By HOMERO SANTIAGO*
Commentary on Georges Orwell's book, Days in Burma
“This is a political necessity. Of course, it is alcohol that keeps this machine running. If it weren’t for alcohol, we would all go mad and start killing each other within a week. That’s a good topic for your high-minded essayists, doctor. Alcohol as the cement of the Empire.”[I]
1.
Georges Orwell was born in Burma and went to England when he was still young; he graduated from one of the most prestigious schools in the country, thanks to a scholarship. After graduating, instead of following the natural path of university, he decided to return to India and take the exam to become an officer in the imperial police. He stayed in Burma for five years, until in 1927, on leave in England, he decided to resign from his post and become a writer.
The experience in the East provides the raw material for his first novel, Days in Burma, completed in 1933 and published the following year, as well as other texts by the young Orwell, which thus came to occupy a relevant chapter in that branch of British literature that is Anglo-Indian literature.[ii]
The plot is reasonably simple and it doesn't hurt to outline it here. In a small Burmese village, life revolves around the English club. Flory, employed in a lumberyard, suffers the bitterness of a dissolute and solitary life, corrupted by lies; he hates his European peers, abhors imperialism, but must keep his own opinions quiet; his only friend is the local native doctor, whose destruction is desired by a corrupt judge who is also a native.
Flory meets Elizabeth and dreams of marrying her, overcoming his loneliness; however, the two are incompatible: while he truly admires Burma and the Burmese, Elizabeth is horrified by the mere idea of living with the locals. The protagonist becomes the victim of a plan to destroy the reputation of his doctor friend and, finally, sees his marriage plan evaporate; desperate at the prospect of continuing the same sleepy life, he commits suicide.
Georges Orwell's debut novel is often considered a literary failure and, above all, a political failure. For the moment, let us emphasize this second aspect. The thesis of political failure rests on an assumption that goes something like this: in fictionalizing his Burmese experience, Georges Orwell would have wanted to produce something like a denunciation of British imperialism; it is precisely as such that the work fails.
If imperialism and imperialists are demonized by Flory, it is only to the extent that they bring about the psychological suffering of the young man who has discovered the meaninglessness of a life fueled by whiskey and surrounded by servants and prostitutes; hatred of the Empire is confused with self-hatred, to the point of producing dubious literary effects, as when the protagonist slaps himself and curses himself, the desire for purging taking on the air of slapstick: “Scoundrel, cowardly scoundrel […] Coward, vagabond, drunkard, fornicator, scoundrel full of self-pity!” (p. 78).
As more than one scholar has observed, politically this does not go far; the critique of imperialism becomes the psychological drama split between two cultures, maladjusted to both, tarnished by the frustration of youthful dreams, stained by destiny, which is symbolized by “a horrible birthmark that spread, in the approximate shape of an irregular half-moon, across the left cheek, from the eye to the corner of the mouth” (p. 24).[iii] To make matters worse, as has often been noted, the almost complete absence of a native point of view in the work is striking.
The action revolves around the English club, the landscapes, the events, the attitudes, are presented to us through the prism of the colonizer; there is no analysis of the psychology of the Burmese, there is practically no mention of the resistance movements to colonization that were already vigorous at the time – an aspect that stands out even more if we compare Days in Burma e A Passage to India, a work by EM Forster published ten years earlier and focused on the tension between the English and the Indians.
It seems to us that the general problem of evaluations of this type and the identification of the alleged “defects” of the work depend on the assumption mentioned above, according to which, let us reiterate, Days in Burma was intended to constitute a denunciation of imperialism, an anti-colonial libel. Now, it is precisely this premise that does not convince us.
The narrative's intention is not to compose an account of the psychological suffering of a young Anglo-Indian, nor is it a dossier on the perversities and evils of imperialism; although it appears here and there, this does not constitute the essence of the work; and we would even venture to judge that, if it were, the novel would have little interest, no more than that of rain falling on wet ground, today when the condemnation in whole of imperialism and colonialism has become a more or less consensual opinion.
