Orwell: Life and Art

2. Orwell's Burma

Two Orwell’s Burma My trip to Burma in August 2000 fulfilled a longstanding ambition, and I was the first Orwell scholar to visit that country (just as I was the first Lawrence scholar to go down a coal mine). Despite its extreme poverty, authoritarian regime and oppressive atmosphere, I found Burma extremely appealing. Like the Greek islanders of the 1960s, the people were among the nicest I’d ever met, and it was the most rewarding and interesting of my forty trips abroad. I confirmed at first hand that a Burmese student had never (as Maung Htin Aung claimed and I had doubted) pushed Orwell down a staircase in Rangoon. The Orient-Express company asked me to pay my own plane fare to Burma, but gave me a free cruise on the Irrawaddy River from Pagan to Bhamo, near the Chinese border. They said I would not have to give any lectures, but once aboard (and with no notes) I had to give two extemporaneous talks. Condé Nast Traveler did not respond to my original proposal and my essay was not commissioned. But when I came home, they bought it and kept it for a year. They finally published it in November 2001—but left me out of the table of contents and contributors’ notes. It was not easy to follow George Orwell’s footsteps in Burma. Not that I was hampered by a lack of freedom to travel. While the country’s military junta was still limiting the movements of the courageous Aung San Suu Kyi—the hopeful alternative to the current repressive regime—last year it had signed treaties with rebellious hill tribes on the borders of India and China and had lifted travel restrictions. I was able to journey by plane, ship, boat, bus, car, trishaw, and foot to see the places where Orwell, the subject of my recently published biography, had lived while serving with the Burmese police from 10 part i. the life 1922 through 1927. The prison at Insein, near Rangoon, was the scene of “A Hanging,”his polemic on capital punishment. Moulmein, a city in Lower Burma, was the setting of “Shooting an Elephant,” his essay on the limitations of British colonial power. His life in Katha, a town far north of the capital, inspired his powerful novel Burmese Days (1934), a satiric portrait of English officials and corrupt Burmese that had offended everyone. But Orwell’s letters from Burma have not survived, and the meager records of his service had either been transferred to London or destroyed during the Japanese occupation. When writing the Burmese chapter in my biography, I’d had to use information from gazetteers, travel books, and memoirs.Today, most British buildings are in a state of advanced decay, and the Burmese government has tried to obliterate all traces of the colonial era, which lasted from the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to independence in 1948. (The five-story National Museum leaves out more than a century of the country’s history.) But with the help of Burmese friends, I was able to find the places where he had worked, to imagine how it was for a very young Englishman to represent British rule in an exotic, alien land. Rangoon, like a rich widow fallen on hard times, was a broken-down and depressing city—more like Calcutta than the thriving capitals of Southeast Asia. It had leprous-looking, fungus-encrusted buildings; dark, uninviting shops; and restaurants that served such menacing dishes as“stamping fish,” “fish bladder soup,” and “pork stomach with garlic bean curd,” as well as more exotic plates of snake, alligator and monkey meat. Street vendors had pathetic offerings: a tiny mound of lemons, a few cheap sunglasses, some tattered English magazines. Men dressed in lungis and rubber sandals hung off the edge of packed buses. (Few people in Burma wear shoes, as I discovered when I broke my shoelaces and had trouble buying new ones.) Laborers staggered by, under crushing piles of bricks. Lines of monks— heads shaved, feet bare, with rust-colored robes and umbrellas—walked in procession with black lacquer bowls to beg their food and alms. Huge red government billboards carried Big Brother’s slogans in English, urging the populace to destroy those who opposed the ruling generals and who wanted to restore the democratically elected government (Aung San. Suu Kyi’s party won the national elections in 1990): “Crush all internal and destructive elements as the common enemy,” and...