Burmese Days

by George Orwell

There must be no accusations that can be answered, and yet within three months I must fix it in the head of every European in Kyauktada that the doctor is a villain. What shall I accuse him of? Bribes will not do, a doctor does not get bribes to any extent. What then?” “We could perhaps arrange a mutiny in the jail,” said Ba Sein. “As superintendent, the doctor would be blamed.” “No, it is too dangerous. I do not want the jail warders firing their rifles in all directions. Besides, it would be expensive. Clearly, then, it must be disloyalty—Nationalism, seditious propaganda. We must persuade the Europeans that the doctor holds disloyal, anti-British opinions. That is far worse than bribery; they expect a native official to take bribes. But let them suspect his loyalty even for a moment, and he is ruined.” “It would be a hard thing to prove,” objected Ba Sein. “The doctor is very loyal to the Europeans. He grows angry when anything is said against them. They will know that, do you not think?”

“We begin with this article in the Burmese Patriot. The Europeans will shout with rage when they see it. Well, the next move is to persuade them that it was the doctor who wrote it.” “It will be difficult while he has friends among the Europeans. All of them go to him when they are ill. He cured Mr. Macgregor of his flatulence this cold weather. They consider him a very clever doctor, I believe.” “How little you understand the European mind, Ko Ba Sein! If the Europeans go to Veraswami it is only because there is no other doctor in Kyauktada. No European has any faith in a man with a black face. No, with anonymous letters it is only a question of sending enough. I shall soon see to it that he has no friends left.”

U Po Kyin waddled to the table, sat down with a grunt and at once threw himself on the food. Ma Kin, his wife, stood behind him and served him. She was a thin woman of five and forty, with a kindly, pale brown, simian face. U Po Kyin took no notice of her while he was eating. With the bowl close to his nose he stuffed the food into himself with swift, greasy fingers, breathing fast. All his meals were swift, passionate and enormous; they were not meals so much as orgies, debauches of curry and rice. When he had finished he sat back, belched several times and told Ma Kin to fetch him a green Burmese cigar. He never smoked English tobacco, which he declared had no taste in it.

The native town, and the courts and the jail, were over to the right, mostly hidden in green groves of peepul trees. The spire of the pagoda rose from the trees like a slender spear tipped with gold. Kyauktada was a fairly typical Upper Burma town, that had not changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910, and might have slept in the Middle Ages for a century more if it had not proved a convenient spot for a railway terminus. In 1910 the Government made it the headquarters of a district and a seat of Progress—interpretable as a block of law courts, with their army of fat but ravenous pleaders, a hospital, a school and one of those huge, durable jails which the English have built everywhere between Gibraltar and Hong Kong. The population was about four thousand, including a couple of hundred Indians, a few score Chinese and seven Europeans. There were also two Eurasians named Mr. Francis and Mr. Samuel, the sons of an American Baptist missionary and a Roman Catholic missionary respectively. The town contained no curiosities of any kind, except an Indian fakir who had lived for twenty years in a tree near the bazaar, drawing his food up in a basket every morning.

“Look at this naughty old man,” said Westfield, taking Mr. Lackersteen half affectionately by the shoulders and shaking him. “Example to the young, what? There, but for the grace of God and all that. Gives you an idea what you’ll be like at forty.” Mr. Lackersteen gave a groan which sounded like ‘brandy’. “Poor old chap,” said Westfield; “regular martyr to booze, eh? Look at it oozing out of his pores. Reminds me of the old colonel who used to sleep without a mosquito net. They asked his servant why and the servant said: ‘At night, master too drunk to notice mosquitoes; in the morning, mosquitoes too drunk to notice master.’ Look at him—boozed last night and then asking for more. Got a little niece coming to stay with him, too. Due to-night, isn’t she, Lakersteen?” “Oh, leave that drunken sot alone,” said Ellis without turning round. He had a spiteful cockney voice. Mr. Lackersteen groaned again, “—— the niece! Get me some brandy, for Christ’s sake.”

Only once, a year after they were married, she had left him for a fortnight, and had returned unexpectedly a day before her time, to find Mr. Lackersteen, drunk, supported on either side by a naked Burmese girl, while a third up-ended a whisky bottle into his mouth. Since then she had watched him, as he used to complain, ‘like a cat over a bloody mousehole’. However, he managed to enjoy quite a number of ‘good times’, though they were usually rather hurried ones.