Let us emphasize our understanding: Georges Orwell's intention was to present, in novelistic form, his discovery of colonial despotism; ultimately, to elaborate in literary terms the understanding of the nature or essence of imperialism, its functioning and its effects. This cognitive aspect of the novel emerges directly from Orwell's ability to reflect on his own experience, without a doubt, but working on it, unraveling its hidden knots and ultimately rising to an understanding of the nature of the system that determined it.
This is an aspect well indicated by the writer, when reporting on his stay in the colony: “the work in Burma had given me an understanding of the nature of imperialism”; or else, when recognizing the importance of “an insignificant incident” that had given him “a better idea of the true nature of imperialism – of the real reasons why despotic governments act”.[iv] That is why it makes no sense whatsoever to psychologize or trivialize the story; Flory suffers, but the suffering comes from a wound opened by learning: “he began to realize the truth about the English and their Empire”, understanding that “the Indian Empire was a despotic regime” (p. 85).
The truth that is revealed to the protagonist is irreducible to his psyche, as it “pulls” to the surface an entire power structure and intertwines with it, introducing us to the universe of imperialism. In a way that only good literature (that which is far from being simply unresolved) can do.
Neither a psychological drama with autobiographical overtones nor an anti-colonial libel, Days in Burma It functions as a kind of study of what British imperialism is, namely, a system based on lies. In this sense, the naturalist zeal – and we recognize its presence in the long and detailed descriptions of the vegetation, fauna, and local human types – must give way to the effort to unravel the subject, a bit like in a geometric text the distance from the data helps to better understand its conditions.
With this, we discover that British imperialism is a system of lies because lies constitute it; it is its universal element (present in all its intricacies) and the only one capable of keeping the imperial machine running smoothly, imposing itself on colonizers and colonized, the colony and the metropolis, and even dispensing with the use of brute force – the army is there as a mere guarantee, the ideal is never to use it. Domination is all the more effective the softer and sweeter it is,[v] by the work of the lie that pleases, numbs and intoxicates… like one, several drinks. In the literary plane, the figuration of this element that dominates and maintains the domination, constituting the essence of imperialism, is the alcohol.
2.
“Despite all the whiskey he drank at the Club, Flory slept little that night.” (p. 77) This is the revealing beginning of the chapter that reconstructs Flory’s trajectory, from his arrival in Burma at the age of 19, through the debauchery of drinking and prostitutes, his premature aging, the gradual damage to his spirit caused by insincerity and loneliness, and the hatred directed at his compatriots and the Empire. “It is an airless, stupefying world,” in which “every white man is another cog in the wheel of despotism.”
After a while, the effort to keep your rebellion quiet ends up poisoning you like a secret disease. Your whole life becomes a life of lies. Year after year you frequent the little Kipling-haunted Clubs, glass of whiskey in hand, the latest issue of the Financial Times on your left. (p. 86)
This capital passage takes us to the center of intelligibility of Days in Burma: the triad of imperialism, which deserves careful consideration.
The plot of the book revolves around the European Club, and this is no coincidence. In the British Indies, every village has its own club; together, they form one of the central institutions in the lives of Anglo-Indians, one of the few places where they can truly feel at home, Englishmen among Englishmen, as they suggest, read the latest news and debate the great issues of the metropolis. An “impregnable fortress”, a “spiritual citadel”, to use Georges Orwell’s words, the club is a unique political institution, since it serves as a public sphere in the colonies, the only space for social interaction that was neither created nor administered by the Imperial Service or the army.[vi]
These clubs, frequented for years on end, or so we are told, are haunted by the figure of Rudyard Kipling, the most famous English author from the turn of the 1907th to the XNUMXth century, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in XNUMX; the greatest exponent of “colonial literature”, “the prophet of British imperialism in its expansionist phase”, as Georges Orwell defines him elsewhere.[vii] Like no other, the exceptional creator of Jungle Books and Mowgli knew how to forge an ideology for imperialism with his work, representing it in the guise of a civilizing enterprise in which the philanthropic efforts of the “whites” are tested to the limits of beneficent selflessness.
