The Influence of British Burma on George Orwell

My biography of George Orwell can be found here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/George-Orwell-Explaining-History-Century-ebook/dp/B00HLRW8YQ

On 27^th October 1922, a nineteen-year-old man boarded the SS Herefordshire in Birkenhead; his destination, Rangoon, the vibrant heart of British Burma. Eric Blair had failed to meet academic expectations, despite attending Eton, and his parents had decided that he should enrol in the Imperial Indian Police. The shores of the steamy sub-continent were not entirely foreign to him: his father, Richard, had served in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service since he was eighteen, and Eric had been born in India. His mother chose to raise her children in England, but she had grown up in Moulmein, where Eric’s grandmother still resided. Thus Burma, with its potent blend of exotic allure and family history, seemed the natural colony in which to work. Eric underwent six months of rigorous preparation at a crammer in Southwold, and, upon passing assessments in subjects such as Greek and riding a horse, he was deemed fit for service and dispatched like a freshly minted coin into the Treasury of the British Empire.

The Eric who returned to England five years later was a man transformed, for his reaction to the British rule in Burma had been of visceral disgust and profound disillusionment. Experiences churned in his mind like fish in the Irrawaddy River, and, over the coming months, these inchoate ideas would crystallise into the foundations of some of the most powerful writing of the 20^th century. George Orwell had arrived.

The British occupation of Burma – or Myanmar as it was previously known – began in 1824. Former relations had revolved around the East India Company’s efforts to engage the Konbaung Dynasty in open trading, but these soon deteriorated with the escalation of border tensions. The First Anglo-Burmese War saw the loss of Assam and other northern provinces; a second conflict in the mid-19^th century, provoked by a trivial Burmese violation of the treaty that had ended the first, resulted in the annexation of Lower Burma to the burgeoning Raj. In November 1885, animosity between the two powers was further enflamed by a dispute over raw materials, and the British capitalised on the situation with fervent expansionism. By the end of the month, forces had advanced to the capital and deposed Thibaw, its monarch.

The texture of Burmese life was now to be taken from a different cloth. Myanmar was rechristened Burma in a stamp of British authority, and the country was consumed by the imperial behemoth. The wounds inflicted on society by the dissolution of the monarchy and the secularisation of the state festered for some time, and rancorous Burmese nationalism sparked guerrilla warfare. The livelihood of Burmese farmers was undermined by a significant influx of Indian migrants prepared to labour for a lower wage. Consequently, these displaced natives resorted to desperate measures and crime rates soared. British rule heralded a new era of prosperity through foreign trade: by the 1920s, Burma was exporting around two million tonnes of rice every year. This was, however, only a veneer of opulence. Although the economy flourished, wealth was disproportionately concentrated in the hands of foreigners, and the Burmese social system crumbled.

Orwell found himself in the awkward position of being a critic of his own community during his five years in Burma, and became increasingly isolated from his contemporaries as he retreated into the sanctuary of his own mind. This independence of thought would light the touchpaper of his genius. He saw the Janus-faced nature of colonial rule – the exploitation, the oppression and the domination – and was disgusted by it. When he returned home for leave in 1927, after contracting dengue fever, he was shocked to discover the same iniquities in his own country, and set about alerting others to such issues through his writing.

Burmese Provincial Police Training School in Mandalay (1923). Orwell is third from the left in the back row.

‘Burmese Days’ was not published until 1935, as it was seen to be teetering on the edge of defamation. This imagined story of life under British rule was corroborated by personal experiences, fusing fact and fiction in a damning critique of imperialism. The outlandish Eastern world had pummelled his mind relentlessly: in a passage written a decade after his return, he remarked:

‘The landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them.’ ^{The Road To Wigan Pier}

‘Burmese Days’ was by no means his sole account of colonial life. In 1929, an essay entitled ‘Comment on exploite un peuple: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’ – or ‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burma’ – elaborated on all that he abhorred. The government of Burma was denounced as ‘of necessity despotic’ but concealing itself ‘behind a mask of democracy’. The British were able to maintain their domination over the region only because it was populated by Burmese peasants who existed in a state of ‘political apathy’ founded on an insubstantial education: ‘because there are no educated classes, public opinion, which could press for rebellion against England, is non-existent.’ Remarkably, twelve thousand British controlled fourteen million people, and Orwell was responsible for the security of over two thousand. Further opprobrium was heaped on the British: ‘they [the Burmese] are under the protection of a despotism which defends them for its own ends, but which would abandon them without hesitation if they ceased to be of use. Their relationship with the British Empire is that of slave and master.’

