‘Burmese Days’: The Sweaty Incompetence of Colonialism
A review of ‘Burmese Days’, by George Orwell; Harper & Brothers, 1934.
George Orwell’s Burmese Days is a novel of heat and hypocrisy. It was Orwell’s first to be published and — well, we can tell. This is not because it is written poorly, although at times it is. It is because it is so eager to mean something. The result is a book that froths at the mouth with righteous anger and then, almost charmingly, stumbles over its own prose like a drunk with a moral compass. That the compass still points in the right direction does not mean the journey there is always elegant.
The novel was written in 1934, and Orwell draws heavily on the time he spent in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. It is part exposé, part exercise in self-flagellation, and part tortured love story. It hates colonialism, loathes the colonisers, and barely tolerates the colonised. And yet despite all this, despite its being a bubbling cauldron of contempt (or, perhaps, because of that), Burmese Days is blisteringly effective at portraying the colonial project as a grand, sagging fraud propped up by petty men, weak gin, and strong delusions. What it lacks in subtlety it makes up for in venom. Orwell, it is clear, isn’t here to seduce us. He is here to make a point, and to slap us across the face if we fail to listen.
The novel is part exposé, part exercise in self-flagellation, and part tortured love story.
Our story begins in the fictional Burmese town of Kyauktada, a thinly veiled stand-in for Katha, where Orwell served. It centres on John Flory, a timber merchant with a birthmark on his face and a very deep reservoir of self-loathing. Flory is the closest thing the novel has to an avatar of conscience, because Flory finds the Empire distasteful. But he is still too cowardly to do anything about it, and he still depends on it for his income and, in fact, his whole life. All he can do is deliver the odd half-hearted tirade.
Flory’s days keep to the rhythm of colonial life: sweating, shooting, and drinking with other Europeans at the club. The defining traits of these men range from extreme racism to everyday bitterness and incompetence. The club is exclusionary by design and stifling by nature; it acts as both a literal and symbolic stage for displays of what Orwell sees as the imperial delusion. It is the centrepiece of Flory’s world: a space where everything is imported—including, perhaps, the social decay.
Flory’s days keep to the peculiar rhythm of colonial life: sweating, shooting, and drinking with other Europeans at the club.
The plot deals with a campaign to admit a ‘native’ member to the club, which predictably creates tensions among the members. The prime candidate for inclusion is Dr. Veraswami, a local Indian doctor and friend of Flory’s. His nomination is met with outrage, despite his being a fervent supporter of British rule.
Complicating things is the arrival of Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young Englishwoman whose bland prettiness is matched only by her profound entitlement and absence of personality. Flory, who aches for some kind of salvation (or at least distraction), falls hopelessly in love. Elizabeth, too, is in love—just not with him. For she yearns for a fantasy of English gentility in the tropics, and so is rather put off when Flory shows himself to be merely an honest man, which in her eyes makes him unspeakably vulgar. And everything unravels from there, as it nearly always does in Orwell’s fiction. But I will not spoil it for you.
Complicating things is the arrival of Elizabeth Lackersteen, a young Englishwoman whose bland prettiness is matched only by her powerful sense of entitlement
What Orwell succeeds in doing in Burmese Days depicting imperialism as not just morally obscene, but pathetically small. There is a temptation to see the men behind great moral wrongs as in some way great themselves, however many and various their sins. The truth, as Orwell (and, later, Christopher Hitchens) show us is that these are often small and inadequate men, whose only outstanding skills are a high tolerance for cruelty, a lack of conscience, and/or a hopelessly inflated view of their own importance—traits that point not to greatness but to broken mental and moral equipment. We may worship individualism, we may throw ourselves to our knees when faced with enormous wealth and standing; but those so determined to assert their will on the rest of us are, much of the time, just a little less than human than we. In Orwell’s hierarchy, the men of empire are right at the bottom. Those who express an everyday common decency are far closer to the top.
So Orwell does not glamourise the conquest of Burma or India or anywhere else. He paints its political order as sweaty and inefficient, run by men who could not be trusted to keep a corner shop in business for a week. Complacency and entitlement are the standout features of these men, for Orwell: that, at least, was what he perceived when he was one of them. The ruling class in Burmese Days are no benevolent managers of some less developed region, but a rogue’s gallery of racists, cowards, social climbers and fools. They are so grotesque in their mediocrity that the novel nearly slides into farce. Orwell’s outrage is moral; but his gaze is more clinical. He manifestly sees the Empire not as some deviation from the course of British history but the logical upshot of unexamined privilege meeting bureaucratic inertia.
Complacency and entitlement are the standout features of these men, for Orwell: that, at least, was what he perceived when he was one of them.
If we were feeling uncharitable, we might say at this point that Orwell, for all his brilliance, is not immune to the flaws he identifies in his subjects. Flory, his proxy, is painted as morally better to his peers, yet he treats his friend Veraswami with a great deal of condescension himself. We could argue in response that this is fiction; and at any rate Orwell was a man of his time. We should also note that one of Orwell’s fears about empire was that it brutalised its participants. (To brutalise, by the way, is to desensitise, not to beat up.) But there are ways in which the novel is unquestionably flawed. U Po Kyin, one of the villains of the piece, is cartoonishly drawn; and Elizabeth has all the character and charm of a piece of wet cardboard: she acts as a mere cipher for a kind of shallow, status-conscious woman with whom Orwell, it seems, had a problem.
Still, Burmese Days is a young writer’s book, full of fury and self-loathing and a desire to say something true in a world built on lies. Hence even its imperfections have a certain charm. Orwell would of course go on to define and refine his political outlook, clean up his prose, and crystallise more concrete targets for his anger. But the raw stuff of Orwell as we have come to know him are here: the moral clarity, the disdain for cant, the belief that the personal is political, and vice versa.