Take up the White Man's burden –
Send your best children
Go, condemn your children to exile
To serve their captives;
To wait, with harness
With agitators and savages
Your captives, stubborn servants
Half demon, half child.[viii]
Read through modern eyes, these lines from the first stanza of Rudyard Kipling's most famous poem no longer sound horrifying; they merely exude the most ridiculous impudence. However, our current contempt does nothing to change the meaning and power of a play that, thanks to the talent of its author (the fact that the imperialist wolf Mowgli still entertains us is a sure indication of this talent), played a fundamental role in the dissemination of a certain vision of imperialism, winning over a legion of well-intentioned hearts to the cause.
Rudyard Kipling was worshipped at the altars of English clubs in India, he who confessed to being a great tributary of these institutions,[ix] for the same reason that he sometimes acted as “home god (household god)” in every middle-class home, especially the Anglo-Indian ones,[X] and enjoyed unparalleled prestige among the British military in the colonies;[xi] declared cultivator of traditions and social order, of the hierarchy between races and social classes – my “imperialist vices”, which he loves to criticize in each of my publications, as he jokingly assumed;[xii] this champion of status quo he was the “prophet” of British expansionism for the good reason of having offered the colonial enterprise that without which, irremediably, it would be nothing more than pure and simple theft.
In a word, Rudyard Kipling gave imperialism an idea.[xiii] A notion, an understanding that avoids doubts, compensates for sacrifices and firmly guides actions, justifying them, even the most brutal, by their noblest ends, namely, elevating to civilization the large areas of the planet where savagery and people “half demon, half child” live, or rather survive, on the margins of progress.
Rudyard Kipling is the brilliant creator of the “imperialism-idea”, which in one way or another needs to be instilled in the minds of every Anglo-Indian and every native so that the colonial system can function well, smoothly and without the need for weapons. It is more than fair, therefore, that he has a place of honor in every English club in the East, as described by Georges Orwell.
The second constituent of the imperialism triad is profit, business unequivocally symbolized by Financial Times, the “messenger” of City London, founded in 1888, at the height of the British Empire. Having said this, however, one question immediately arises: how to reconcile altruism, the idea, and plunder, theft, profit, colonial business, in short? The problem is not small and cannot be left aside.
The association between profit and philanthropic effort is a major requirement already present in the document that is considered the birth certificate of modern imperialism: the minutes of the Berlin Conference of 1885, which brought together 14 countries (in addition to European countries, the United States and the Ottoman Empire) to negotiate and formalize the division of sub-Saharan Africa; without conciliatory efforts, there was a risk of repeating, in the XNUMXth century, the criminal barbarism of the Romans, to whom precisely the idea, the ideal that sets the difference between mere plunder and civilizing altruism.[xiv]
In the German capital, the main point of discussion is the Congo, which is ceded to Belgium in exchange for freedom of navigation on the region’s rivers and lakes, thus greatly facilitating business. Could this, however, be the sole justification for the colonial effort? Not at all. The signatories of the aforementioned minutes claim to have met “in the name of Almighty God” with the aim of establishing “the most favourable conditions for the development of trade and civilisation in certain regions of Africa”, since they are sincerely “concerned at the same time with the means of increasing the moral and material well-being of the aboriginal populations”.[xv]
If the reader feels compelled to laugh, it is best to restrain himself. Despite what Tim Maia sings (“when we love / we do not think about money”), it is far from impossible to reconcile free trade and philanthropy in its highest etymological sense of love for humanity. Business exists and profits are desirable, perhaps inevitable, since they are what finance the humanitarian enterprise.
This is a virtuous logic whose foundations are candidly explained by Dr. Veraswami, an Indian, to Flory, his English friend: “While English businessmen develop the resources of our country, British government officials civilize us, raise us to their level, through sheer public spirit. It is a magnificent story of self-sacrifice.” (p. 52)
The ideal finds its conditions for realization in the material, while business is clothed in the nobility of altruism. It is a perfect win-win. Every logger in Upper Burma who cuts down a tree can be sure that he does so for excellent reasons; were it not so, the forests would remain untouched, without providing the native population with the auspicious civilizing gains that only commercial interest makes possible – roads, railways, hospitals, prisons, “law and order”, “unshakable British justice, the Pax Britannica”, concludes Dr. Veraswami (p. 53). In short, imperialism-idea definitively redeems what we can call “imperialism-profit”.
