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Introduction to Burmese Days
In Katha, the remote town in northern Burma where George Orwell set Burmese Days, there stands a
solitary, pale-orange chimney. The large British house that once stood around it is long gone. On
either side of its base there is an empty brick fireplace. Halfway up the chimneystack are the remnants
of the second storey – five weathered planks sticking out in all directions like signposts.
In Burmese Days, part of the grassy clearing around the chimney was once a sitting room decorated
with ornamental tables and brassware trinkets from India. Orwell wrote that the room had smelled of
chintz and dying flowers.
According to my reading of a sketch-map Orwell drew (reproduced on page ii of this edition) to
show the real-life geographical setting of Burmese Days in Katha, this chimney is all that remains of
the home of Mr Lackersteen, the lascivious gin-swilling sahib, and his wife, the indomitable
memsahib forever making kit-kit with her servants and complaining about the heat of the tropics.
Ever since I first visited Katha, Burmese Days has been for me a heady blend of fact and fiction.
Based on Orwell’s time in Burma between 1922 and 1927, the novel provides a keen insight into his
own experiences there as well as an intimate and damning critique of colonialism written from first
hand experience. Though the colonial society that inspired Burmese Days has long-since vanished, all
the novel’s key buildings remain much as Orwell described them, and walking through the streets of
Katha feels like walking onto an abandoned stage-set.
In my mind, the characters brought to life in Burmese Days are so vividly etched against the
backdrop of Burma that it is easy to imagine them haunting the country still.
Before Orwell became a writer, he spent nearly five years working as a policeman for the British
imperial police force in colonised Burma. Known then by his real name, Eric Blair, he was a
distinctly un-Orwellian character. His background had groomed him to be the quintessential child of
empire. His father had been an opium-tax collector in India and his mother, who was born into a
prominent family of shipbuilders and teak traders, had had a grand upbringing in Burma tended to by a
small army of servants. Orwell himself was born in India, returning to England with his mother before
his second birthday. He went to Burma at the age of nineteen, fresh from Eton College. The young
Orwell enjoyed the decadence of the ruling class in Burma; he later wrote, ‘I habitually allowed
myself to be dressed and undressed by my Burmese boy.’
Orwell’s career in the colonies came to an abrupt end in June 1927 when he was granted six
months home leave and sailed back to England. He joined his family on holiday in Cornwall and