“Shooting an Elephant”

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“Shooting an Elephant”

THE LITERARY WORK

An essay describing an incident from Orwell’s time as a policeman in Burma in the 1920s; published in 1936.

SYNOPSIS

Orwell’s responsibility for dealing with a rogue elephant becomes an occasion for reflection on the nature and effects of imperialism.

Events in History at the Time of the Eassy

The Essay in Focus

For More Information

George Orwell (1903–50) was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, where his father worked for the Opium Department of the Government of India. He had a relatively comfortable middle-class upbringing in England, first attending a private preparatory school and then winning a scholarship to Eton, an exclusive “public” secondary school (the name in England for a private school). On leaving Eton in 1921 he joined the Indian Imperial Police; he was posted to Burma in 1922. After five years of service, however, he resigned, unable any longer to stomach doing “the dirty work of Empire” and harboring an ambition to be a writer (Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501). On his return to Europe, he spent a year and a half living in poverty in London and Paris, trying to share the life of the destitute and oppressed and doggedly teaching himself to write. In 1933, using the name George Orwell, he published his first book, based on these experiences, Down and Out in Paris and London. The next three years saw Orwell publish three novels, Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936); he honed his skills as a reviewer and essayist during these years too. In 1936 the publisher Gollancz commissioned him to write a book on the economically depressed areas of northern England, which became The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). In the spring of that year Orwell was also asked to contribute something to New Writing, a new journal edited by John Lehmann. Orwell offered to write what he described as “a sketch … describing the shooting of an elephant,” but only if Lehmann was likely to publish something of the sort (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 483). Lehmann replied that he would like to see it, and when he did, he liked what he saw. “His editorial acumen or ‘instinct’ … had led him straight to a masterpiece” (Stansky and Abrahams, p. 147): one that was about not simply the shooting of an elephant, but the tragedy, violence, and farce of imperialism.

Events in History at the Time of the Eassy

The British empire in Burma

In the nineteenth century, the British, anxious to secure control of cotton, teak, and other natural resources, and of inland trade routes to western China, came increasingly into conflict with the Burmese kings. The British saw Burma as simply an extension of India, which they already ruled. So they persistently tried “to bring the Burmese kings down to the level of Indian princes in a subservient relationship,” while “the proud Burmese kings,” for their part, “did everything possible to retain their sovereign status” (SarDesai, p. III). The two nations went to war in 1824–26, and in 1851 the British occupied and annexed Lower Burma. Pressure from British trading interests for greater commercial opportunities in the region continued, and when in 1882 a new clique at the Burmese court insisted on a tougher line against the British, further conflict seemed inevitable. In 1885, the Burmese took legal action against a British company, the Bombay-Burmah Trading Corporation, for underpayment for timber. This legal action, along with fears that King Theebaw was considering an alliance with the French, precipitated Britain’s declaration of war against Burma. After only 15 days, the British army took over Mandalay, the capital of Burma, and the royal family was sent unceremoniously into exile. On January 1, 1886, the British government announced the annexation of Upper Burma. The whole of Burma was now to be ruled directly by the British, as a province of India.

Under British rule, the economy and society of Burma were transformed. A growing rice export trade prompted vast areas of land in the Irrawaddy delta to be brought under cultivation, and the export of oil, minerals and timber also increased greatly. But these changes resulted in few benefits for the Burmese people: instead profits went to the South Indian moneylenders who provided cash to Burmese peasant farmers at interest rates of up to 50 per cent, and to the British companies involved in processing, shipping and exporting these goods. Along with the transport and financial networks that sustained this trade, the British established new administrative, judicial and education systems. These too had profound effects on Burma. Traditional rulers were bypassed, and the country was governed by British civil servants working with lower-level local leaders and with a new indigenous administrative class, the a-so-ya-min, who were chosen on the basis of training and merit rather than birth. Ironically people lost regard for traditional Buddhist education, which had led to levels of basic literacy in Burma in the mid-nineteenth century being far higher than those in Europe. A western education became the passport to a place in the new social hierarchy of British Burma, and gave rise to a new urban elite, whose “perspectives and occupational skills became very unlike those of their village-dwelling peasant compatriots” (Steinberg, p. 284).

