burma not because he has been seduced by its charms but because despite himself and the claims of England, he comes to realise he belongs there. At the heart of the expatriate life is the Club which he has nonetheless come to abhor.

I was reminded of this when I visited Rangoon (Yangon) in the late 1990s. I stayed in a club which was redolent of a different time. Not in any sense was it a hang-out for ghastly characters like the casual racists of the Kyauktada Club portrayed by Orwell in 1934. The British Club in Rangoon was a gathering place for the small British community of businessmen, teachers and others who sought to generate a little bit of Britain and of community  in the sweltering heat and dislocation of a city which had been so isolated internationally for so long. The bar was small and companionable. Notice boards highlighted barbecue evenings and upcoming social events. Outside patio doors the Club’s small garden was more threadbare than luxuriant but a few chairs and tables invited congregation. The bedrooms were basically furnished but attractive and mine faced over the garden. It had an air-conditioning unit which struggled in the face of old age and of interruptions in the power supply.

I read Burmese Days as I sat in the room gently sweating in the cane chair. I realised then how well Orwell had captured the atmosphere of a country so remote, so unremittingly hot and humid. He had caught too the beauties of the countryside and of the people. And he had recognised the injustices.

The beauties Orwell had seen in Burma in the 1930s had not of course faded sixty years later. The local people still had a humbling dignity. A self-assurance was reflected in the quiet elegance of the way they walked so erectly and in the striking but restrained colours of their traditional dress, especially the Longyi worn by the men. Perhaps above all the architecture of Buddhist temples and monuments retained a deeply soothing grandeur. I recall a long and exhausting trek through city streets and up a sharply ascending pathway to the Shwedagon pagoda. Nothing really had prepared me for what greeted me as I reached the top. From the dank and crowded pathway I walked out onto a tiled roofscape of shimmering metals and gold-clad stupas (rather like spires).

There is much discontent and corruption described in Orwell’s novel, but such things took different forms in 1990s Burma. On the day after my walk to the temple complex I drove slowly past the small domestic compound where the extraordinarily dignified opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi was being held under house-arrest. On another day I attended a meeting with senior members of the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) through which the military ruled Burma. In contrast to so many of their fellow citizens walking in the streets outside, the SLORC were physically well-upholstered (including an especially tall and flabby head of the Central Bank) and bore the off-putting appearance of the strikingly self-satisfied.

Military rule in one way or another has been more the norm in Burma/Myanmar than the exception since 1962. The democracy hard-won by Aung San Suu Kyi and her then supporters was all the more celebrated and treasured for being the exception.

At one point in Burmese Days the restrictions and inhumanities of colonial Burma are described almost laconically:

“It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored … Free  speech is unthinkable.”

Orwell was writing of repression at a different time and in different circumstances. But repression is no less abhorrent now than it should have been then. My recollections of my visit to Rangoon/Yangon have of course come back to me in recent days. The people of Myanmar were entitled to make their own choices in the 1990s and they are entitled to do so today. Not least they have the right to choose their own government and a right not to have a resurgent military try to usurp that choice.