Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. But I could get nothing into perspective. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.Īll this was perplexing and upsetting. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. We rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity. Home / Orwell / Essays and other works / Shooting an Elephant Shooting an Elephant
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