What a fantastic story, kept be intrigued and captivated till the end. Orwell is the best English author for me. He has the ability to clearly see incongruities in the English culture, exposing its many weaknesses by juxtaposing it Indian and Burmese cultures to great effect. The main issue for all English in Raj seems to be melancholy, which is the chief ailment of any immigrant of today. Living in British India was privileged with cheap servants and lax laws as compared to living in an increasingly Industrial culture of England where almost everyone had to work and help getting expensive.

Orwell also captures the ideology of the Pukka sahib or the Imperialist mentality required to maintain the rule in India. There were rich pickings for both the ruling class and their adhering as long as these guidelines were followed. Orwell also exposes the crass colour prejudice, echoes of some of which are still pretty much alive to this day almost a hundred years on.

Only 30 or so pages into this book I was overwhelmed by the depiction of racism in the British Raj...I'm now pondering whether I find it shocking because of my modern perspective OR whether it would have always been this shocking even when Orwell wrote it? - There is a line about Ellis being "...one of those Englishmen - common unfortunately - who should never be allowed to set foot in the East" (the bottom of page 21 in my Penguin Modern Classics edition) - That piques my interest in the British Raj - essentially there seems to have been a definite group or school of Racist thought among the colonising classes on the one hand and on the reverse...what? - those who were 'open-minded about'?, those who were 'actively in support of'? or those who were condescendingly 'in tune with' the local population??? – What is on the other side of Racism here? and if they thought they were being noble, do we now find that a little patronising? - Interesting stuff – Orwell has depicted attitudes that are rather further beyond my reach at present than I would have assumed.

I generally find Orwell's writing style a little difficult - but I was determined to persevere with this one as his subject matter is very interesting. Not only in the depiction of race but also in the depiction of women - I'm tempted to say that Elizabeth is simply anchored in her time period and would be fairly typical. She has, as an unmarried woman, a responsibility to protect her social standing so her attitudes are fairly understandable when viewed in terms of the society she inhabits – it’s about following the 'rules' that lead to 'belonging' and 'community'. – You have to keep reminding yourself that it is Flory who is out-of-step here - even if to modern eyes we agree more with his views today than Elizabeth's he really is putting her in a difficult position for those times. I really didn't want Flory and Elizabeth to get married and was glad when the ‘honourable' military captain turned up!

After overcoming his weaknesses to actually propose Dr Veras... to the club and 'quelling' the rebellion etc etc Flory goes and... ...well I never expected that! - I expected it all to come to no good but, really, that ending was a little out of the blue for me (..feel free to laugh at me here!)

But after a slow start due to getting used to Orwells writing I actually very much enjoyed this book. The descriptions of the jungle, the colonial station, the heat, the bazaar etc - all very evocative.

I'm torn about the attitudes depicted. How much of it is observation? how much artistic licence? how much personal demons being exorcised? - I feel like it's a rather negative but probably more-true-than-not portrayal of life in the British Raj at that time. - It's rather depressing isn't it! - I don't like to think that Britain was made 'Great' THAT way. - But how much can we blame those involved? - it would be wrong to judge what happened back then by today’s standards for all the unpalatable-ness in today's harsh light.

After half-way through this book had me hooked...and I loved the 'purple passages'.

Sömürgeci ve vahşinin ta kendisi olmanın öz-bilinciyle kaleme alınmış bir sömürgeci romanı. R. Kipling'gillere ayna tutup ne olduklarını göstermiş. Bunu da sömürülenin romantik güzellemesini yaparak yapmıyor, sömürüleni sömürgecinin işbirlikçileriyle ortaya koymuş Orwell. Bence türünün en iyi örneklerinden. Hayal kırıklığına uğratmadı.

4,5 *

Interim review.
Burmese Days is arguably Orwell's most important work, incidental to being his first novel, because of what it exposes and being when it was published, 1934. The power of this critique on colonialism is drawn from first hand experience. The last short chapter that tidied up the story seems drawn from lives he knew in India.
Burmese Days was the last of Orwell's works for me to read, fiction or non-fiction unless there are some essays I've missed. Fortuitous timing to read it together with Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, by Shashi Tharoor, which confirms what Orwell describes of colonialism in India in greater depth and detail. This gave me a better appreciation of this story on the British Raj.

