Question- On Handling Racism

After today's discussion and reading the various blog posts, I'm confused with regards to racism in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant". Are we supposed to read his derogatory/offensive lines such as 'sneering yellow faces' and 'an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie' etc as Orwell's remarks, or are we supposed to read them as his narrator's/characters' remarks?

I agree with Lucas when he says that such racist terms/ways of thinking have to be presented in order for Orwell to subvert/problematize them. Shouldn't we then be taking such remarks in the larger context of the story, or in trying to understand what Orwell was trying to achieve (e.g. subvert/problematize them), rather than looking at the lines individually? If we look at them out of context, sure, any reference to Burmese people as a homogenized 'sea of yellow faces' is indeed, as Achebe says, 'bloody racist'. But given that the narrator is an idiot (in many instances, e.g. he fails to fatally wound it several times, he cows to the need to not look a fool) who is, himself, a piece of evidence for us to 'grasp the hollowness' of colonialism- how seriously are we to take his words?

By 'how seriously', I don't mean to disregard them as unimportant- but rather, instead of reading them as merely racist lines (that they undoubtedly are), try to see how they function in the text as a larger whole? Just as the police officer is merely a cog in the machinery of imperialism, aren't these offensive lines a(n intentional) tool of Orwell's?

Please let me know what you guys think. I'm pretty confused as to how we're supposed to handle such lines in Orwell's texts (and maybe this' relevant for other course texts).

Thanks and enjoy the weekend!

Why Elephants are Shot

I fell asleep yesterday night while reading Chatterjee before I could post. Had this killer medical gem test yesterday. For that my sincere apologies.

I shall attempt to link the Chatterjee to Shooting an Elephant. The main thing I took away from the reading was that of the deviation of the colonial government in India from the idealised Western modern notion of a democratic government. Under the essay's heading "It Never Happened" Chatterjee discusses the idea of British colonialism as one of a "centralising tendency of 'military-fiscalism' inherited from previous regimes" (27), one that essentially bases itself on differences (in this reading, it is racial differences) in order to perpetuate fiscal power that is in favour of the ruling British power. In relating this to Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", Orwell can be seen as discussing how power structures are created and sustained. Through the narrative's biographical re-accounting of a trivial incident, he draws parallels to empire and its basis of rule. In the nameless narrator's account of how the Burmese, the "yellow faces" egged him "a thousand wills pressed me on" into shooting the elephant, the idea of how power as based on a performative, collective set of rules that the parties agree upon and perpetuate. As the narrator states earlier on, the British individual becomes " a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib." In relating this to Chatterjee's article, can we then say that colonialism is merely a replacement of one "native" power regime with another power regime. That all regimes are ones based on differentiation and performative rules.

Shooting an Elephant in the Foot

Orwell wrote that in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. It's a sentiment that informs our own reading of Shooting an Elephant. Orwell himself is the indefensible; A Passage to India and Heart of Darkness warn us of the virulence of imperialism: it corrupts the conquering as much as it does the subject peoples, fostering egotism and resentment. The torpidity that he feels toward shooting the elephant may be only a few steps removed from what he feels toward the "evil-spirited little beasts"; he has already expressed the greatest joy in the world is very possibly driving a bayonet into a "Buddhist priest's guts". Orwell is castrated by the power he purportedly wields over the Burmans, power that is ultimately revealed as a masquerade. I'm reminded of the Hegelian dialectic between master and slave, but Orwell doesn't even posit reciprocity in his essay, he paints the "will of those yellow faces" to be essentially insurmountable and "every white man's life is the East" as "one long struggle not to be laughed at". The individual/collective binary colludes with imperial exclusivity here.

The "dummy" here has a triple meaning; as a stock figure and a fool and more, as a perverted simulacrum of a human being, exactly like how he himself has "conventionalized" the "damn Coringhee coolie". He is glad of the coolie's death, for taking the heat off his decision, a decision made solely to reject becoming a grinning corpse.

Ruskin's oxymoron "fruitful waste ground" used to describe colonial lands is overturned here too; Orwell as representative of British imperialism murders the elephant on a seemingly perfunctory whim while the Indians rear these beasts of burden and strip them to the bone after they die.

everyone wants an elephant

I would just like to add on to Christine’s point about the elephant not being a modernist symbol, because I didn’t see it as one either.

