Tag Archives: Essay

The George Orwell Challenge – Shooting an Elephant (1936)

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Shooting an ElephantOrwell had already used his experiences as a police officer in Burma for five years from 1922 to create not only his superb Burmese Days, but also his essay A Hanging. In September 1936 he published his essay Shooting an Elephant in New Writing magazine; several years later in 1948 it was broadcast on the BBC Home Service. Once more he would call on his time as an imperialist authoritarian figure in Burma to write this short piece that he himself describes in it as “a tiny incident 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.”

MoulmeinIn Moulmein (present day Mawlamyine, the fourth largest city in Myanmar), the un-named narrator (but Orwell doesn’t disguise the fact that it’s him) is notified that an elephant is on the rampage in one of the city’s poorer quarters. It’s not a wild elephant, but a tame, privately owned elephant, who’s in must; Wikipedia tells us more about that state: “a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by highly aggressive behaviour and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones. Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal). However, whether this hormonal surge is the sole cause of musth, or merely a contributing factor, is unknown. Scientific investigation of musth is problematic because even the most placid elephants become highly violent toward humans and other elephants during musth.”

Indian elephantOrwell/Blair takes his rifle, even though it is too small to kill an elephant. Nor is he willing to kill the animal; he takes it more as an automatic self-defence strategy. But he becomes aware that his actions are creating attention from the locals; they are watching his every move and clearly expect him to kill the elephant. This will be spectacle for the people; and also, the promise of elephant meat is very attractive to them. If he fails to deliver the three outcomes of spectacle, death and meat, he will lose face; and nothing would be worse for him than for the assembled crowd to laugh at him. This is his biggest fear.

elephant gunThe elephant has caused some havoc in the marketplace, but, worst of all, has killed a man. “He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth.” He realises he has no choice but to kill the elephant, but because of his inexperience, he does not know that the best way is to shoot it in the ear. Instead, he imagines where the animal’s brain and heart would be, aims there, and shoots several times, which causes the animal to die a slow, painful, lingering death. “It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat.”

Coringhee coolieHe’s satisfied that he was right to kill the elephant as it had taken a human life, although “the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie.” The elephant’s owner was furious “but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.” “Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

Orwell Burma PassportIt’s fascinating to see the opposing motivations at work in this little story. For a piece that was written 85 years ago, and describes an event that had taken maybe 100 years ago, Orwell has quite a complex view on the whole event. For him it is primarily a horrific act to kill a noble beast like the elephant who, although dangerous, is only following his own instinct. But Orwell’s own self-preservation kicks in too, and, unsurprisingly, he values his own safety and authority above that of the elephant. But he realises that, long term, this is a symptom of the evil that is imperialism. “I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his 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. I had got to shoot the elephant.”

Buddhist priestsFor the locals, they have a much less romantic image of their own local animal life. The elephant is owned by an Indian, so they don’t worry about its death. The locals have a natural cynicism and distrust of their colonial invader, and have no qualms about betraying those feelings to individual foreigners. “As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter […] The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.” Young Orwell is only human; his own reaction to that is also a matter of balance: “With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, 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.”

Burma prison cagesHe doesn’t shy away from describing the grim excesses of life in Burma, whether it be the imperialist influence or nature’s own. “As for the job I was doing, I hate it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear […] the wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.” His description of the dead Dravidian is both gruesome and gripping with its attention to detail: “He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony […] the friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit.”

Indian elephantAnd the death of the elephant is a mixture of the surreal and tragic: “A mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down […] he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him […] the thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause […] in the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were arriving with dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.”

Bookshop MemoriesIt’s a powerful piece of writing, constructed with the detailed sincerity and insight you would expect from Orwell. Next in my George Orwell Challenge is a continuation with the essay format, and Bookshop Memories, first published in the Fortnightly Review for November 1936. Once again Orwell writes about what he knows about – his experiences working in a second-hand bookshop that he had already explored in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I look forward to reading it soon and I hope you read it too!

The George Orwell Challenge – Common Lodging Houses (1932)

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George OrwellBy 1932, Orwell was teaching at a boys’ school in West London but was also writing articles for submission to magazines and journals. With this article, Common Lodging Houses, published in the New Statesman on 3rd September 1932, and signed Eric Blair, Orwell recalls his regular experiences over the previous couple of years when he chose to live as a tramp, to find out what it was like to endure the hardships of life with no money, job, or home, as a form of journalistic research.  Common Lodging Houses is a factual account of what it’s like to rely on such places, “night-shelters specially licensed by the LCC” – that was the old London County Council.