An interesting aside: Burmese Days, was published in 1934. A light came on while reading of the English at their Club at night, talking of Home, I remembered in a book I have by H.V. Morton, The Nights of London, a paperback size fifth edition 1932 hardback, on the title page is stamped 'The Burma News Agency, 125 Scott Market, Rangoon.' This book was there during the Raj, very likely read in a Club at the time Orwell was writing Burmese Days. How it travelled from Rangoon to a second-hand bookshop on the Central Coast of New South Wales I would like to know.

Rudyard Kipling, Eat Your Heart Out

Port Out, Starboard Home----memsahibs---a chakker of polo---chhota peg---solar topi---the veranda of the bungalow---natives---Gunga Din---these are all faded images, pictures from an old magazine found in an attic, words from books found in dusty secondhand bookstores. Still, within one lifetime ago they formed the picture of India and the East that people often had. Colonialism or Imperialism of the old kind didn't really die till the 1960s. Even so, most people born in the last half century grew up with Cold War images, talk about "underdevelopment", and "the Third World". The relations between "sahibs" and "natives" grew far from anyone's mind. Today, new topics exist. BURMESE DAYS is one of the best novels ever to emerge from that now-disappeared time. George Orwell, better known for "1984" and "Animal Farm", once served for five years in the British police in Burma, so he was able to portray colonial society much as it was, to set his novel in an authentically tropical Southeast Asian setting. Vividly colorful description, added to a very well-developed plot, make this a great novel, set in a small upper Burma town called Kyauktada in the 1920s. Burmese and Indian characters appear, but Orwell wisely chose to make the main characters British, a small group of mostly arrogant, racist men isolated for years on end, far from home, behaving with piggish closed-mindedness, refusing to learn anything about their surroundings, intent on segregation to the point of utter idiocy. Into this setting arrives Elizabeth, impoverished, poorly-educated and with snobbish pretensions. Flory, the only Englishman who takes any interest in Burma (even has a Burmese mistress), is attracted to the newcomer, perhaps seeing her as the only way out, or as the one person likely to understand what he felt about his fifteen years of loneliness. She is horrified by everything. The novel is a pessimistic tale of his dashed hopes, of nefarious plots, and even a revolt of sorts.
As a person who has spent five years in India and lived with Indians for the last 55 years, I have always disliked Kipling because his Indian characters (but not his British ones) are of extremely thin cardboard, though he claimed to "know Indians" and millions of people believed he did. Orwell was more perceptive, and in my opinion, a much better writer. His depiction of colonial relationships, the arrogance that came with too much power, and the internal sickness of colonialism ring very true. So, not only is this a great novel, it is an antidote to Kipling's oh-so-imperialist attitudes. Read it.

There’s a map of the village of Kyautada in my edition of Burmese Days, a map which is based on a drawing done by Orwell himself. My heart skips when I see a map in a book; I know immediately that the geography of the place will be somehow important, and Orwell’s map, with little arrows tagged UP and DOWN alongside the roads, gives an almost three-dimensional idea of the terrain, showing that the village was built on the side of a hill. The few buildings strewn along the slope are tagged with their owners’ names. At the bottom of the hill, he’s drawn in the broad expanse of the River Irrawaddy and at the top of the hill, a large shaded area, which he has simply tagged ‘Jungle’. When you begin reading, you know that the story will take place on this rather narrow slope of land between the jungle and the river, and for me, that information spelled danger. The book opens with the hatching of a rather diabolical plot so the suspicion of danger is confirmed and the tone of the story is set from the beginning.

I was slightly disappointed that the descriptions of nature promised by this hillscape between jungle and river were so few but the scattering of houses on the map are far more significant than they look at first. In fact, most of the story takes place in one or other of these houses, or in the little cube marked ‘Club’, its back set to the river, and to which the main characters make their way before breakfast, at noon, and every evening of their Kyautada lives. They sit in their club, as in all such Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to the right of you, Pink’un to the left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. The club, needless to say is exclusively white and the plot of the book revolves around it remaining that way. Or not.