While there is a certain sense of ‘unknowability’ suggested by the failure to obtain any definite information about the elephant, it nonetheless remains that the elephant IS eventually located, isolated and killed. There is a consensus that is arrived upon with regard to the elephant: While the elephant starts off as being both an enigmatic and disruptive force, the end of its violent spree coincides with a ‘conquering’ of the enigma as the elephant is no longer presented as being beyond comprehension and knowledge.
The capitalist-imperial mind DOES succeed in inscribing the elephant within its own utilitarian terms. As the narrator describes it in terms of dollar worth: “Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds possibly”. Interestingly, the Burmese perspective also reduces the elephant to a simple object of value – the nutritional value that its meat provides.

This convergence of multiple perspectives into a single one is visualised in how all the Burmese people converge into a single body with a collective gaze directed upon the elephant as a thing to be killed and a source of food. Even the narrator is implicated within this gaze, as he states “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it”. Interesting to me, however, is that it is neither the white man nor the native who succeeds in gaining mastery over the elephant, but a sort of shared will, with the desire of the Burmese coinciding with the ability of the armed, white man.

A Panopticon in Reverse

The way in which the narrator in "Shooting An Elephant" is compelled by the colonial native gaze to act out the role expected of him suggests to me a sort of Panopticonism at work: under the public gaze, one is compelled to stay within the confines of prescribed behaviour.  The narrator shoots the elephant merely 'to avoid looking a fool'; he is his own 'policeman', unwilling to let himself buck the colonial narrative.  As the narrator notes, 'when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys'; by constructing the structures of power, the structure itself becomes a constraint on the colonizer's freedom of action.  In this way, the colonial entreprise turns into a faracial performance, one that can only end when the 'white man' abandons the entreprise, and thus leaves the Panopticon that he constructed.

-Yingzhao

Interesting Angle - Shooting

It is interesting to me how the story begins by providing an 'honest' view of a European official trapped - he "was stuck between [his] hatred of the empire [he] served and [his] rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make [his] job impossible". This 'in between-ness' is then declared a "normal by-product of imperialism", what then is the real product of imperialism? Did the "early British administrators in India [really intend] to train the people of India to govern and protect themselves ... rather than to establish the rule of a British bureaucracy?" (Chatterjee 14).

I think Orwell's story provides some sort of an answer. The shooting incident reveals "a better glimpse ... of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act". Lets just say the British administrators really intended on 'helping' the Indians modernise, however the immense pressure to "to act like a sahib ... to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things" prevents them from actually 'helping' the Indians, but reproduces the act of enslavement?

Simply put (I hope):
The immense pressure to rule, to be a figure of authority is that which fuels the colonial ambition and prevents any real 'help' from being given to the Indians.

I think Shooting An Elephant takes a rather sympathetic slant in addressing the colonial situation in India, and raises the question - to what extent was imperialism/colonialism in India a product of context (pressure) and/or the expectations of the natives?

P.S. Sorry about the rambling guys!

To shoot or not to shoot?

I think Orwell's short story raises an important dilemma, which I'm not quite sure how to solve. As a colonial policeman, both the natives and the British government expect him to fulfill his role and his duty towards society -- this would mean restoring order by shooting the elephant. Yet the elephant is not altogether disorderly and violent, but also has a "grandmotherly air" about it.

Here, what seems to be highlighted is the conflict between the self and the institution that the self is part of. This reminded me of something that I either read or something that someone told me really long ago. Basically, some MP who wasn't a part of the PAP criticized its policies a lot ... however, later on in his career he joined the PAP and he stopped criticizing it not because he suddenly agreed with everything the PAP did, but because it is incredulously hard to do what is right when one is also a part of the institution. The question then to ask would be how it is possible for one to remain as an individual while still be part of an institution, especially when one disagrees with something that the institution preaches? Audrey (for those of you who know her) once told me that the great Milton stayed cooped up in his home till his death because he didn't believe in institutionalized religions, and he was trying to escape from it.

