Pox Britannica

In November 1922, George Orwell (or Eric Blair, as he was then) arrived in Burma, to take up a post with the Indian Imperial Police. He was 19, not long out of Eton, which he had attended on a scholarship; his family could not afford to send him to university. He moved about: from hill station to frontier outpost, to the outskirts of Rangoon, eventually posted to the town of Katha, in Upper Burma. It was on this remote place that he based the town of Kyauktada, the setting for his first novel, Burmese Days. It was published in New York by Harper & Brothers in 1934, and then, in 1935, in London, by Victor Gollancz, who had – needlessly – been afraid of libel.

In 1934, my father, aged 22, arrived in the province of Bihar, in northern India. For five years he was to supervise the large district of a sugar plantation before serving in the Indian Army until the end of the war. This tenuous temporal connection between two utterly different men is what set me reading Burmese Days. In my twenties I had read almost all of Orwell except, for no good reason, this novel. Decades later, steeped in my father’s tape-recorded stories of his time in India, and trying to write my own novel about the aftermath of his colonial experience, I was reading all things relevant, from Forster to Rushdie – and then, almost as an afterthought, Orwell. Everyone should read this novel, I think now. Much darker than Forster, whose A Passage to India was published ten years earlier, and whose knowledge of India was as a gentle traveller, Burmese Days describes a country of ravishing beauty and squalor, with an intolerable climate, in which there is corruption in every sweating pore. And although it offers an unflinching portrait of the casual – and deliberate – cruelties of colonialism, its villain is Burmese. It burns with a clear-sighted anger, exploring all aspects of people and place in empire’s waning days – most poignantly through the complex character of Flory, a lonely timber merchant who both loathes and loves the country, and who understands its culture as no one among the yellowing old bores in the Club will do. It is he who strikes a plangent note on his enforced return from an attempted visit to England: unexpectedly, he is glad to be back, knows that this is his home. What he longs for is someone to share it with, and in this he is doomed. Set in a ring of hills, Kyauktada is a railway town lying between jungle and the banks of the Irrawaddy. Orwell drew a little map of it: the Club and the hospital on the river; the seething jail where men are flogged and hanged; the maidan where polo is played; the tin-roofed church; the slender tower of the pagoda rising from a grove of peepal trees; the bazaar, with its shouts and smells and prostitutes. Vultures soar and circle in the heat. Close to the hospital is the house of Dr Veraswami, who aspires to be elected the first non-European member of the Club. Nearby lives U Po Kyin, the obese and murderous Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada. As the novel opens, he is sitting on his veranda, chewing betel from a lacquered box and thinking about his past life. As ‘a naked, pot-bellied child’ he had watched the victory march of British troops into Mandalay, and in his awe and terror had conceived his ambition: to fight on their side, to become a parasite upon them. Through ‘a lucky stroke of blackmail’, through theft, bribery and betrayal, he has risen to power. Now, all his energies have one aim: the downfall of Dr Veraswami. ‘We are going to slander him, destroy his reputation and destroy him for ever,’ he tells his servant. ‘It will be a rather delicate operation.’ And then it is he who will be elected to ‘the European Club, that remote, mysterious temple, that holy of holies far harder of entry than Nirvana!’ On the other side of the town, facing the jungle, lie the houses of some of the British: Macgregor, the Deputy Commissioner and Club Secretary; the Lackersteens, he the alcoholic director of a timber firm, she his discontented wife; and Flory, Veraswami’s friend. Flory lives with his mildewed books, his dog and Ko S’la, the servant he has had since his arrival. Ma Hla May, his doll-like mistress, is a frequent visitor, a young woman he uses for sex, though it leaves him disgusted and ashamed. What marks him out, what has in some ways formed his character, is a dark blue birthmark, stretching down his left cheek. ‘He was quite aware of its hideousness.’ Educated and bullied at a ‘cheap, third-rate public school’ he has through solitary reading broadened his mind, but there is only Veraswami, kindly and put upon, Anglophile to the last cell of his body, with whom to debate ideas. Dr Veraswami has a passionate admiration for the English which a thousand snubs from Englishmen have not shaken, and Flory’s seditious opinions shock him. ‘At least you have brought us law and order. The unswerving British justice and the Pax Britannica.’ To which Flory replies, ‘Pox Britannica, doctor . . . Of course I don’t deny that we modernize this country in certain ways . . . In fact, before we’ve finished we’ll have wrecked the whole Burmese national culture.’ Meanwhile, there is outrage at the Club. In response to a government edict, Macgregor has proposed that a non-European member should be elected. ‘I suppose you’d like little Veraswami for a Club member, eh?’ demands Ellis, a timber firm assistant, of Flory. ‘That pot-bellied, greasy little sod of a nigger doctor . . . I’ll die in the ditch before I see a nigger in here.’ Flory is unable to meet his eyes. And later he weakly signs a letter of disagreement with the proposal. ‘He had done it for the same reason as he had done a thousand such things in his life; because he lacked the small spark of courage that was needed to refuse.’ Soon afterwards, he receives an anonymous letter, warning him against Dr Veraswami, ‘NOT A GOOD MAN, in no ways a worthy friend of European gentlemen’. As he tears it to pieces, he hears sudden screams from the jungle – ‘an English voice, a woman’s, crying out in terror’. Racing with his dog towards the sound, he discovers a young woman in terror of a buffalo, which he quickly scares away. And here they are: a lonely, middle-aged man with a hideous birthmark, and the slender 20-year-old niece of the Lackersteens, fresh from Paris. Elizabeth has cropped hair, a delicate, oval face and blue eyes as pale as harebells. She is full of gratitude for her rescue; as they walk back, and stop to look at the flowers in his garden, a pang of unreasonable happiness goes through them both. What follows is utterly compelling: an account of the rise and fall of love – and never were two people more ill-suited – interwoven, in the interminable heat, with the treacherous and inexorable machinations of U Po Kyin. They culminate in the arrival at the Club one evening of a murderous mob. It is Flory, acting at last, who saves the day, but the reigniting of Elizabeth’s affections lasts only until U Po Kyin’s last vile act, and from that moment all meaning in his life is gone. What is on show in this flawlessly constructed novel is the ways in which colonialism destroys itself. At its worst, it devalues ‘native’ culture while almost inevitably sowing aspiration and ambition for something it will never give: equality. Thwarted, that ambition turns against it – or, in the case of U Po Kyin, brings tragedy to good men. Amid passages of great descriptive beauty, Orwell’s dry, ironic voice charts events which end quite terribly. And then he swings the whole thing round: terrible acts, and shallow people – oh, how shallow is Elizabeth! – are rewarded with status and power. The villain is destined for glory. And this is empire.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 40 © Sue Gee  2013