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location in Upper Burma were removed. (The modern-day edition has been restored, with a few later
editorial changes, to its original form.)
To facilitate some of the geographical disguises, Orwell drew a sketch-map of Katha for his
publisher. On the map are roughly drawn boxes marking the location of Flory’s house, the church, the
bazaar, the jail and the British club – the physical and spiritual centerpiece of Burmese Days.
According to Orwell, the real seat of British power lay, not in the commissioner’s mansion or the
police station, but in this sad, dusty little building.
The club building still stands today, though it has since been turned into a government-owned cooperative.
Where the garden used to be a riot of English flowers – larkspur, hollyhock and petunia –
there are now large warehouses holding stores of rice, oil and sugar. The low tin roof of the club still
hangs over a wooden verandah at the entrance, but the main room has been divided by a wall and is
filled with desks and mismatched chairs. In Flory’s time, the interior boasted a mangy billiard table, a
library of mildewed novels, months-old copies of Punch magazine and the dusty skull of a sambar
deer on one wall. Members of Katha’s British community whiled away interminable evenings with
tepid gin and tonics and inane club chatter about dogs, gramophones, tennis racquets, the infernal heat
and, inevitably, the insolence of the Burmese (older club members recalled the good old days of the
colony when you could send a servant to the jail with a note reading, ‘Please give the bearer fifteen
lashes’).
Most colonial memoirs I have read paint a jolly picture of life in Burma; making affectionate
references to the butlers from Madras who prepared ice-cold shandy on river flotillas, ribald
drinking songs around the club piano, shooting expeditions, dances. Burmese Days, however, is
something very different. It is a portrait of the dark side of the Raj, chronicling sordid and shameful
episodes of empire life.
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.
There are hints throughout Burmese Days of the future themes for which Orwell would later
become so well known. Flory is the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is
undermining the better side of human nature. Like Flory, Orwell was surrounded during his time in
Burma by people he felt he had nothing in common with and to whom he could not fully reveal
himself. When Flory muses on the constraints of colonial society, he could just as well be in the
Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four:
‘It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored… even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is
a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a
drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself.’
When Burmese Days was first published in the 1930s it came as a surprise to some old Burma hands.
A colleague of Orwell’s who had received training with him at the Mandalay Police Training School