The promising strip of jungle on the upper edge of the map has a role to play in the story, as does the river, but too much of the book is concerned with the sayings and doings of the sahiblog, the little group of agents of the British Empire who gather in the club at Kyautada, and they are a particularly unpleasant group. But thanks to Orwell’s talent as a writer, he somehow manages to squeeze an interesting story out of such unpromising material. If he were alive today, I would love to talk to him about this book and his motivations for writing it. Of course that’s impossible, but the next best thing is to take a look at what he said about this book when he was alive, in Why I Write:

From an early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer...When I was about sixteen I suddenly discovered the joy of mere words..As for the need to describe things, I knew that already. So it is clear what kind of books I wanted to write, in so far as I could be said to want to write books at that time. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were partly used for the sake of their sound. And in fact my first complete novel, Burmese Days, which I wrote when I was thirty but projected much earlier, is rather that kind of book.

But already in Burmese Days, for all his attempts at ‘purple passages’ and ‘arresting similes’, there is a definite leaning towards the type of social criticism that was to become the focus of Orwell’s later writing. The Indian Empire is a despotism - benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object...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 Forces - 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.. The real work of administration is done mainly by natives. Burmese Days, p. 69

In Why I Write he explains how he came to definitively turn his back on the Burmese Days type novel. In a peaceful age, I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming something of a pamphleteer. First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc.

Fortunately for us, those later life experiences gave Orwell material for some of his finest writing, Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia as well as Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four.
I need to read more Orwell.

British Imperialism described as realisticly as only fiction allows. I enjoy Orwell putting into words what I have always imagined it all to have been like back then. I would love to say some of these characters were very stereotypical but alas! I fear they are just honest depictions of people and what can you do if later on they were turned into stereotypes?
Somewhere along the story I started to float in the opposite direction thus rendering the story at times inaccessible to me. There was something about the particulars of this novel that made it more like a page in a history book rather than a riveting historical novel.
That's not to say I don't still love Orwell, it's just that Burmese Days didn't grab me by the throat like I know he can.

It's Orwell.
It's fantastic.
What more is there to say?

In this debut novel, we are introduced to George Orwell’s distaste for an Empire on which the sun was beginning to set and to his desire for Socialism as a panacea for colonialism. Burmese Days reminds me of novels Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene might have written in the later stages of their careers had they been trapped like timber merchant Flory (a proxy for Orwell) in an obscure Indian station with no way out.

Orwell spent five years in the Imperial Police Force in Burma and drew heavily from his experiences in that period. The fictitious station of Kyauktada is a miserable place for British colonials. Surrounded by jungle, festering in drought that is only alleviated by drenching rain, irritated by prickly heat that breaks out over white bodies at random, isolated from the natives who surround them and who are still dominated by the yoke of a fading Empire, these Brits have only the traditional Club in which to centre their activities and drink copiously to drown out their loneliness, decay and self-pity. When Dr. Veraswamy is touted to be the first native to gain membership in the club, given the relaxing of colonial laws in favour of locals, and his rival U Po Kyin, a corrupt local magistrate, is all out to thwart the appointment, the stage is set for an eruption of violence fuelled by the seeds of discrimination that engulf colonial and local alike, with tragic consequences for both sides.

The Brits at Kyauktada are unapologetically racist. Characters like Ellis, a manager of a colonial company, thinks nothing of bribing witnesses to lie, or torturing locals, and shooting them, all if it means that British hegemony in the area is preserved. And Mrs. Lackersteen is the quintessential burra memsahib, lording it over her domestic servants, trying to keep an eye on her alcoholic husband and his frisky hands with the ladies, and hatching brazen plots to snag a husband for her impoverished and orphaned niece, Elizabeth. Elizabeth too has all the trappings of a budding memsahib; she is materially and socially focussed; she prefers horse riding and hunting to reading and mixing with the locals. Flory is madly in love with her and rescues her from wild buffalos, leopards and crazed mobs, but she spurns him for the wastrel, Verrall, commander of the Military Police detachment sent to Kyauktada to fend off a loomimg local rebellion being secretly organized by U Po Kyin. Why is Elizabeth so stupid? Because Verrall has “Honourable” attached to his name and is considered to be going more places than Flory will ever do with his sympathies for locals such as Dr. Veraswamy. Flory too has his demons; one particular loud and cunning one is Ma Hla May, his former mistress, who embodies the warning: “hell hath no fury like a woman spurned.”

