Orwell on Law, Order and Corruption in Burma.

• Author: Normey, Rob

George Orwell was an outstanding man of letters who is also quite likely the most influential political novelist of the 20th century. Best known for his satiric animal fable Animal Farm, and the dystopian novel 1984, he began his career as an unlikely candidate for literary stardom. His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), reveals his complicated feelings about both being part of the machinery of British imperialism and secretly hating it in ever-escalating feelings of disgust during his six years in the Indian Imperial Police (Burma was a region within the Indian division of the British Empire). As a police officer, Orwell had an unparalleled opportunity to see the workings of imperial rule close up, as part of the machinery devised to impose law and order.

At the time Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, arrived in Burma in 1922, nationalist agitation was just beginning to become a serious problem for the imperial masters. Whereas the important Montagu-Chelmford reforms took effect in India, perhaps out of either carelessness or indifference, they were not extended to the province of Burma, leading to riots and cries for greater autonomy. The British attempted to respond, but the local governor's reforms were too little, too late. Historians inform us that economic pressures created by British manufacturing and the opening of the Suez Canal were transforming traditional Burmese life in sometimes startling ways. A further point of serious tension was the decision by the British to establish secular schools, thereby depriving Buddhist monks of a fair amount of their secular power. As a consequence, a number of monks advanced nationalist positions and became serious trouble makers to British officialdom. They would obviously have a considerable amount of scorn for police officers like Blair/Orwell. This friction is described in one of Orwell's well known essays, "Shooting An Elephant", when he admits: "With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, something clamped down... upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts." Fortunately, he did not give in to the impulse but resigned from the service, instead, and sailed home with little money and a completely uncertain future but with his dignity and self-respect intact.

In Burmese Days, the protagonist, John Floy, was a fairly typical Orwellian "hero"...