Do what you like outside the Club. But, by God, it’s a different matter when you talk of bringing niggers in here. I suppose you’d like little Veraswami for a Club member, eh? Chipping into our conversation and pawing everyone with his sweaty hands and breathing his filthy garlic breath in our faces. By God, he’d go out with my boot behind him if ever I saw his black snout inside that door. Greasy, pot-bellied little ——!” etc. This went on for several minutes. It was curiously impressive, because it was so completely sincere. Ellis really did hate Orientals—hated them with a bitter, restless loathing as of something evil or unclean. Living and working, as the assistant of a timber firm must, in perpetual contact with the Burmese, he had never grown used to the sight of a black face. Any hint of friendly feeling towards an Oriental seemed to him a horrible perversity. He was an intelligent man and an able servant of his firm, but he was one of those Englishmen—common, unfortunately—who should never be allowed to set foot in the East.

Mrs. Lackersteen was a woman of about thirty-five, handsome in a contourless, elongated way, like a fashion plate. She had a sighing, discontented voice. The others had all stood up when she entered, and Mrs. Lackersteen sank exhaustedly into the best chair under the punkah, fanning herself with a slender hand like that of a newt. “Oh dear, this heat, this heat! Mr. Macgregor came and fetched me in his car. So kind of him. Tom, that wretch of a rickshaw-man is pretending to be ill again. Really, I think you ought to give him a good thrashing and bring him to his senses. It’s too terrible to have to walk about in this sun every day.”

“Really I think the laziness of these servants is getting too shocking,” she sighed. “Don’t you agree, Mr. Macgregor? We seem to have no authority over the natives nowadays, with all these dreadful Reforms, and the insolence they learn from the newspapers. In some ways they are getting almost as bad as the lower classes at home.” “Oh, hardly as bad as that, I trust. Still, I am afraid there is no doubt that the democratic spirit is creeping in, even here.”

Ellis had meanwhile unpinned the offending notice from behind Mr. Macgregor’s back, and he now held it out to him, saying in his sour way: “Here, Macgregor, we’ve read this notice, and we all think this idea of electing a native to the Club is absolute—Ellis was going to have said ‘absolute balls’, but he remembered Mrs. Lackersteen’s presence and checked himself—“is absolutely uncalled for. After all, this Club is a place where we come to enjoy ourselves, and we don’t want natives poking about in here. We like to think there’s still one place where we’re free of them. The others all agree with me absolutely.” He looked round at the others. “Hear, hear!” said Mr. Lackersteen gruffly. He knew that his wife would guess that he had been drinking, and he felt that a display of sound sentiment would excuse him.

We’ve got to hang together and say, ‘We are the masters, and you beggars—’” Ellis pressed his small thumb down as though flattening a grub—“‘you beggars keep your place!’” “Hopeless, old chap,” said Westfield. “Quite hopeless. What can you do with all this red tape tying your hands? Beggars of natives know the law better than we do. Insult you to your face and then run you in the moment you hit ’em. Can’t do anything unless you put your foot down firmly. And how can you, if they haven’t the guts to show fight?” “Our burra sahib at Mandalay always said,” put in Mrs. Lackersteen, “that in the end we shall simply leave India. Young men will not come out here any longer to work all their lives for insults and ingratitude. We shall just go. When the natives come to us begging us to stay, we shall say, ‘No, you have had your chance, you wouldn’t take it. Very well, we shall leave you to govern yourselves.’ And then, what a lesson that will teach them!”

Flory pushed back his chair and stood up. It must not, it could not—no, it simply should not go on any longer! He must get out of this room quickly, before something happened inside his head and he began to smash the furniture and throw bottles at the pictures. Dull boozing witless porkers! Was it possible that they could go on week after week, year after year, repeating word for word the same evil-minded drivel, like a parody of a fifth-rate story in Blackwood’s? Would none of them ever think of anything new to say? Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilisation is this of ours—this godless civilisation founded on whisky, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all of us are part of it.