Burmese resistance to British rule

The Burmese never accepted British rule. As soon as annexation was announced in 1886, armed uprisings began all over Burma. The British responded by burning down villages and executing those they saw as rebels en masse, but the uprisings continued until 1895 in some areas. Around the turn of the twentieth century, resistance began to take other forms. In towns and cities, the new urban elite established Buddhist groups with the aim of asserting a distinctive Burmese cultural identity, and in 1906, these groups united to form the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA). Although ostensibly they were religious organizations, the real objective of the YMBA and its successor, the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA) was greater self-government for Burma. In 1921, the British responded to such nationalist demands by introducing a degree of political reform, providing for greater Burmese involvement in the central legislature and at the provincial level. However, this did not satisfy the nationalists; during the 1920s political activism spread throughout Burma. Activists established village-level nationalist organizations, which boycotted government officials and supported peasants who refused to pay taxes and rent. Younger Buddhist monks also became politically active, “attacking foreign rule, village headmen, the police and courts, tax collectors, and Indians” (Steinberg, p. 286). Tensions increased still further during the 1930s, as the worldwide depression hit Burmese rice growers hard, fueling resentment against the British government and moneylenders from India.

Orwell alludes to this atmosphere in “Shooting an Elephant,” when he describes the strong anti-European feeling amongst the people of Moulmein, especially the young men, and the several thousand young Buddhist priests who seemed to have nothing to do “except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501). He treats the tensions between Burmese and Europeans at more length in Burmese Days, in which a British man is killed after helping to put down a peasant rebellion; the resulting tensions culminate in a riot.

The Indian Imperial Police in Burma

Political and economic tensions made policing the 13 million inhabitants of Burma in the 1920s and ’30s a demanding task. Burma had the highest crime rate in the empire; violence against government officials was rising, and armed gangs of thieves, or “dacoits,” roamed the countryside on the prowl for homes to rob. Most of the day-to-day policing was done by the 13, 000 strong subordinate force of Burmese police; standing in reserve in case of emergency were British and Indian troops and the largely Indian military police. The 90 or so officers of the Indian Imperial Police—almost all British, despite an official policy in the 1920s of admitting more native-born officers—had a largely administrative role.

This role entailed considerable responsibility, however, especially given that many officers, including Orwell himself (under his given name—Blair), were very young. Orwell started as an assistant superintendent, responsible for such tasks as preparing cases for prosecution, compiling crime reports, and managing payroll and police supplies. In 1926, at the age of 23, Orwell became subdivisional officer—the senior police officer—at Moulmein in southern Burma, an important provincial center and commercial port. As subdivisional officer, his duties included supervizing investigations, settling local quarrels, disciplining constables, observing interrogations of prisoners and testifying at important trials and inquests. This was the only time in his life, he later wrote, when he had been important enough to be “hated by large numbers of people” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501); it was here that the events he describes in “Shooting an Elephant” took place.

The Essay in Focus

The contents

“Shooting an Elephant” opens with a description of the anti-European feeling Orwell encountered while he was subdivisional police officer in Moulmein. This feeling was “aimless” and “petty,” but “very bitter,” and eventually the sneering and the insults “got badly on my nerves” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501). He writes that his experiences as a police officer had already turned him against the British empire and filled him with “an intolerable sense of guilt” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501). But his sympathy for the Burmese as victims of British oppression was complicated by a violent “rage against the evil-spirited little beasts [the Burmese with anti-European feelings] who tried to make my job impossible” (“Shooting an Elephant,” pp. 501–02). This, he observes, is the kind of quandary that afflicts all British imperial officials. Orwell then recalls an experience that, in retrospect, casts light on the violence and futility of imperialism.

THE HSAYA SAN REBELLION

The most serious outbreak of anticolonial protest during the 1920s and ’30s began in December 1930, in the Thar-rawadcly District. It was led by Hsaya San, an organizer for the CCBA and a former Buddhist monk. The symbols of Hsaya San’s leadership were traditional—including a white umbrella, formerly associated with the Burmese royalty. But the grievances that fuelled the revolt were contemporary ones: “taxation, crime, rice prices, land alienation, Indian immigration, and unemployment as well as the denigration of the Buddhist religion” (Steinberg, p. 288).

The rebellion spread quickly, and, after initially underestimating the threat, the British responded with force. The regular police, the military police, and the army were used against the rebels; 12, 000 troops were mobilized, and aircraft was brought in. Before the authorities regained control, the rebels suffered 3, 000 casualties; casualties on the government side numbered only 138 (Steinberg, p. 289).

Hsaya San was captured in late 1931, and was later tried and executed. The rebellion was not a complete failure, however. It demonstrated the government’s indifference to peasant grievances, and “awakened public opinion, setting an example of sacrifice and anticolonial zeal that few could ignore” (Steinberg, p. 289).

