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Introduction to Burmese Days In Katha, the remote town in northern Burma where George Orwell set Burmese Days, there stands a solitary, pale-orange chimney. The large British house that once stood around it is long gone. On either side of its base there is an empty brick fireplace. Halfway up the chimneystack are the remnants of the second storey – five weathered planks sticking out in all directions like signposts. In Burmese Days, part of the grassy clearing around the chimney was once a sitting room decorated with ornamental tables and brassware trinkets from India. Orwell wrote that the room had smelled of chintz and dying flowers. According to my reading of a sketch-map Orwell drew (reproduced on page ii of this edition) to show the real-life geographical setting of Burmese Days in Katha, this chimney is all that remains of the home of Mr Lackersteen, the lascivious gin-swilling sahib, and his wife, the indomitable memsahib forever making kit-kit with her servants and complaining about the heat of the tropics. Ever since I first visited Katha, Burmese Days has been for me a heady blend of fact and fiction. Based on Orwell’s time in Burma between 1922 and 1927, the novel provides a keen insight into his own experiences there as well as an intimate and damning critique of colonialism written from first hand experience. Though the colonial society that inspired Burmese Days has long-since vanished, all the novel’s key buildings remain much as Orwell described them, and walking through the streets of Katha feels like walking onto an abandoned stage-set. In my mind, the characters brought to life in Burmese Days are so vividly etched against the backdrop of Burma that it is easy to imagine them haunting the country still. Before Orwell became a writer, he spent nearly five years working as a policeman for the British imperial police force in colonised Burma. Known then by his real name, Eric Blair, he was a distinctly un-Orwellian character. His background had groomed him to be the quintessential child of empire. His father had been an opium-tax collector in India and his mother, who was born into a prominent family of shipbuilders and teak traders, had had a grand upbringing in Burma tended to by a small army of servants. Orwell himself was born in India, returning to England with his mother before his second birthday. He went to Burma at the age of nineteen, fresh from Eton College. The young Orwell enjoyed the decadence of the ruling class in Burma; he later wrote, ‘I habitually allowed myself to be dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy.’ Orwell’s career in the colonies came to an abrupt end in June 1927 when he was granted six months home leave and sailed back to England. He joined his family on holiday in Cornwall and
announced to them that he was going to give up his job as an imperial policeman and become a writer. They were horrified that he would throw away a respectable career for such an unpromising future. Disregarding their apprehensions, he took on the pen-name George Orwell and began to write. Through his essays and novels, especially Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, he went on to become one of the most respected and oft-quoted writers of the twentieth century. I have always thought that Orwell’s time in Burma marks a key turning point in his life. It was during those years that he was transformed from a snobbish public-school boy to a writer of social conscience who sought out the underdogs of society. As a policeman in Burma, Orwell saw the underbelly of the empire; not the triumphant bugles or bejewelled maharajas, but the drunken sahibs pickled by heat and alcohol in mildewed clubs, the scarred and screaming Burmese in their prison cells. He witnessed first hand the devastating effects of repressive governance and it troubled him deeply. Unable to share his views with the enthusiastic empire builders around him, he retreated like John Flory, the main protagonist of Burmese Days, ‘to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds’. In Burma, Orwell acquired a reputation as someone who didn’t fit in. Unlike his contemporaries, who prided themselves in being pukka sahibs, Orwell preferred to spend most of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-pukka activities such as attending the churches of the ethnic Karen group or befriending an English opium addict who was a disgraced captain of the British Indian army. Reading Burmese Days, it is easy to see how Orwell’s hatred towards colonialism must have festered in the solitude and heat, growing like a hothouse flower. Orwell later wrote that he felt guilty for his role in the great despotic machine of empire and became haunted by the ‘faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my stick in moments of rage’. Tormented by these Burmese ghosts when he returned to England, Orwell began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed masses in the working class. The working class, he wrote, became the symbolic victims of the injustice he had seen in Burma. He wrote that he was compelled into the world of London’s homeless and the destitute of Paris (experiences that would, a few years later, be collated in his book Down and Out in Paris and London): ‘I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.’ Down and Out in Paris and London was Orwell’s first published book and it was not until some years after he had left Burma that Burmese Days was ready for publication. Orwell’s publisher was initially reluctant to publish Burmese Days as he was concerned that Katha had been described too realistically and that some of his characters might be based on real people, making the novel potentially libellous. As a result, Burmese Days was first published further afield in the United States in 1934. A carefully censored British edition came out a year later, but only after Orwell altered the characters’ names and tried to disguise the setting. The Indian doctor, Veraswami, had his name changed to Murkhaswami (thus losing his derogatory nickname, ‘Dr Very-slimy’) and the Lackersteens became the Latimers. The town is called Kyauktada in the book and all references to its
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- Page 17 and 18: wages, for he was a convicted thief
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- Page 39 and 40: efore this cursed sun gets too high
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- Page 47 and 48: Flory got out of the water, put on
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Introduction to Burmese Days<br />
In Katha, the remote town in northern Burma where George Orwell set Burmese Days, there stands a<br />
solitary, pale-orange chimney. The large British house that once stood around it is long gone. On<br />
either side of its base there is an empty brick fireplace. Halfway up the chimneystack are the remnants<br />
of the second storey – five weathered planks sticking out in all directions like signposts.<br />
In Burmese Days, part of the grassy clearing around the chimney was once a sitting room decorated<br />
with ornamental tables and brassware trinkets from India. Orwell wrote that the room had smelled of<br />
chintz and dying flowers.<br />
According to my reading of a sketch-map Orwell drew (reproduced on page ii of this edition) to<br />
show the real-life geographical setting of Burmese Days in Katha, this chimney is all that remains of<br />
the home of Mr Lackersteen, the lascivious gin-swilling sahib, and his wife, the indomitable<br />
memsahib forever making kit-kit with her servants and complaining about the heat of the tropics.<br />
Ever since I first visited Katha, Burmese Days has been for me a heady blend of fact and fiction.<br />
Based on Orwell’s time in Burma between 1922 and 1927, the novel provides a keen insight into his<br />
own experiences there as well as an intimate and damning critique of colonialism written from first<br />
hand experience. Though the colonial society that inspired Burmese Days has long-since vanished, all<br />
the novel’s key buildings remain much as Orwell described them, and walking through the streets of<br />
Katha feels like walking onto an abandoned stage-set.<br />
In my mind, the characters brought to life in Burmese Days are so vividly etched against the<br />
backdrop of Burma that it is easy to imagine them haunting the country still.<br />
Before Orwell became a writer, he spent nearly five years working as a policeman for the British<br />
imperial police force in colonised Burma. Known then by his real name, Eric Blair, he was a<br />
distinctly un-Orwellian character. His background had groomed him to be the quintessential child of<br />
empire. His father had been an opium-tax collector in India and his mother, who was born into a<br />
prominent family of shipbuilders and teak traders, had had a grand upbringing in Burma tended to by a<br />
small army of servants. Orwell himself was born in India, returning to England with his mother before<br />
his second birthday. He went to Burma at the age of nineteen, fresh from Eton College. The young<br />
Orwell enjoyed the decadence of the ruling class in Burma; he later wrote, ‘I habitually allowed<br />
myself to be dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy.’<br />
Orwell’s career in the colonies came to an abrupt end in June 1927 when he was granted six<br />
months home leave and sailed back to England. He joined his family on holiday in Cornwall and
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