“Stay and have another spot, old man,” said Westfield. “Morning’s young. Have a gin. Give you an appetite.” “No, thanks, I must be going. Come on, Flo. Good-bye, Mrs. Lackersteen. Good-bye, everybody.” “Exit Booker Washington, the niggers’ pal,” said Ellis as Flory disappeared. Ellis could always be counted on to say something disagreeable about anyone who had just left the room. “Gone to see Very-slimy, I suppose. Or else sloped off to avoid paying a round of drinks.” “Oh, he’s not a bad chap.” Westfield said. “Says some Bolshie things sometimes. Don’t suppose he means half of them.” “Oh, a very good fellow, of course,” said Mr. Macgregor. Every European in India is ex-officio, or rather ex-colore, a good fellow, until he has done something quite outrageous. It is an honorary rank.

“Seditious?” Flory said. “I’m not seditious. I don’t want the Burmans to drive us out of this country. God forbid! I’m here to make money, like everyone else. All I object to is the slimy white man’s burden humbug. The pukka sahib pose. It’s so boring. Even those bloody fools at the Club might be better company if we weren’t all of us living a lie the whole time.” “But, my dear friend, what lie are you living?” “Why, of course, the lie that we’re here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them. I suppose it’s a natural lie enough. But it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can’t imagine. There’s an everlasting sense of being a sneak and a liar that torments us and drives us to justify ourselves night and day. It’s at the bottom of half our beastliness to the natives. We Anglo-Indians could be almost bearable if we’d only admit that we’re thieves and go on thieving without any humbug.” The doctor, very pleased, nipped his thumb and forefinger together. “The weakness of your argument, my dear friend,” he said, beaming at his own irony, “the weakness appears to be, that you are not thieves.” “Now, my dear doctor——”

“Behold there the degeneracy of the East,” said the doctor, pointing to Mattu, who was doubling himself up like a caterpillar and uttering grateful whines. “Look at the wretchedness of hiss limbs. The calves of hiss legs are not so thick ass an Englishman’s wrists. Look at hiss abjectness and servility. Look at hiss ignorance—such ignorance ass iss not known in Europe outside a home for mental defectives. Once I asked Mattu to tell me hiss age. ‘Sahib’, he said, ‘I believe that I am ten years old’. How can you pretend, Mr. Flory, that you are not the natural superior of such creatures?” “Poor old Mattu, the uprush of modern progress seems to have missed him somehow,” Flory said, throwing another four-anna piece over the rail. “Go on, Mattu, spend that on booze. Be as degenerate as you can. It all postpones Utopia.” “Aha, Mr. Flory, sometimes I think that all you say iss but to—what iss the expression?—pull my leg. The English sense of humour. We Orientals have no humour, ass iss well known.”

Ma Hla May came across to the bed, sat down on the edge and put her arms rather abruptly round Flory. She smelled at his cheek with her flat nose, in the Burmese fashion. “Why did my master not send for me this afternoon?” she said. “I was sleeping. It is too hot for that kind of thing.” “So you would rather sleep alone than with Ma Hla May? How ugly you must think me, then! Am I ugly, master?” “Go away,” he said, pushing her back. “I don’t want you at this time of day.” “At least touch me with your lips, then. (There is no Burmese word for to kiss.) All white men do that to their women.” “There you are, then. Now leave me alone. Fetch some cigarettes and give me one.”

Flory went sulkily into the little stone-floored bathroom that gave on to the bedroom, splashed himself with lukewarm water and put on his shirt and shorts. He must take some kind of exercise before the sun went down. In India it is in some way evil to spend a day without being once in a muck-sweat. It gives one a deeper sense of sin than a thousand lecheries. In the dark evening, after a quite idle day, one’s ennui reaches a pitch that is frantic, suicidal. Work, prayer, books, drinking, talking—they are all powerless against it; it can only be sweated out through the pores of the skin.

The village headman, a weazened, leaf-brown old man, came out of his house, and there were shiko-ings. Flory sat down on the steps of the headman’s house and relighted his pipe. He was thirsty. “Is the water in your well good to drink, thugyi-min?” The headman reflected, scratching the calf of his left leg with his right big toenail. “Those who drink it, drink it, thakin. And those who do not drink it, do not drink it.” “Ah. That is wisdom.” The fat woman who had chased the pariah brought a blackened earthenware teapot and a handleless bowl, and gave Flory some pale green tea, tasting of wood-smoke. “I must be going, thugyi-min. Thank you for the tea.” “God go with you, thakin.”