However, I’m wondering if the escaping from institutions are the right way to go about dealing with these sort of things, or should we instead remain "plugged in" like in the Matrix and fight it out? But how?

Shooting a man shooting an elephant

‘Shooting an elephant’ sounds very much like shooting a film called, ‘An Elephant’. At one point, the narrator is even described to have “la[in] down on the road to get a better aim”, a position which you can imagine some photographer out in Africa getting into. Conveniently, the rifle is depicted like it is a long range camera—“a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights”. The point I am perhaps trying to raise here is the idea of theatrics, of the spectacle, of performance. And the elephant certainly looks like it is on display, while the narrator clearly is as well.
I would go so far as to draw a parallel between both the elephant and the narrator—in the same way that the elephant is this huge being, the narrator is an agent of this other huge entity called the British Empire. (It helps that elephants are grey, because that’s the colour of institutions in my mind’s eye: stony grey walls, and high pillars which kind of look like the elephant’s four thick legs too eh?) Both elephant and empire are running amok, or going haywire—“the dirty work of Empire”—and both are literally and figuratively going down—“the British Empire is dying”. Indeed, in the same way the crowds rose against the elephant, they will rise against the flailing empire.
The difference between the two is that unlike the narrator, the elephant doesn’t have anything to prove. Like someone put it, an elephant is an elephant is an elephant. The white man, on the other hand, is on display because he is trying to prove his whiteness. The camera, or the stage, then turns on him here because the one being shot/filmed is really the white man. And the crowds are watching.

[295 words]

Theatre of the (Colonial) Absurd: The Performance Of: Shooting An Elephant

Orwell's colonial tale emphasizes the theatrical aspects of European subjectivity vis-à-vis the colonized, internally and externally. The modernist focus on the alienation of the self within the colonial subject gets inflected through the consciousness of the narrator who "was hated by large numbers of people” (280) in Burma. The narrator's psyche gets interestingly caught in a split between sympathy for the colonized and rage against their acts of retaliation against the colonial system. It is a curious tangle, however, that is locked in a circle and self-perpetuates: the motivating factor for sympathy is precisely the dehumanizing colonial regime that fuels such acts of counter-aggression in the first place. Both positions obviate any genuine relation to the colonized independent of what Chatterjee calls “colonial difference”: the narrator's compassion remains faceless and abstract, without transcending the ideological paradigms of imperialism that also inscribes the native person as a “damn Coringhee coolie” (287) whose life is worth less than that of a piece of machinery.

Colonial difference is theatricalized externally in Orwell's story as the white man, through his superior technological arsenal, brings control and order through a show of force. This staging however, proves to be disempowering. Orwell shows how the European and the native relate to each other through images and constructions of the other that are completely inauthentic; therein lies the dilemma. The white man must constantly perform his role: what actually distinguishes his subjectivity belongs not to him, but is negotiated through a process of mediation with the colonized. The narrative distance gained in Orwell's tale betokens this fracturing of consciousness that is necessary for the colonial enterprise. The interplay of modernism and colonialism manifests in the alienated subject's psyche as a performance of dissonance, which he then carries into the sphere of physical action.

Shooting the heart

Reading Orwell’s Shooting An Elephant provides a refreshing insight into the difficulties of the imperialist. I’m not sure about the rest of you, but most of the times when I read colonial texts I tend to align myself more with the colonized as the victimized rather than with the colonizer. But here in SAE, it is not so simple. Orwell’s presentation of the dilemmas he face, in being both an imperialist and seemingly sympathetic attitude towards the Burmese, makes him one of the most humane characters. The way he is caught between the imperialists and the Burmese reminds me of Ronny in A Passage to India: how they have to change their attitudes and wear masks just so as to fit into their prescribed space. As Orwell highlights, ‘Feelings like these [hatred towards both the imperialists and the Burmese] are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty’. We are not presented with as much insight into Ronny’s mind, but I don’t think he buys entirely into the whole colonialism business but rather succumbs to the motion because he’s stuck in it; hence his constant parroting of the “wiser” senior imperialists.

