Burmese Days by George Orwell

George Orwell was posted in colonial Burma and John Flory’s character is a looking glass into the The British Raj and its extreme inefficiencies.

Context: At 24, John Flory avoided going to war in Burma, eventually turning him more introspective.

He celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday in hospital, covered from head to foot with hideous sores which were called mud-sores, but were probably caused by whisky and bad food. They left little pits in his skin which did not disappear for two years. Quite suddenly he had begun to look and feel very much older. His youth was finished. Eight years of Eastern Life, fever, loneliness and intermittent drinking, had set their mark on him.

Since then, each year had been lonelier and more bitter than last. What was at the centre of all his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain developed - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life - he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire. The Indian Empire is a despotism - benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object. And as to the English of the East, the ‘Sahiblog’, Flory had come so to hate them from living in their society that he was quite incapable of being fair to them. For after all, the poor devils are no worse than anybody else. They lead unenviable lives; it is a poor bargain to spend thirty years, ill-paid, in an alien country and then come home with a wrecked liver and a pine-apple back side from sitting in cane chairs, to settle down as the bore of some second-rate club.

On the other hand, the ‘Sahiblog’ are not to idealized. There is a prevelant idea that the men at the ‘outposts of Empire’ are at least able and hardworking. It is a delusion. Outside the scientific services - The Forest Department, the Public Works Department and the like - there is no particular need for a British Official in India to do his job competently. Few of them work as hard or as intelligently as the postmaster of a provincial town in England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real backbone of the despostion is not the officials by the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

Context: John Flory is trying to develop a bond with Elizabeth Lackersteen.

Here was anything but tactful with her. Like all men who have lived much alone, he (Flory) adjusted himself better to ideas than to people. And so, though all their talk was superficial, he began to irritate her sometimes; not by what he said but by what he implied. There was an uneasiness between them, ill-defined and yet often verging upon quarrels. When two people, one of whom has lived longed in the country while the other is a new-comer, are thrown together it is inevitable that the first should act as cicerone to the second. Elizabeth during these days, was making her first acquaintance with Burma; it was Flory, naturally, who acted as her interpreter, explaining this, commenting upon that. And the things he said, or the way he said them, provoked in her vague yet deep disagreement. For she perceived that Flory, when he spoke of the ‘natives’, spoke nearly always in favour of them. He was forever praising Burmese customs and the Burmese character; he went so far as to contrast them favourably with the English. it disquieted her. After all, natives were natives - interesting no doubt, but finally only a ‘subject’ people, an inferior people with black faces. His attitude was a little too tolerant. Nor had he grasped, yet, in what way he was antagonising her. He so wanted her to love Burma as he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a memsahib! He had forgotten that most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants.

He was too eager in his attempts to interest her in things Oriental. He tried to induce her, for instance, to learn Burmese, but it came to nothing. (Her aunt had explained to her that only missionary-women spoke Burmese; nice women found kitchen Urdu quite as much as they needed). There were countless small disagreements like that. She was grasping, dimly, that his views were not the views an Englishman should hold. Much more clearly she grasped that he was asking her to be fond of the Burmese, even to admire them; to admire people with black faces, almost savages, whose appearance still made her shudder!

Context: Flory and company find the Forest Deptartment Officer Maxwell’s body

Maxwell’s death had caused a profound shock in Kyauktada. It would cause a shock throughout the whole Burma, and that case - ‘the Kyauktada case, do you remember?’ - would still be talked of years after the wretched youth’s name was forgotten. But in a purely personal way no one was much distressed. Maxwell had been almost to a non entity - just a ‘good fellow’ like any other of the ten thousand ‘ex colore’ good fellows of Burma - with no close friends. No one among the Europeans genuinely mourned for him. But that is not to say that they were not angry. On the contrary, for the moment they were almost mad with rage. For the unforgivable had happened - a white man had been killed. When that happens, a sort of shudder runs through the English of the East. Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma; they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege. Poor Maxwell would be avenged, that was certain. But only a servant or two, and the Forest Ranger who had brought in his body, and who had been fond of him, shed any tears for his Death.