In 1931 his essay The Spike had been published, which told his experience of staying in a casual ward of a workhouse, the slang term for which was a spike. That essay is a grim depiction of filth and squalor, and the indignities suffered by those who slept there. However, in Common Lodging Houses, Orwell finds they’re not much better than spikes, and in some respects, considerably worse, noting “considering that they house so many people and that most of them are in an extraordinarily bad state common lodging houses do not get the attention they deserve.”

Spike cell roomsTo be specific: “the dormitories are horrible fetid dens, packing with anything up to a hundred men, and furnished with beds a good deal inferior to those in a London casual ward.” He points out that the beds are small and hard, with thin, dirty bedclothes, and with access to neither baths nor privacy; but Orwell goes on to emphasise the horror of the filth. “As often as not the beds are verminous, and the kitchens invariably swarm with cockroaches or black beetles.” Casual wards, or spikes were free; in fact, it was a condition of entry that you were forbidden to bring any money in with you. But Orwell reveals that the charges for a night in a common lodging house vary between 7d and 1s 1d per night; and because so many people use them, “the average common lodging house brings in something like £40 net profit a week to its owner.” That’s the equivalent of around £2000 per week today.

This is Orwell’s main source of despair in this essay. By licensing these lodgings, proprietors could profiteer from the men who stay there, whilst offering a service that is in many ways worse than the (unlicensed) spikes. In addition, Orwell describes the rules and regulations for staying in a house as “exceedingly tyrannical”; “gambling, drunkenness, or even the introduction of liquor, swearing, spitting on the floor, keeping tame animals, fighting – in short, the shole social life of these places – are all forbidden.”

Men outside a Common Lodging HouseHe gives an example of how the legislation effectively works against the lodgers, rather than in their favour. When lodging house owners were required to comply with an LCC regulation that the beds in a dormitory had to be at least 3ft apart, thereby reducing the numbers of beds, and therefore the number of paying customers, they simply increased the prices, without providing any further upgrade to the living conditions. With lodging there was no scope for men and women to be in the same house; nor was there any remedy for the lodgers to prevent the constant appearance of slumming parties – 1930s style slum tourism, people “who march into the kitchen uninvited and hold lengthy religious services”. Orwell criticises the reasoning behind what he calls the “interference-legislation” that governs the common lodging houses: “their emphasis is on hygiene and morals, and the question of comfort is left to the lodging house proprietor”.

The essay is not written simply to alert the reader to what life in a lodging house is like, nor is it simply to bemoan the fate of the unfortunate people who have no choice but to live there. He also offers constructive suggestions to improve the houses. “The LCC would be doing an immense service if they compelled lodging house keepers to divide their dormitories into cubicles and, above all, to provide comfortable beds”; even the casual wards had their cells. “The houses should be licensed for both sexes alike […] and the lodgers should be protected by law against various swindles which the proprietors and managers are now able to practice on them.” Orwell also displays a resentment towards this kind of exploitation in his essay on Hop Picking. He asks the question: “Can anyone imagine such things being tolerated in a hotel? And yet a common lodging house is only a hotel at which one pays 8d a night instead of 10s 6d. This kind of petty tyranny can, in fact, only be defended on the theory that a man poor enough to live in a common lodging house thereby forfeits some of his rights as a citizen.” Highlighting this social injustice is the core of this essay.

Rowton HouseThere is an alternative to the lodging house, which Orwell briefly touches on; the hostels provided by the Salvation Army and the Rowton Houses – a chain of hostels built by the philanthropist Lord Rowton, who had been Disraeli’s private secretary. According to Orwell, these are “clean and decent. Unfortunately, all of these places set off their advantages by a discipline so rigid and tiresome that to stay in them is rather like being in jail.” Orwell calls not only for decent conditions for poor people, but also respect for them to live their own lives, and not to have to comply with lifestyles imposed on them by their “betters”. His final summing up in the article reveals that harsh alternative on offer. “Tens of thousands of unemployed and partially employed men have literally no other place in which they can live. It is absurd that they should be compelled to choose, as they are at present, between an easy-going pigsty and a hygienic prison.”

Down and out in Paris and LondonLike his essay on hop picking, this is a fact-filled piece of journalistic reporting, also serving as an opinion piece on how low cost lodging could be improved. Orwell’s deep understanding and despising of the horrors that these men must endure is clear in every sentence. He rarely needs to spell it out for the reader to know his precise feelings. Describing the dormitories as “horrible fetid dens” and the kitchens as “murky, troglodytic caves” is enough for us to get an insight into the conditions for ourselves; and his inevitable hatred of those who seek to make money out of the misery of others is obvious throughout. If the reader has any sense of socialism in their soul, this is bound to bring it out! I’m expecting much more of these insights and observations in his next published work, the full-length non-fiction Down and Out in Paris and London, which would appear a few months later, and which I’m looking forward to reading for the first time since I was a teenager.