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felt that Orwell had ‘rather let the side down’. The training school’s burly principal was reportedly
livid and threatened to horsewhip Orwell if he ever saw him again.
In defence of his harsh portrayal of colonial society, Orwell wrote simply, ‘I dare say it’s unfair in
some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.’
It is a curious twist of fate that Orwell’s later novels have mirrored Burma’s recent history. In Burma
today, there is a joke that Orwell didn’t write just one novel about the country, but three; a trilogy
comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The link begins with Burmese Days as it chronicles the country’s period under British colonialism.
Not long after Burma became independent from Britain, a military dictator who took power in 1962
sealed off the country from the outside world, launched ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’ and turned
Burma into one of the poorest countries in Asia. The same story is told in Orwell’s Animal Farm, an
allegorical tale about a socialist revolution gone wrong in which a group of pigs overthrow the human
farmers and run the farm into ruin. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s description of a horrifying and
soulless dystopia, paints a chillingly evocative picture of Burma today, a country ruled by one of the
world’s most tenacious military dictatorships.
Intellectuals in Burma laughingly refer to Orwell as ‘the prophet’. And, just as Orwell’s shadow
continued to fall across Burma, so Burma never really relinquished its hold on Orwell either.
There are physical affectations that Orwell picked up in Burma which remained with him
throughout his life. While in Burma, he acquired a moustache similar to those worn by officers of the
British regiments stationed there. Orwell also acquired some tattoos while he was there; on each
knuckle he had a small untidy blue circle. Many Burmese living in rural areas still sport tattoos like
this – they are believed to protect against bullets and snake bites.
A decade after Orwell had returned to England, he slipped the following paragraph into a book
review he wrote:
‘For an average Englishman in India [Burma was then ruled as part of the Indian empire] the basic fact, more important even
than the loneliness or the heat of the sun, is the strangeness of the scenery. In the beginning the foreign landscape bores him,
later he hates it, in the end he comes to love it, but it is never quite out of his consciousness and all his beliefs are in a
mysterious way affected by it.’
When Orwell wrote about Burma in Burmese Days he produced his most elaborate descriptive
writing and the novel is given a supremely exotic backdrop, drenched in mist and tropical flowers.
Orwell’s other books seem to lack the fervour of Burmese Days. Neither his writing on Spain, nor
England, produced such vivid ‘purple passages’, as he deridingly called them. The scenery of the
East clearly got under Orwell’s skin.
Two of Orwell’s most powerful essays, ‘Shooting an Elephant’ and ‘A Hanging’, are based on his
time in Burma. And, on his deathbed, it was to this setting that Orwell’s mind wandered once again as
he sought inspiration for another novel. Though doctors at the Cotswolds’ sanatorium where Orwell
was being treated for pulmonary tuberculosis had confiscated his typewriter and advised him to stop
writing, he stubbornly continued. He scribbled letters, composed essays, reviewed books, and
corrected the proofs of his soon-to-be-published novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Also simmering in his