MEMORIES OF ORWELL, NÉE BLAIR, THE POLICEMAN

Blair arrived in Burma at the age of 19, drawn there by his family connections with Burma, a taste for adventure, and the good salary attached to a posting in the Indian Imperial Police (Shelden, p. 86). There is some debate about the success of his police career. Bernard Crick argues that Blair was seen as a solitary eccentric, that he often did not get on with his superior officers, and that this led to his being given generally “poor and lonely postings” (Crick, p. 80). Blair clearly did not enjoy socializing with the other Europeans at their clubs—one fellow-officer, Roger Beadon, remembered him as “a very pleasant fellow to know,” but also as an untidy-looking sort who preferred to keep to himself (Beadon in Coppard and Crick., p. 62). Michael Shelden argues, however, that Blair did his job well and made satisfactory progress in his career. He gave little or no sign to those around him that he was uncomfortable with his role as a servant of British imperialism, or that he wished to be a writer. Fellow-officer Beadon was astonished when Burmese Days appeared and he realized Blair was its author: “to find that George Orwell was Eric A. Blair … was rather like seeing a flying saucer arrive at your front door and wondering what it’s going to do” (Beadon in Coppard and Crick, p. 65).

Another who encountered Blair the policeman was Maung Htin Aung, who later became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Rangoon. One day in November 1924, he was part of a group of students waiting at a railway station. As Blair, in civilian clothes, came down the station stairs, one of the group accidentally bumped into him, causing Blair to fall heavily. Furious, Blair raised his heavy cane to hit the boy on the head, but managed to control himself enough to hit him on the back instead. An argument ensued; when Blair got into a first-class train compartment, the students followed him and continued arguing until he got off the train. Htin Aung observes that Blair’s attitude to students at this time seems to have been typical of his English contemporaries: Burmese students were generally viewed with suspicion or even hatred for their nationalist sympathies. But Bernard Crick suggests that there is something very “Orwell-like,” and unlike the typical Englishman, in the fact that Blair did not call the police, but instead carried on arguing with the students in a train compartment until he reached his destination (Crick, p. 88).

Blair was troubled by his own behavior and by other acts of violence by Europeans against Burmese, and must have wondered what would have happened if he had not controlled himself. He would later use this incident as the basis for one in Burmese Days, where the Englishman Ellis strikes a Burmese boy and blinds him.

One day, one of his subordinate officers telephones him to say that an elephant has gone berserk in the bazaar, and will he please come and do something about it? On the way, Orwell discovers that the elephant is a tame elephant that has gone must—has slipped into a temporary frenzy. The elephant has already destroyed a hut, raided a fruit-stall, killed a cow, and vandalized the municipal rubbish-van; as he gets closer, he discovers it has also just killed a man, an Indian laborer, or coolie. He sends for an elephant rifle and pursues the elephant to a nearby paddy field, followed by a large crowd of locals. Having seen the gun, they think Orwell is going to shoot the elephant, and are keen for “a bit of fun”—and for the meat (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 503). Orwell, however, has no intention of shooting the elephant, and the instant he sees him he knows “with perfect certainty” that he ought not to do so (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 503). The elephant is now calmly eating grass; Orwell is sure that his must is passing, and that he will simply wander around harmlessly until his mahout, or handler, comes to catch him.

But Orwell realizes that the watching crowd of more than 2, 000 people confidently expects that he will shoot the elephant, and that if he does not, the crowd will laugh at him. This, he feels, would be intolerable. So, despite feeling that “it would be murder to shoot him,” he takes aim and fires (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 504). But since he does not know exactly where to aim in order kill the elephant, Orwell has to shoot him three times before he falls. The essay describes the elephant “[sagging] flabbily to his knees,” then rising again, and then trumpeting once before finally crashing to the ground (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 505). Orwell goes over to the elephant, only to discover that he is not dead. So Orwell fires two more shots at what he thinks must be the elephant’s heart, but they have no apparent effect: the elephant is “dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 505). Orwell does not even have the power to put him out of his misery. He fires more shots from a smaller rifle but they too make no difference. Eventually Orwell cannot stand the animal’s suffering any longer and leaves; he later hears that the elephant took half an hour to die, and that his body was stripped almost to the bones by the afternoon.