“Cur, spineless cur,” Flory was thinking to himself; without heat, however, for he was too accustomed to the thought. “Sneaking, idling, boozing, fornicating, soul-examining, self-pitying cur. All those fools at the Club, those dull louts to whom you are so pleased to think yourself superior—they are all better than you, every man of them. At least they are men in their oafish way. Not cowards, not liars. Not half-dead and rotting. But you——” He had reason to call himself names. There had been a nasty, dirty affair at the Club that evening. Something quite ordinary, quite according to precedent; but still dingy, cowardly, dishonouring.

On Saturday nights the older boys used to have what they called a Spanish Inquisition. The favourite torture was for someone to hold you in a very painful grip known only to a few illuminati and called Special Togo, while someone else beat you with a conker on a piece of string. But Flory had lived down ‘Monkey-bum’ in time. He was a liar and a good footballer, the two things absolutely necessary for success at school. In his last term he and another boy held the school poet in Special Togo while the captain of the eleven gave him six with a spiked running shoe for being caught writing a sonnet. It was a formative period.

His first six months in Burma he had spent in Rangoon, where he was supposed to be learning the office side of his business. He had lived in a ‘chummery’ with four other youths who devoted their entire energies to debauchery. And what debauchery! They swilled whisky which they privately hated, they stood round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and silliness, they squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles. That too had been a formative period.

The jungle life was not a bad one, in spite of the discomfort, the loneliness, and what is almost the worst thing in Burma, the filthy, monotonous food. He was very young then, young enough for hero-worship, and he had friends among the men in his firm. There were also shooting, fishing, and perhaps once in a year a hurried trip to Rangoon—pretext, a visit to the dentist. Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips! The rush to Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking-bout! He was too young to realise what this life was preparing for him. He did not see the years stretching out ahead, lonely, eventless, corrupting.

The rains tailed off, ending in October. The fields dried up, the paddy ripened, the Burmese children played hopscotch with gonyin seeds and flew kites in the cool winds. It was the beginning of the short winter, when Upper Burma seemed haunted by the ghost of England. Wild flowers sprang into bloom everywhere, not quite the same as the English ones, but very like them—honeysuckle in thick bushes, field roses smelling of peardrops, even violets in dark places of the forest. The sun circled low in the sky, and the nights and early mornings were bitterly cold, with white mists that poured through the valleys like the steam of enormous kettles.

There is a prevalent 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 despotism is not the officials but 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.

It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.

Time passed, and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world of the sahibs, more liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously on any subject whatever. So he had learned to live inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks with the doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good man, understood little of what was said to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it. It would be better to be the thickest-skulled pukka sahib who ever hiccuped over ‘Forty years on’, than to live silent, alone, consoling oneself in secret, sterile worlds.

Mr. Macgregor never, or hardly ever, missed his morning exercises. Number 8 (flat on the back, raise legs to the perpendicular without bending knees) was downright painful for a man of forty-three; Number 9 (flat on the back, rise to a sitting posture and touch toes with tips of fingers) was even worse. No matter, one must keep fit! As Mr. Macgregor lunged painfully in the direction of his toes, a brick-red shade flowed upwards from his neck and congested his face with a threat of apoplexy. The sweat gleamed on his large, tallowy breasts. Stick it out, stick it out! At all costs one must keep fit. Mohammed Ali, the bearer, with Mr. Macgregor’s clean clothes across his arm, watched through the half-open door. His narrow, yellow, Arabian face expressed neither comprehension nor curiosity. He had watched these contortions—a sacrifice, he dimly imagined, to some mysterious and exacting god—every morning for five years.

He let the girl walk ahead of him, feeling easier when she could not see his face. She was tallish for a girl, slender, and wearing a lilac-coloured cotton frock. From the way she moved her limbs he did not think she could be much past twenty. He had not noticed her face yet, except to see that she wore round tortoise-shell spectacles, and that her hair was as snort as his own. He had never seen a woman with cropped hair before, except in the illustrated papers. As they emerged on to the maidan he stepped level with her, and she turned to face him. Her face was oval, with delicate, regular features; not beautiful, perhaps, but it seemed so there, in Burma, where all Englishwomen are yellow and thin. He turned his head sharply aside, though the birthmark was away from her. He could not bear her to see his worn face too closely. He seemed to feel the withered skin round his eyes as though it had been a wound. But he remembered that he had shaved that morning, and it gave him courage. He said: “I say, you must be a bit shaken up after this business. Would you like to come into my place and rest a few minutes before you go home? It’s rather late to be out of doors without a hat, too.”

