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imperialism in which he lived. For as his brain developed–you cannot stop your brain developing,
and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already
committed to some wrong way of life–he had grasped the truth about the English and their Empire.
The Indian Empire is a despotism–benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final
object. And as to the English of the East, the sahiblog, Flory had come so to hate them from living in
their society, that he was quite incapable of being fair to them. For after all, the poor devils are no
worse than anybody else. They lead unenviable lives; it is a poor bargain to spend thirty years, illpaid,
in an alien country, and then come home with a wrecked liver and a pineapple backside from
sitting in cane chairs, to settle down as the bore of some second-rate Club. On the other hand, the
sahiblog are not to be idealised. There is a prevalent idea that the men at the ‘Outposts of Empire’ are
at least able and hardworking. It is a delusion. Outside the scientific services–the Forest Department,
the Public Works Department and the like–there is no particular need for a British official in India to
do his job competently. Few of them work as hard or as intelligently as the postmaster of a provincial
town in England. The real work of administration is done mainly by native subordinates; and the real
backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the Army. Given the Army, the officials and the
business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull,
decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every
thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in
England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But 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. Your opinion on every
subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code.
In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of
lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink’un to left of
you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody
Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called ‘greasy Little babus’, and
you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking greyhaired
servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long
for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this mere is nothing honourable, hardly
even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are
bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a
creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable
system of taboos.
Time passed, and each year Flory found himself less at home in the world of the sahibs, more
liable to get into trouble when he talked seriously on any subject whatever. So he had learned to live
inwardly, secretly, in books and secret thoughts that could not be uttered. Even his talks with the
doctor were a kind of talking to himself; for the doctor, good man, understood little of what was said
to him. But it is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of