Yet for Orwell, when the opportunity was presented for him to remain true to himself, he is pressurized to act otherwise. Despite how much he says he wants to let the elephant go, he can’t. He not only has to save his own face and act like a proper White man (‘A sahib has got to act like a sahib’), he is answerable to the Burmese themselves. It’s like a circus act: You want to see me shoot an elephant? Well, then you’ll see it! Ultimately, we come to the realization that neither the imperialist nor the colonized are truly free.

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*As an aside, when I saw that we’re going to read this work on the course, I wondered if it was the same as the comprehension passage I did in secondary school. It was the same, although the one I read back then was a shorter edited version. And I remember my teacher tearing when she read aloud the part where Orwell just kept shooting the elephant…somehow, that memory just kept replaying itself when I was reading this again.*

-Yuen Mei-

The elephant is an elephant is an elephant

Unlike Ramona, I didn't really see the elephant as a modernist symbol. Firstly, the elephant is a very "Asian" metaphor, they are only available in India, Africa or Thailand. The narrator admits that this incident

"gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act."

This suggests that the incident relates to a method and difficulties of ruling. Perhaps he understands why despotic governments are cruel - they are compelled to uphold "justice", the other natives who want to literally feed on the corpse of the "elephant", the incident draws too much attention to be left unattended, etc etc. Secondly, the opinion was divided not on the nature of the elephant but on the decision to shoot it. Lastly, the rampage was temporal, it is later "harmless", and the reason for this is provided by the narrator.

I saw it the elephant as clearly representing natives who revolt; there are not inherently "wild", they are "tame" but perhaps they, for a period, went "must". What do you all think?

In any case, it doesn't seem to fit the mould of the modernist symbol as easily as the Marabar Caves and Lighthouse. It seems like a parable in which we can draw parallels to the difficulties of governing empire from the coloniser's point of view.

White Mask, No Face

Orwell's semi-autobiographical piece achieves through its ironized narcissism not simply a condemnation of the praxis of imperialism, but a realization of his own disempowered subjectivity as a colonial subject of the Empire. In the binarized Manichean Burma, Orwell's dispossessed civil servant-police officer finds that it is his own subjectivity impinged upon not only by the Burmese, but by the colonial strictures of his own originating culture.

This ironic hegemony, which closes back on itself, arises sharply in Orwell's delineation of the half-hour it takes for the elephant to die. The elephant is trapped between life and death, in a liminal hell-on-earth, its existence held in temporary abeyance. Orwell's narrator in killing the elephant to save "face" and uphold the image of colonial superiority, can no longer give the elephant life to reverse his dreadful act, but is also unable to fully and completely kill it, and it is in that painful long interval between life and death where we see the artifice of the colonial identify, and yet, more disturbingly, how this artifice forces a capitulation of his own subjective humanity - "He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it." In being scrutinized by both the gaze of the colonized and the interiorized colonial gaze (yes, think surveillance and 1984), Orwell's narrator sharply encounters this irony of colonial hegemony, where he is disempowered by an ideology meant to empower him. He is no longer a person, but simply a colonial representative wearing the mask of the white man.

Thus what Orwell grapples with in this short piece is not just the realization that racial identities and power structures are merely performative given the white and yellow masks of colonialism (worn both by colonizers and colonized, and not by their own volition), but ultimately with the loss of self in a dehumanizing colonial landscape as a result of necessarily having to uphold such appellated identities.

The Reluctant Imperialist

Ok, I am a little sympathetic to the narrator. I see his inconsistencies, or hypocrisy at one level, and his reluctance in his role in the imperialist regime, as a human condition, not an imperialist one. What seems apparent in SAE and Chatterjee’s article, is that the disparity in theory and practice cannot be bridged easily especially in political history.

“Theoretically . . . I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British”.

In theory, the narrator bears “hatred of the empire” and is guilt ridden by the evils of imperialism. Yet at the practical level, he suffers “sneers”, “insults” and “hideous laughter” from the Burmese whom he, in theory, supported. The reality of the dislike and discrimination against the narrator by the Burmese flames his anger at them. Similarly in Chatterjee’s article, “that there should be one law alike for the European and Native is an excellent theory (21)” at best and cannot be practically realized in a period where racial and cultural differences are magnified by inequalities in power.

