The Anglo-Indians try to recreate England in India and by doing so merely show up the worst prejudices of the English middle class. 39-40.ģThe community portrayed in Burmese Days is one from which purpose, achievement or rewarding personal relationships are conspicuously absent. 3 George Orwell, Burmese Days, London, 1949, pp.The theme of this novel is not directly relevant to English society as a whole but to a minority, the Anglo-Indians, and the kind of communities they set up in the Far East, but it throws light on Orwell’s approach to a social system in which he was ultimately involved and shows that from the start, his reactions to his environment were ambivalent. He dramatized this conflict in Burmese Days (1934). At the same time, he was building up a violent hatred of the colonial system, though he remained a sincere admirer of what the early empire builders had achieved. He became aware of the discrepancy between the democratic principles which the liberals upheld in England and their continuing support of colonialism. Orwell was first made to face this dilemma as a servant of British Imperialism in Burma. They present the predicament of the modern Englishman caught between his strong loyalties to traditional institutions and his disgust for what they have become. He always wrote, he said, “from a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice,” and he attempted “to make political writing into an art.” To Orwell all writing was ultimately political because he thought that in modern society no sphere of human existence is left untouched by politics.ĢOrwell’s pre-war novels expose the sham and corruption of all organizations that wield power in some form or other.
He committed himself to politics, but he saw that each cause carries its own traps and he came to the conclusion that nothing could improve the desperate condition of human beings in a diseased society. Orwell was not alone among the writers of his generation in condemning the standards of middle-class life in England, but his rejection involved more than a denunciation of meaningless conventions and institutions, and his position was more dramatic because his despair at not finding an adequate substitute for them was greater.
It gives his writing its highly idiosyncratic character and that passionate tone which, together with his well-known honesty, is so compelling an element of his art. The life he chose to lead in the Thirties is so intimately bound with the social and political history of the period that we cannot altogether ignore his personal experience. The account he gave of his school-days experiences shows how sensitive he was since childhood to the humiliations which poverty can inflict and to the destructive power of injustice on the human mind. England in the disturbed years of the Great Depression gave him plenty of opportunity to observe the effects of poverty and to question the system that could produce such evil. … I was conscious of an immense guilt that I had got to expiate.” 2 This sense of guilt is at the origin of Orwell’s persistent and often masochistic association with the unprivileged and the victims of injustice. “For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. He was then going through a crisis provoked by the remorse he felt at having served British Imperialism. 149.ġWhen Orwell came back from Burma, where he had been working as a police officer, the Western world was on the brink of the Great Slump of 1929.