The Pridi Banomyong Library Rare Book Room, Thammasat University, Tha Prachan campus, owns a number of rare and useful items of potential interest to students and researchers, especially those interested in ASEAN studies, Myanmar, literature, history, political science, ethnography, linguistics, anthropology, and related subjects.

Among them is Burmese Interlude by C. V. Warren.

When this book appeared in 1938, it was reviewed by the noted English writer George Orwell, who stated:

Mr. Warren was an assistant in one of the big timber firms and was in Burma five years, including the bad period of the rebellion. Between 1928 and 1930 the price of paddy dropped from Rs. 150 to Rs. 70 a hundred baskets, there was widespread misery and bands of men who had been thrown out of employment took to the forests and swore oaths of rebellion.

As in previous wars in Burma it was guerrilla fighting, and Mr. Warren tells pathetic stories of men armed only with dahs and spears being mown down by the machine-guns of the British troops, and believing to the last in the magic tattoo-marks which were supposed to make them proof against bullets.

Like every European who is not tied to the big towns, Mr. Warren conceived a deep affection for the Burmese. Social relations have always been friendlier in Burma than in India, party because of the native geniality of the Burmese, partly because of the fewness of European women.

The TU Library circulating collection also includes several other books by and about George Orwell.

Burmese Days was a novel by Orwell, published in 1934 on the themes of racism and colonialism.

Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as “a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.”

The novel describes “both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry” in a society where, “after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally…an inferior people.”

Orwell spent five years from 1922 to 1927 as a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police force in Burma (now Myanmar).

The British had gradually annexed Burma in stages, and it was not until 1885, when they captured the royal capital of Mandalay, that Burma as a whole could be declared part of the British Empire.

Migrant workers from India and China supplemented the native Burmese population.

Although Burma was the wealthiest country in Southeast Asia under British rule, much of the wealth was in the hands of Europeans.

Under the British administration, the people of Burma were at the lowest level of the social hierarchy.

Among its exports, Burma’s up-country forests produced 75 per cent of the world’s teak.

The a website of the Orwell Foundation has posted a preface to a recent reprint of Burmese Days:

In Burma, Orwell acquired a reputation as someone who didn’t fit in. Unlike his contemporaries, who prided themselves in being pukka sahibs, Orwell preferred to spend most of his time alone, reading or pursuing non-pukka activities such as attending the churches of the ethnic Karen group or befriending an English opium addict who was a disgraced captain of the British Indian army.

Reading Burmese Days, it is easy to see how Orwell’s hatred towards colonialism must have festered in the solitude and heat, growing like a hothouse flower. Orwell later wrote that he felt guilty for his role in the great despotic machine of empire and became haunted by the “faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my stick in moments of rage”.

Tormented by these Burmese ghosts when he returned to England, Orwell began to look more closely at his own country and saw that England also had its oppressed masses in the working class. The working class, wrote Orwell, became the symbolic victims of the injustice he had seen in Burma.

He wrote that he was compelled into the world of London’s homeless and the destitute of Paris (experiences that would, a few years later, be collated in his book Down and Out in Paris and London): “I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed; to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.” […]

Few of the characters in Burmese Days have any redeemable features; both British and Burmese alike are tarnished by the colonial system in which they live. As far as fictional heroes go, John Flory is painfully inadequate. He is cowardly, self-pitying, and carelessly cruel. In nearly every chapter he does something to debase himself, something for the reader to cringe at. But he is, like most of Orwell’s leading men, uncomfortably and almost unbearably human.

In defense of his harsh portrayal of colonial society, Orwell wrote simply, “I dare say it’s unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but much of it is simply reporting what I have seen.”

A blogger also observed:

While living in Burma, Orwell took a much closer interest in the local culture than most of his colleagues, and refused to adopt the aloof demeanour – known as “pukka” – habitually assumed by British colonialists toward the people they ruled.

He learned to speak Burmese (his former colleague, Roger Beadon, reported that he spoke it fluently), visited the churches of ethnic minorities, and acquired a small, circular tattoo on each knuckle – a local superstition thought to provide protection from bullets and snake bites.

Orwell’s work as a police officer also caused him considerable concern, and he later wrote of his guilt at his part in the British Empire. Throughout his life, the themes of social injustice and poverty would form a major part of all his writings – not just about Burma but England and France, where he “went native”, took a false name and dressed like a tramp in order to find out how the poor lived. His experiences prompted many essays, and Orwell’s first book: Down and Out in Paris and London, which he published in 1933.

Burmese Days

Burmese Days, a novel based on Orwell’s experiences in Burma, appeared in 1934 and is fiercely critical of the British Raj. Many of Orwell’s former colleagues were angered by the book, which focuses on the corruption and bigotry of the imperial system, and several publishers turned it down due to fears it would be considered libellous – but Orwell shrugged off their criticisms, explaining that he was “simply reporting what I have seen”.

The book was published only after extensive cross-referencing of colonial lists to ensure that no real personages could be confused with its characters – but it’s clear that Flory, the novel’s protagonist, feels the same conflicts that Orwell felt in Burma, torn between his distaste for imperial rule and his role in sustaining it.

In addition to Burmese Days, Orwell wrote two essays on Burma: A Hanging (1931), which describes the execution of a condemned man, and Shooting an Elephant (1936), about a young police officer who is called on to shoot an aggressive elephant – against his own better judgement.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)