The owner of the elephant is furious that it has been killed, but cannot do anything about the matter as he is “only an Indian” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 506). Legally Orwell was in the right because the elephant had killed a man, and the older Europeans support him, but the younger ones say, “it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant”—valued at a hundred pounds or more—”was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 506). Orwell admits that he was very glad the elephant had killed the coolie because it put him in the right—but wonders whether any of the other Europeans realized that he shot the elephant “solely to avoid looking a fool” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 506).

“A sahib has got to act like a sahib.”

By analyzing why he killed the elephant when he did not want to and, what is more, knew he ought not to, Orwell explores the dynamics of imperialism. The incident, he writes, was tiny in itself,”but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 502). Standing in front of the crowd, he feels it willing him to kill the elephant, and at this moment he grasps the “hollowness” and “futility” of the empire (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 504). Armed with a gun in front of an unarmed crowd, he would seem to be in control, but he is not. He is, instead:

a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of [the white man’s] rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. … A sahib has got to act like a sahib.
(“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 504)

To refuse to play the part—for example, to “trail feebly away,” rifle in hand, instead of shooting the elephant—would look weak and indecisive, would add to the list of petty humiliations he suffers as an emblem of the empire: being tripped-up while playing football, for example, or being insulted, from a safe distance, on the street. “The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at” (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 504).

A “PUKKA SAHIB”

Sahib means “Englishman,” or “European,” and has also been used by peoples of India and Burma as a title of respect when addressing an Englishman or other European. A “pukka sahib” is a thorough sahib: an Englishman behaving as he was expected to by Indians and by other English people in India.

Of course, the other side of the coin was the constant stream of humiliations suffered by the Burmese under British rule. Orwell may have been tripped-up on the football field, but Burmese people suffered systematic, institutionalized discrimination. A Burmese student himself at the time, Maung Htin Aung recalls that his eldest brother U Tin Tut was asked in 1924 to play for the English regiment garrisoned in Rangoon in a rugby match against the European-only Gymkhana Club. U Tin Tut was a member of the Indian Civil Service and a British-trained lawyer. He had held a commission in the (British) Indian Army and captained the Cambridge University Rugby team, so he was a logical choice to bolster the strength of the regimental team. When the match ended, the players headed for the Gymkhana Club to shower and change. At this point, the club secretary ran out and told U Tin Tut that he could not enter the building, let alone use the showers because he was not a European. U Tin Tut later received personal apologies from individual players, but no official apology from the club. “Naturally,” says Maung Htin Aung,”that was the last game of rugby that my brother ever played” (Aung, p. 26). The incident, concluded the Burma newspapers, was proof that the British considered the Burmese an inferior people.

Although Orwell recognizes that the chief evil of imperialism is that it destroys the freedom and dignity of its subject peoples, he addresses another evil in “Shooting an Elephant.” His concern here is with the guilt and self-loathing that he feels results from taking on the role of imperialist “tyrant.” As he sees it, imperialism destroys the freedom of not only the subject people but their rulers too (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 504). This is a view that he explores at greater length in Burmese Days and in The Road to Wigan Pier. The main character of Burmese Days, John Flory, shares Orwell’s hatred of the empire and feels contempt for his fellow sahibs—and, inevitably, for himself. They are all the servants of an empire whose object is theft: a despotism in which, as Flory puts it,”the official holds the Burman down while the businessman goes through his pockets” (Orwell, Complete Works2, p. 38). Such a view was, of course, unspeakable in European clubs, which were the social center of the sahibs’ world. Only very occasionally could it be voiced aloud. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell describes a night on a train in Burma when he and a man who worked in the Educational Service, whose name he never knew, cautiously sounded each other out and, each discovering that the other was “safe,” talked for hours:

we damned the British Empire—damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.
(Orwell, Complete Works5, p. 135)

Dissenters like Orwell and his companion felt their hatred of the empire had to be kept secret, and this secrecy was “corrupting” (Complete Works 2, p. 70). As the narrator of Burmese Days puts it, in a voice very close to Orwell’s own:

Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit… listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil…. You see [English] louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable, hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond[deep down], what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of taboos.
(Orwell, Complete Works2, pp. 69–70)