While one could argue that the narrator had a choice in his actions, it would also be oversimplifying a difficult issue such as colonialism. I think one problem with reading at a distance, is that it is easier to make moral judgments in hindsight because we do not experience the dilemmas or the full extent of political and emotional conflicts in a situation. I was just imagining if I was pressed with “two thousands wills” to act in a matter of minutes or seconds, what would I have done? While his inconsistencies between thought and action is problematic, since he is part of the imperialists, nonetheless we can empathize as he seems a more reluctant imperialist assuming a role placed upon him by both sides.

(300 words)

Irony in Shooting an Elephant

Orwell’s story is refreshingly ironic in its critique of British colonialism. Instead of cataloguing the cruel injustices meted by the British colonizer on the colonized in a run-of-the-mill fashion, it critiques colonialism by revealing how colonialism ironically inhibits the freedom of the colonizer. The first-person narrator experiences this revelation when he was assigned to resolve the case of the momentarily deranged elephant. Knowing that the madness was temporary, the narrator was reluctant to shoot despite possessing the “legal right” and “sufficient pretext” to do so due to the animal’s tragic killing of an Indian coolie. When the narrator assesses his visceral/emotional response towards killing, he comes to the conclusion that he does not in the “least want to shoot [the elephant].” Personifying and humanizing the elephant as grazing with a “preoccupied grandmotherly air”, he rationalizes about the moral grounds for killing and finds it wanting, knowing “with perfect certainty that [he] ought not to shoot” as “the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow.” The act possesses to him, the gravity of “murder.” Nonetheless, his sovereignty to act according to his own free will and values are inhibited by the oppressive premises of colonialism, which imposes the “conventionalized figure of the sahib” that the “natives expect” the narrator to conform to. Since the justification of colonialism is contingent upon the British colonizer’s self-imposed myth of the courageous, strong and “resolute” sahib who “knows his own mind”, and “do definite things”, the narrator does not want to “look like a cowardly and indecisive fool” in front of the natives. To “feebly” do nothing would be a laughable spectacle inviting mockery and cries of hypocrisy from the natives as it undermines the model image of the sahib that affirms British authority. Thus, the colonizer is ironically trapped and disempowered by his own myth. He realizes that “the moment the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys.” The colonizer’s superiority is an illusion. Although “seemingly the leading actor of the piece”, he is in reality only an absurd puppet” ironically subjugated by the very mechanisms that enables his oppression of the natives.

value of one indian

so far my favourite of the course texts - short, sweet and a straightforward read! :)

the way orwell saw it was, he persecuted what he described as a rather benign-seeming animal to preserve his pride (and that of the empire's). yet what i find most interesting is, he does not recall the murdered Indian in his description of it as having a "preoccupied grandmotherly air" and being "no more dangerous than a cow." He "knew with perfect certainty that [he] ought not to shoot him." this, knowing that the beast has just violently dashed an Indian's body into the mud, seems to me to be quite incredible. it points to the fact that life is measured in very different terms in different settings. every life is (supposedly) equal in a nation, but in a colony, when judged against a magnificent gentle creature, an Indian's life really is worth nothing at all. while orwell does acknowledge his complicity in empire to the extent that he was glad the Indian was killed so that he was legally permitted to shoot the elephant, i think he does overlook this moral issue. yes, one could argue he was subscribing to the Eastern ways of attributing different value to different men (caste and hierarchy systems), or of the mindset that one life is quite insignificant given how many there are (in India for eg) - when in Rome do as the Romans do, but that does not reconcile with the British Empire's moral highhorse and their ideals of honour and justice, which is in fact the moral impetus for colonizing in the first place. clearly, the colonies are settings which corrupt the Englishman but perhaps it is more the drawing out of what is already present in him, than rendering him newly evil. however, i'm sure these are way more complex issues than i make them out to be.

(299)

No sides worth taking

Orwell seems to have achieved the effect of resisting the reader’s sympathy with either side of the colonial divide in “Shooting an Elephant”. I say this because the narrator speaks from a very personal point of view, and harbours disdain for both the Empire and the natives. Thus it is difficult for readers to treat him as an allegory for the collective Empire, or as the embodiment of sympathy towards the natives.