If that reader whom we asked to contain his laughter a moment ago retorts that it is all just a bedtime story, just a string of lies, we will not refute him; we tend to agree with the diagnosis, especially since he is the protagonist of Burma Days who repeatedly rails against “the lie that we are only here to improve the lives of our poor little black brothers, and not to steal what they have” (p. 51).[xvi]
However, it is better to slow down the easy-going judgment-bearing stretcher. Let us agree that the virtuous union between human well-being and commerce is no more aberrant than Mowgli, and just in case it is still common currency: we do not see privatization or concession of public assets, even a common good like water, that is not claimed to be for the “benefit” of the population; in the hell of capital – and imperialism is a stage of capitalism, as Lenin taught – nothing is done without the acknowledgment of good intentions.
Whoever disregards the idea will feel guilty of venality; whoever disregards profit will fall into the limbo of foolish idealism. Be careful! Problems only arise when we forget one of the points. On the contrary, things need to go together, absolutely in tune, for the system to work perfectly, to the extent that one can believe in it. Now, the responsibility for not letting us fall into this error lies with the last element of the triad: whiskey, the genuine oil of the imperial machine.
Only whiskey imperialism (of course we also drink beer, gin, brandy; we only drink for all a pars more significant) is capable of cementing the union, practically identifying – by way of the “mysterious identity between five and four”, to use an expressive image of 1984[xvii] – profit and ideas, plunder and civilization. Roughly speaking, as Descartes once said that the substantial union, theoretically inconceivable, becomes reasonable as long as we do not think about it and only experience it, one can say that we only need to drink for imperialism to exude coherence and pride, emerging as a marvelous historical-political-cultural arrangement.
Living together, drinking: “it is a “political necessity”, explains Flory, because it is “clear that it is alcohol that keeps this machine running” (p. 50). And indeed, in Days in Burma, people drink a lot and at all times, before breakfast, after lunch, at the end of the working day, during dinner, before going to sleep; they drink to endure the heat and life in Indian exile, they drink above all to believe.
It is revealing that the glass of whiskey, in the picture that gives us the triad of the system, occupies the noble right side, symbolizing, very Christianly, the mysterious extension of the power of God the Father, in a case of almost substitution. “What a civilization ours is, a civilization without God, based on whiskey”! (p. 42). Alcohol occupies this prominent place because it refers to the central problem of belief in the lie that sustains the system. As a comprehensive model, it is valuable for its effects: altered perception, a clouded mind, the numbness that fosters credulity.
Hence its utmost importance, deserving to be said to be the “cement” of the Empire. Whiskey imperialism takes priority over the others because, without it, the former are innocuous. What would a lie be if no one believed it? A spurious artifice that only works on the basis of coercion. Now, alcohol sweetly instils sincere belief in what is, literally, incredible; it thus rests on the basis of a systemic and anonymous lie that, when all is said and done, does not even require liars or deliberately lying people.
The drunkard does not lie when he tells his stories nor does he fail in the simplest gestures, because he believes in what he says, he frankly believes in what he sees, and he who believes in an illusion truly believes; therefore, he is far from being a liar or an illusionist; even if the illusion, the distorted perception, the lie, if you will, really exists. Burma Days whiskey imperialism gives us the literary representation of the way of understanding a peculiar system of lies, since it apparently does not lack liars, and can be widely and sincerely believed, both by the colonized and by the colonizers.
One example is enough to demonstrate this aspect. In a certain passage, Ellis – a caveman Englishman who despises and viscerally hates the natives – is or feels provoked by some Burmese students; he immediately attacks them, and hits one of the boys with a blunt cane; in retaliation, the young men attack him en masse, until he is saved by his servants. It is not clear in the text of the novel to what extent the hostility came from the students or if Ellis imagined it that way, after all, that was what he expected, what he wanted to express his hatred. The fact is that later, at the police station, the Englishman's version (that he was attacked for no reason) will be supported by the servants who exonerate their boss and blame the students.
