Closer Home - George Orwell's "Burmese Days"

Like the rest of the world, Indians get most of their Orwellian exposure from Animal Farm and 1984. But it’s Burmese Days, Orwell’s debut novel, that is closer to home.

        Fearing reprimand from the British government, Orwell had Burmese Days published in the United States first, in 1934. Born Eric Arthur Blair to British parents in Bihar, India, in 1903, he was raised and educated in England. His father worked in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. Orwell attended Eton on a scholarship but chose to join the Indian Imperial Police at the age of 19, returning to Burma soon after. We know right away who the protagonist of the book, John Flory, is modelled after.

Set in the 1920s, Burmese Days follows Flory, a timber merchant with a disfiguring birthmark who has lived in Kyauktada for well over a decade. His birthmark, or so he thinks, and his aversion to the pretentiousness of the elitist Pukka Sahib-ness alienate him from the other white men at the local European club. His loneliness, his love-hate relationship with the Burmese, and his intolerance of imperial high-handedness drive him to extreme despair. His only solace is his friend, the Anglophile Indian doctor Veraswami, with whom he can openly share his disagreements. Love beckons in the form of the young Elizabeth, who comes to the faraway town to live with the Lackersteens, her uncle and aunt. Flory hopes she will be the person with whom he can share his almost “oriental” life. The most fascinating and insightful character is, unfortunately, given the least page time: U Po Kyin, the Burmese magistrate, whose eyes are set on an “impossible” prize—the acceptance he so desperately seeks in the elite club, where a single seat is reserved for a non-white member. His schemes are aimed at destroying Veraswami’s reputation, as the doctor stands in his way, but it is Flory who ultimately pays the price.

Thinking of Flory, I thought of Levin from Anna Karenina. Levin is patronising and genuinely romanticises the labour of his workers. He devises plans to improve their lot, even if it means sharing the profits from his land with them. These plans meet with resistance, as Levin sees it, because the workers are unwilling to abandon their established ways. Farming is a nobler pursuit in Levin’s eyes, and he admonishes his brother for viewing the countryside merely as a holiday retreat. 

Flory is not Levin. He doesn’t feel sorry for the natives as much as he despises the selfish ways of the imperialists. But he admires their craftsmanship and their dance, even as his admiration is overpowered by his feelings about its grotesqueness. He is familiar with the language and its nuances, interpreting the elderly canoe woman’s observation that the land is a distance a man can shout across as meaning half a mile to her companion. He knows he is part of the Burmese landscape as much as Levin belongs to the countryside. But whereas Levin has fully integrated into his chosen vocation and made peace with it, Flory, because of his foreignness and his longing for a past he cannot quite shake off, remains aloof.

Though Flory doesn’t display his disdain, his cowardice prevents him from publicly defending his native friend. Unlike Levin, he doesn’t want to redeem anyone. He just wants to speak his mind and act as an Englishman in England would, rather than follow the Pukka Sahib ways.

“Besides, he had heard it all so often, so very often—a hundred times, a thousand times it might be, since his first week in Rangoon, when his burra sahib… saw him take off his topi to pass a native funeral and said to him reprovingly: 'Remember laddie, always remember, we are sahiblog and they are dirrt!' It sickened him, now, to have to listen to such trash.”

Spoilers ahead. 

            Orwell devastates the reader by bringing Flory to the verge of redemption and a life ahead of him, only to rob him of everything, including his own life. But I feel that even if he had lived, Orwell makes it apparent that he would not have lived a wholesome life and would have fallen back into his desolate existence. The chief reason is that, had Elizabeth married him, their views on life were so different that they would have led rather bitter lives under the same roof.

            Flory’s longing for a partner in the middle of nowhere makes him oblivious to the fact that Elizabeth is precisely the kind of person he detests: a memsahib who looks down upon the natives and professes white superiority, showing open disdain for all things “oriental”. Her horror at the sight of a naked Chinese child urinating, her refusal to acknowledge the Eurasian greeters in the church, her disapproval of the appearance of Burmese women, and her hatred of art embody everything Flory loathes in a Pukka Sahib. He believes she is all white wine and Marcel Proust while living in a land that reeks of whisky and Edgar Wallace.

            Orwell tries to redeem Elizabeth a little by letting us in on her selfish parents’ upbringing of her and her impractical mother’s love of art, which robs Elizabeth of a secure home. But by the end of the book, there is little about Elizabeth that stands out, and one wishes U Po Kyin had ended up as one of the more talked-about characters, even though his evil nature is fully brought out in the limited space he occupies.

            Orwell, though an avowed atheist, retained a certain affection for the Anglican Church, perhaps out of nostalgia. Yet this did not stop him from making sarcastic remarks about religion.

The book-wallah was an itinerant peddler of books… for any book in his bundle you gave him four annas, and any other book. Not quite any book, however, for the book-wallah, though analphabetic, had learned to recognize and refuse a Bible.

'No, sahib,' he would say plaintively, 'no. This book… this book with a black cover and gold letters—this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly.'

He also pokes fun at the Burmese practice of relying on religious penances and vows to build pagodas as a way of making up for past sins.

The headman's house was a little bigger than the others, and it had a corrugated iron roof, which, in spite of the intolerable din it made during the rains, was the pride of the headman's life. He had foregone the building of a pagoda, and appreciably lessened his chances of Nirvana, to pay for it.

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I remember what a priest said to me once about hell, something that he had translated from the Pali scriptures, and it was very terrible… Is it not very dreadful to think of such things, Ko Po Kyin?'

U Po Kyin laughed and gave a careless wave of his hand that meant 'pagodas'.

            

            Dr. Veraswami, the well-meaning, innocent, and gullible man who is devoured by U Po Kyin’s schemes, is, I understand, Tamil. He is said to have been modelled on Dr. Krishnaswamy, who nursed Orwell back to health after he came down with dengue in Burma.

            Burmese Days is, I believe, my favourite Orwellian work so far because it feels rustic and has a personal touch. The novel has rekindled my interest in Burma, a country I last encountered in Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace more than a decade ago. I would like to read more about its history, especially the Tamils who migrated there during British rule, and perhaps understand the myriad complexities of Myanmar’s present-day politics.