Some of Orwell’s observations are didactic and more like condemnations:
1) The British official holds the Burman down while the British businessman goes through his pockets.
2) The army provides protection to the British fools who work in the colonies.
3) Colonialism is despotism: you are free to be a drunkard, coward, fornicator, idler and back biter, but you are not free to think for yourself.
4) The Oriental hates himself and looks to the Britisher; the Britisher hates himself and look to the Oriental.
5) The key to success is to sell out your partner in crime.
6) Half-educated people (those in the colonies) develop late in life, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

Descriptions of village life, the jungle, the empty club life, and the eternal arguments about the filthy natives are well drawn. After some earlier scene setting, especially through racially charged arguments in the British club that provide us with the lay of the land on each person’s sensibilities and sympathies, the action moves at a fast pace towards a thrilling climax. Yet the device of the omniscient narrator—one who not only jumps into everyone’s heads to tell us what each is thinking, but who also attempts to explain certain plot points to us—gives this book an amateurish feel. Perhaps these devices were allowed in the 1920’s when Orwell wrote this novel; perhaps, this being his debut offering, Orwell needed the crutch of the omniscient narrator to get him through the writing of it.

As the omniscient narrator sums up in the end, each character gets his dues, deservedly or not. The opportunists come out ahead of the honest ones, and even Mother Nature intervenes to thwart some of the best laid plans of master Machiavellians such as U Po Kyin. Kyauktada shrugs off its wounded and dead and continues to fly the flag of its colonial master, chewing up those who are not resilient enough to play the survival game; and all its denizens, colonials and natives alike, continue their roles as pawns in the service to this vast business empire on whom the sun eventually was to set a couple of decades later—unfortunately, it was not to be in this book! I came away feeling like a total sucker for having pledged allegiance to the Union Jack as a fellow colonial myself. I wish I had read Burmese Days when I was a teenager living in the colonies.

روز های برمه اولین‌اثر جرج ارول است و در همان ابتدا نقطه قوت ارول را نشان می دهد بیان ساده و خواندنی نوشته هایش و همچنین ایده و درون مایه خیرخواهانه، آثارش،در واقع ارول نویسنده بزرگ یا خالق شاهکار یا افریننده مکتب نیست،تنها فردی ست با نیاتی مثبت در جهت اینکه انسان ها بتوانند با حفظ منزلت و حقوق خود سوای طبقات زندگی‌کنند.در واقع ارول راه حلی عملی برای تغییر وضعیت موجود ارائه نمی کند و صرفا بیان کننده ای ست برای مشکلات و تمام انچه غلط می داند. نقطه قوت او‌ همان قلم روانش در توصیف آنچه است که ‌میبیند و تجربه می کند،از دیدگاه فردی خیرخواه که دغدغه تمام زندگیش اینهاست..همه سبب شده نوشته هایش  که اغلب از تجربیاتش هستند خواندنی و جذاب باشند.
روز های برمه به روز های جوانی ش باز می گردد..زمانی که خود به برمه تحت استعمار انگلستان رفته بود. بی شک‌ اغلب کاراکتر های داستان برگرفته از افرادی حقیقی اند که خود در کنارشان زیسته..تجربه ای جالب و اشنا در میان ملتی که استعمار هر دو روی سکه ش را به آنان نشان داده.
روز های برمه با اینکه در محلی غنی و بزنگاهی تاریخی رخ می دهد اما واضحا نخستین تجربه ارول و طبعا ضعیف ترین کار وی است.با وجودی که موضوع برمه و استعمارش جذاب است اما روایت داستان و شخصیت پردازی ها ناقص و ابتدایی ست.

It is extraordinary that I haven’t read Burmese Days before. I owe my thirst for colonial novels an apology. However, better later than never to bump into a classic. Orwell’s book flashes qualities of Bates in descriptions of Burman climate, wildlife and living circumstances, plus adds highly enjoyable critical view of British colonial society and politics of the 1920s. The tragic love story naturally is of secondary importance.

” A cool breath of wind blew up the hill. It was one of those momentary winds that blow sometimes in the cold weather in Burma, coming from nowhere, filling one with thirst and with nostalgia for cold sea-pools, embraces of mermaids, waterfalls, caves of ice.”

I am more than certain that I lived in the colonial Asia in my beforelife.

http://mukikamu.wordpress.com