Here comes the narrator's surgical comment: “it is likely that Ellis, to be fair, believed that this was the true version of events” (p. 298). Here is the point: if Days in Burma It is more than a mere dossier of imperialist evils, because Orwell managed to understand and literarily figure out that the bare facts were much less interesting there than things as perceived and believed by people like Ellis; strictly speaking, he is not lying, because he truly believes in the lie, and that is enough to justify his actions, all of them.[xviii]
A discredited lie is worthless; therefore, the means of accrediting falsehood are fundamental to the consolidation of a system of lies. In the case of Burma Days, the investigation of this aspect passes, primarily, through the analysis of the relations between the main characters of the novel and the omnipresent alcoholic substance, that is, the very entrails of whiskey-imperialism and how it oils, delights and believes in imperialism-idea and imperialism-profit. From this emerges a varied picture of the ways in which, under imperialism, colonizers and colonized live, suffer and make others suffer. Without claiming exhaustiveness, let us sketch from this picture only what is necessary to understand, depsychologizing as we politicize, the sad fate of the protagonist.
It has already been noted that the European club is the center of the narrative; let us now add: it is also, of course, the reception and drinks consumption center, where members find the coveted ice (what could better represent the pride, ingenuity, and exclusivity of the English citizen than the superhuman effort to stay “ice cold” in the Burmese heat!). More than spiritual, or for that very reason, the club is an alcoholic citadel, an environment in which the state of constant drunkenness echoes the imperial ideal, the idea, while everyone does their best to profit. The British thus live peacefully, as numb as Ellis. Except when the alcohol stops generating its soothing effect. That is Flory’s entire misfortune.
After understanding the “nature of the hell reserved for the Anglo-Indians” (p. 89), that is, a life steeped in systemic lies, all that remains for Flory is to drink. In large quantities and all the time. When the servant brings him breakfast one day, he is blunt: “I don’t want to eat anything. Take this rubbish back and bring me a whiskey.” (p. 65) It is the way to feel better and get through the days. The problems intensify as drinking begins to show its limits. Let us return to the beginning of the fifth chapter of Days in Burma, mentioned above: despite all the whiskey, Flory cannot sleep. Similarly, after falling from his horse, he goes home and asks for a bottle of whiskey, which however “did not sit well with him” (p. 270).
Before he came to the club expecting to face a difficult discussion, “he had been drinking gin all the time, but even drink could not distract him now” (p. 276). Flory disbelieves in the system, cannot (although he would very much like to) believe in the idea, and so life becomes unbearable for him; disbelief, cowardice, the frustration of marriage plans; without the relief of alcohol, suicide becomes inevitable.[xx]
It is his fate, it is the destiny of every Anglo-Indian who, in a state of enforced sobriety, is forced to face himself and the system of which he is a cog. In the absence of the deadening effects of alcohol, the horror radiates; the source of this horror is the empire, but the closest and most concrete point of this accursed empire is himself, making the temptation great to end it to alleviate the suffering, to kill himself like Flory.[xx]
* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.
Reference
Georges Orwell, Days in Burma. Translation: Sergio Flaksman. New York, New York, 2018, 360 pages. [https://amzn.to/4ijMaVI]
Notes
[I] Georges Orwell, Days in Burma, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2018, p. 50. All page references without other indication will refer to this volume.
[ii] It is worth clarifying that the term “Anglo-Indian” refers to the English (and British in general) who made their living in the British Indies, either in the Imperial Service or in private business. The formula, therefore, has nothing to do with miscegenation; on the contrary, it refers to a culture proud of serving the metropolis in the most inhospitable conditions while preserving its purity of blood and character; the Anglo-Indian motto par excellence, as Orwell teaches us through the mouth of his protagonist, says it all: “In India, like the English” (p. 181).
[iii] To give just one example of this type of reading, a great critic of Orwell like Raymond Williams (Orwell, London, Flamingo, 1984, p. 9) reads the protagonist's crisis in Burma Days like that of the author of the novel himself, an anti-imperialist and an officer of the imperial police: “In theory, he says, he was totally in favor of the Burmese and totally against their British oppressors. In practice, he was at the same time against the dirty work of imperialism and involved in it.”
[iv] Respectively, “Why I write”, Inside the Whale, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, p. 26; “The slaughter of an elephant”, in the same volume, p. 61.