“Do you know, if you don’t mind, I think I ought to be going,” the girl said. She had stood up. “I’ve been out quite a long time. They may be wondering where I’ve got to.” “Must you really? It’s quite early. I’ll see that you don’t have to go home bareheaded in the sun.” “I ought really——” she began again. She stopped, looking at the doorway. Ma Hla May was emerging on to the veranda. Ma Hla May came forward with her hand on her hip. She had come from within the house, with a calm air that asserted her right to be there. The two girls stood face to face, less than six feet apart. No contrast could have been stranger; the one faintly coloured as an apple-blossom, the other dark and garish, with a gleam almost metallic on her cylinder of ebony hair and the salmon-pink silk of her longyi. Flory thought he had never noticed before how dark Ma Hla May’s face was, and now outlandish her tiny, stiff body, straight as a soldier’s, with not a curve in it except the vase-like curve of her hips. He stood against the veranda rail and watched the two girls, quite disregarded. For the best part of a minute neither of them could take her eyes from the other; but which found the spectacle more grotesque, more incredible, there is no saying.

ELIZABETH lay on the sofa in the Lackersteen’s drawing-room, with her feet up and a cushion behind her head, reading Michael Arlen’s These Charming People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her favourite author, but she was inclined to prefer William J. Locke when she wanted something serious.

Her father had been less of a drunkard than his brother Tom, but he was a man of similar stamp. He was a tea-broker, and his fortunes fluctuated greatly, but he was by nature too optimistic to put money aside in prosperous phases. Elizabeth’s mother had been an incapable, half-baked, vapouring, self-pitying woman who shirked all the normal duties of life on the strength of sensibilities which she did not possess. After messing about for years with such things as Women’s Suffrage and Higher Thought, and making many abortive attempts at literature, she had finally taken up with painting. Painting is the only art that can be practised without either talent or hard work. Mrs. Lackersteen’s pose was that of an artist exiled among ‘the Philistines’—these, needless to say, included her husband—and it was a pose that gave her almost unlimited scope for making a nuisance of herself.

There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever; with Elizabeth, if was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls’ schools exist.

It was not unnatural, with the example of her mother before her eyes, that Elizabeth should have a healthy loathing of Art. In fact, any excess of intellect—‘braininess’ was her word for it—tended to belong, in her eyes, to the ‘beastly’. Real people, she felt, decent people—people who shot grouse, went to Ascot, yachted at Cowes—were not brainy. They didn’t go in for this nonsense of writing books and fooling with paint brushes; and all these highbrow ideas—Socialism and all that. ‘Highbrow’ was a bitter word in her vocabulary.

In some way that I can’t define to you, the whole life and spirit of Burma is summed up in the way that girl twists her arms. When you see her you can see the rice fields, the villages under the teak trees, the pagodas, the priests in their yellow robes, the buffaloes swimming the rivers in the early morning, Thibaw’s palace——” His voice stopped abruptly as the music stopped. There were certain things, and a pwe-dance was one of them, that pricked him to talk discursively and incautiously; but now he realised that he had only been talking like a character in a novel, and not a very good novel. He looked away. Elizabeth had listened to him with a chill of discomfort. What was the man talking about? was her first thought.

Flory and Elizabeth stood watching for a moment. Files of woman passed balancing vegetable baskets on their heads, and pop-eyed children who stared at the Europeans. An old Chinese in dungarees faded to sky-blue hurried by, nursing some unrecognisable, bloody fragment of a pig’s intestines. “Let’s go and poke round the stalls a bit, shall we?” Flory said. “Is it all right going in among that crowd? Everything’s so horribly dirty.” “Oh, it’s all right, they’ll make way for us. It’ll interest you.” Elizabeth followed him doubtfully and even unwillingly. Why was it that he always brought her to these places? Why was he forever dragging her in among the ‘natives’, trying to get her to take an interest in them and watch their filthy, disgusting habits? It was all wrong, somehow. However, she followed, not feeling able to explain her reluctance.