A quest for absolution can be discerned from Orwell’s descriptions of his time in Burma. He wrote with a searing honesty that persuades the reader that he was not a wholly willing party to the brutality:

‘I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear… But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it... 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.’ ^{Shooting An Elephant, Essay}

The essay describes his reluctance to kill an elephant that had trampled an Indian to death: shooting such a majestic creature was ‘comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery,’ particularly as it appeared ‘no more dangerous than a cow.’ Before capitulating to the pressure of the masses and shooting the elephant, a startling, and somewhat disconcerting revelation came upon Orwell:

‘It was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East... I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to “impress” the natives and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.’ ^{Shooting An Elephant, Essay}

A similar degree of involvement is recorded in ‘The Hanging’, an evocative vignette of an execution. The condemned was a ‘Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes.’ Orwell later observed that he had not trained himself ‘to be indifferent to the expression of the human face’. ^{The Road To Wigan Pier.} A subconscious movement by the man on his way to the gallows elicited intense empathy in Orwell:

‘When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All of the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.’ ^{The Hanging, Essay}

Orwell’s words are laced with disgust at the grotesque contrast between an ‘extraordinarily funny’ anecdote told after the hanging, whilst the ‘dead man was a hundred yards away’. It took place at Insein Prison, to which Bo Kyi, a former inmate, referred as the ‘darkest hell hole in Burma’. By a grimly ironic coincidence, Insein is pronounced as ‘insane’: many prisoners suffer from mental health issues as a result of their incarceration. It is a jail notorious for its human rights abuses today: conditions are appalling, disease is rampant and torture is endemic. Yet little has changed since Orwell was stationed there:

‘The wretched prisoners squatting in the reeking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboo, the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest – things like these are beyond bearing when you are in any way directly responsible for them. I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders.’ ^{The Road To Wigan Pier}

Orwell believed the British Empire to be sucking the lifeblood from the Burmese natives, and was ‘conscious of an immense weight of guilt’, for which he had to atone. The injustice of man’s tyranny over another repulsed him, and led him to the ‘simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.’ ^{The Road To Wigan Pier}

Ten years after Orwell’s return to England, Burma was granted some autonomy through devolution from India, and became a separately administered colony. In 1948, Burmese independence was achieved, and the country began to recover economically. Yet it was plagued by its fissiparous political makeup, and, in 1962, the army seized control through a coup d’état. The country has been under the domination of a military junta ever since, and became increasingly introverted and isolated. Burma always resided in the hinterland of the British Empire, and has failed to find a niche in the nation’s imperial imagination. For years, it was an international pariah, beset by atrocious human rights abuses. Although it is now slowly emerging from its seclusion, its cornucopia of natural resources belies the troubled state of its society. It is the world’s principal exporter of teak, and possesses significant reserves of precious stones, oil and gas, yet little of this wealth reaches the populace. An ossified economy, ethnic tensions and rife corruption have all hindered its development.

Conflict between Muslims and Buddhists persists, and this domestic strife can be attributed to the British legacy: it was colonialism that diversified Burmese society, as many foreigners, particularly Indians, emigrated there. Orwell might have seen Burmese emancipation, but he did not live to witness a journey to independence fraught with political and social turmoil. His death extinguished the mind of one of the greatest writers of the 20^th century; one can only imagine his sentiments on Burma’s current predicament, which would be pronounced with the characteristic lucidness and integrity that has illuminated his work and ensured its enduring significance.