[v] “The natives call the British system Sakar ki Churi, the sugar knife. That is, there is no oppression, it is all soft and sweet, but it is a knife, nevertheless.” These words of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), the “great old man of India”, are quoted by Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos in her preface to E. M. Forster’s book, A Passage to India, São Paulo, Globo, 2005, p. 9. A domination that acts, it seems to us, through what the Filipino artist Kidlat Tahimik called “spams”, in his formidable installation at the 2023 São Paulo Art Biennial: Killing us softly… with their SPAMS… (Songs, Prayers, Alphabets, Movies, Superheroes…). We take the liberty of referring to a text of ours about the work: “Will the apocalypse be instagrammed?”, at: https://revistainspirec.com.br/o-apocalipse-sera-instagramado/
[vi] In general, cf. M. Sinha, “British clubbability, and the colonial public sphere”, Journal of British Studies, 40/4, 2001.
[vii] “Rudyard Kipling”, in My country right of left, 1940-1943, New York, Harcourt, 1968, p. 168.
[viii] Kipling, The White Man's Burden; available at: https://www.fafich.ufmg.br/hist_discip_grad/KIPLING%20O%20Fardo%20do%20Homem%20Branco.pdf
[ix] Recalling his youth, he ponders: the club “constituted for me the whole of the outside world”; “the circumstances of my life made me greatly dependent on clubs for my spiritual well-being” (Kipling, “Quelques mots sur moi”, in Artworks, IV, Paris, Gallimard, 2001, pp. 995, 1055).
[X] Orwell, “[On Kipling's death]”, in An age like this, 1920-1940, New York, Harcourt, 1968, p. 159.
[xi] Cf. Kipling, “Quelques mots sur moi”, ob. cit., p. 1059.
[xii] Ditto, p. 1099.
[xiii] We use the term here idea with the meaning present in this passage of heart of darkness from Joseph Conrad: “The conquest of the earth, which first of all means taking it from those who have skin of a different color or a nose a little flatter than ours, is never a pretty thing when we examine it closely. The only thing that redeems the conquest is the idea. An idea behind it all; not a sentimental imposture but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – a thing that we can hold high, before which we can bow down and offer sacrifices…” (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2008, p. 15).
[xiv] Again Conrad (ob. cit., pp. 14-15): the Romans “were not colonists […] They took whatever they could, whenever they had the opportunity. It was simple robbery, armed robbery, robbery-murder on a grand scale, and these men practiced it blindly – as befits those who attack darkness.”
[xv] The minutes of the Berlin meeting are available at: https://mamapress.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/conf_berlim.pdf
[xvi] Again, it is worth contextualizing the lexicon: calling an Indian “black” is a huge insult, since it means equating him with a sub-Saharan; so much so that, as a matter of good policy, the Imperial Service prohibits the use of the expression. As Mr. Macgregor, a figure who expresses the official position of the Empire, explains, “the Burmese are Mongols, the Indians are Aryans or Dravidians, and all of them are very different from…” (p. 39). The forbidden word hangs in the air.
[xvii] Orwell, 1984, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2021, p. 304.
[xviii] Orwell also identifies this aspect of “sincere” belief in lies when dealing with the falsifications that were used against Trotsky in the Stalinist Soviet Union. When we take into account the sophistication of these devices, he argues, “it is impossible to believe that those responsible were simply lying. It is more likely that they were convinced that their version actually occurred in the eyes of God, justifying the rearrangement of the documents in this sense.” (About the truth, New York, New York: Routledge, 2020, p.127)
[xx] It is very interesting to compare Flory's relationship with alcohol with that of Winston Smith in 1984. At a certain point he stops drinking gin because “the process of living had ceased to be intolerable”; in the end, after the forced conversion to which he is subjected, he starts drinking again: “It was his life, his death and his resurrection. It was the gin that every night plunged him into a stupor, and it was the gin that every morning revived him.” (1984, ob.cit., pp. 200, 347)
[xx] Or go crazy, like Kurtz from heart of darkness, which is also a way of responding to the horror produced by the imperial system as soon as we awaken to the hidden aspects of its structure and functioning.
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