563296589345

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