In “Shooting an Elephant,” Orwell contends that his feelings of guilt, hatred, and self-hatred are shared by all of the “Anglo-Indian” officials—the British people who worked in the various imperial services (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 502). He makes the same point even more strongly in The Road to Wigan Pier, asserting that “every Anglo-Indian is haunted by a sense of guilt,” knowing that they really have no right “to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force”; only those who are doing something “demonstrably useful,” like forest officers, doctors, and engineers, seem to have an untroubled conscience (Complete Works5, pp. 135–36). This may be overstating the case. But the experience of being complicit in “the dirty work of Empire” was certainly the beginning of the transformation of Eric Blair into George Orwell (“Shooting an Elephant,” p. 501). Five years of working for an oppressive system left him feeling that “I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man” (Complete Works5, p. 138). It now struck him that the English working class “[played] the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma,” and he wanted “to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants” (Complete Works5, p. 138). In the winter of 1927–28, keen to discover more about the lives of the poor, and vaguely hoping to rid himself of his sense of guilt, Orwell began to explore the slums and lodging houses of London’s East End. After a few weeks, he went on the road as a tramp for the first time.

Sources and literary context

Although “Shooting an Elephant” is written in the first person and presents itself as an account of an actual incident from Orwell’s time in Burma, it is not clear how close to the truth Orwell’s narrative actually is. Orwell himself wrote that it was about an event that “came back to me very vividly the other day,” and at least two men who worked in Burma at the same time recall his being called in to shoot a rogue elephant, a fairly common part of a policeman’s work in Burma at that time (Orwell, Complete Works10, p. 483). But apparently Orwell actually killed the elephant with a single shot, which means that the most memorable and harrowing part of the essay, the elephant’s agonizing death and Orwell’s powerlessness to hasten it, is an exaggeration. It is an exaggeration with a purpose, however. The needless and hideous killing of the elephant symbolizes “the evil, the dilemma, and the pathos of imperialism” (Stansky and Abrahams, p. 148). Orwell’s “concern in the essay [is] to diminish the Empire, not to celebrate its ruthless efficiency” (Newsinger, p. 6).

The blurring of fiction and autobiography was not uncommon at the time Orwell was writing. When “Shooting an Elephant” was reprinted in Penguin New Writing (also edited by John Lehmann) in 1940, 12 of the 14 contributors “wrote in a similar, ambiguous, first-person descriptive vein” that was “truthful to experiences but not necessarily to fact” (Crick, p. 96). This mode of writing can be understood as part of a wider fashion in the 1930s for “eyewitness history,” in which writers explored political and social issues through autobiography. Classics of this genre include Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, as well as Orwell’s own The Road to Wigan Pier. As Janet Montefiore observes, these texts “deploy a brilliant rhetoric of authenticity,

“POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE”

In “Politics and the English Language,” first published in 1946, Orwell famously argues that debased language leads to debased, corrupted thought—and vice versa. He proposes six basic rules to stop the “decay of language” and of political thought:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything [in an] outright barbarous [way].

(Orwell, Complete Works17, p, 430)

which hindsight reveals to be the product of deliberate and skilful construction” (Montefiore, p. 11).

Reception

“Shooting an Elephant” was published in the second issue of New Writing in the autumn of 1936, and Lehmann liked it enough to reprint it as the opening piece in the first issue of his new journal, Penguin New Writing, in 1940. It has since been reprinted countless times in collections of Orwell’s work and other anthologies, and on October 12, 1948 it was broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The essay has become an Orwell classic, praised for its “sharp visual memory” and its “acute” portrayal of guilt and authority, for its combination of “literary” and “moral” honesty and strength (Fyvel, Sykes, and Elliott in Meyers, pp. 306, 309, 340). Later critics have identified it as marking “the beginning of the major phase of Orwell’s career,” in which personal reminiscence and anecdote became the vehicle for a subtle exploration of political themes (Stansky and Abrahams, p. 147).

Since the 1950s, many American students have encountered “Shooting an Elephant” in composition courses, where it is among the most frequently used models of good prose. Orwell’s famous “plain style”—the principles of which are outlined in another of his famous essays,”Politics and the English Language”—is often held up as a model to emulate.

Unfortunately, emulating Orwell is not as easy as it might seem: plain style, as Irving Howe observed sadly, is “that style which seems so easy to copy and is almost impossible to reach” (Howe in Meyers, p. 350). Orwell’s command of it in “Shooting an Elephant” and his other mature essays, along with his skill in articulating “the complexity of seemingly simple experience” have led many critics to call him a master of the essay—in Howe’s view, he was perhaps “the best English essayist … since Dr [Samuel] Johnson” (Stansky and Abrahams, p. 147; Howe in Meyers, p. 349).

—Ingrid Gunby