The narrator exposes the Empire as mercantile and unfeeling: the elephant is comparable to “machinery”. Also, colonial rule seems to have no real function other than to keep up the “mask” of colonial rule. The colonist then becomes “a sort of hollow, posing dummy” and has to “spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’...” At the same time, the narrator is also unkind in describing the natives: they are as a “sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes”, demonized (corpses “devilish”) and infantilized (overly excited over a “bit of fun”).

However, these descriptions of colonizer and colonized are not pitted against each other in the manner that other texts we’ve been reading do. There is no significant interaction between the two sides, and the anecdote is focused on the police officer and his personal fear of losing face. All our sympathies as readers are channelled into the elephant, murdered violently and unnecessarily. With so much attention on the elephant, the usual concerns of colonizer-versus-colonized are sidelined. The materialistic, mercantile approach that both sides take to the death of the elephant disallows us to see one as more moral than the other, and Orwell might perhaps be trying to say that there really are no sides worth taking, and colonial rule has been outdated and rendered useless.

(291 words)

“He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it”

What I find most interesting in Orwell’s work is this whole idea of theory and convention being in opposition to a reality- a reality that ultimately mends itself and shapes itself to fit into theory, but that which in itself is highly individualised and moral. Hence, the mask is really the convention; the mainstream colonial discourse of how the colonizer ought to be, how he is percieved and how he ought to relate to the ‘native’ other. In Shooting the Elephant, of course this is questioned, for we have a narrator who struggles to fit into the mask granted to him, and who on the contrary feels pressure in needing to act out his role, and in trying not to appear inadequate as a person in power. Like Chatterjee implies, it is a performance that needs constant revision and monitoring because unlike theory or convention which is performing to given rules and codes, this is a performance that is not shielded by or elevated by a “stage”, a platform, or divider. Instead, we see the narrator with the masses, the ‘native’ community, and somehow the lines and binaries are less clear and helpful.

However, this mask is not merely one that the colonizer wears. The “yellow faces”, “happy and excited over this bit of fun” wear masks too- the ‘natives’ though conventionally subalterns, seem almost amused in watching the officer trying to fulfill his role and shoot the elephant. Like the narrator tells himself, he is the puppet, the ‘native’ the puppeteers, controlling his every move merely by expecting him to act like the colonizer, the all powerful one. Yet if this truly gives them power and authority is still questionable, for Orwell still presents them as the voiceless/faceless community

Inability to Shoot the Symbol

Since numerous classmates have talked about Chatterjee, I am going to focus on something slightly more different: the elephant in Orwell’s text.

The elephant, in a typically modernist way, represents the unknowability of things. No one in the text is able to pin down the exact whereabouts of the elephant: “some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant” (3). Just as Forster’s India eludes understanding and comprehension, so too does Orwell’s elephant.

Certainly, it is difficult to pin Orwell’s elephant down because its “madness” leads to chaos and confusion. Orwell’s elephant leaves a trail of devastating destruction behind, destroying “someone’s bamboo hut, [killing] a cow, and [raiding] some fruit-stalls and [devouring] the stock,” as well as inflicting violences upon “the municipal rubbish van” (2). Orwell’s elephant, in other words, muddles up colonial order and organization, in a way that is similar to how Forster, through Fielding, perceives India as “a muddle” (63).

At the end of Orwell’s text, there is no one single unitary perspective on the elephant. As the narrator emphasizes, “among the Europeans, opinion was divided” (8): “the older men said [the narrator] was right [while] the younger man said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie” (8). Instead of having some one come up with a single justification for killing the elephant, the narrator tells us that “there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant” (8); the implication being that the elephant cannot be seen from one angle but is presented from multiple perspectives.

The elephant thus becomes a modernist symbol, very much like the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s text and the “Buddha” symbols in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories.

(300 words)

From a Distance

Physical and metaphorical distance is used at length in Orwell’s short story.

It was only in a “job like that [a colonial position] you see the dirty work of the Empire at close quarters”. The close proximity to the colonial administration reveals the lurid details of the Empire. Here, working within the “machine” allows for a microscopic view of the Empire that churns out dirty linen.

“That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes”. In this instance, the closer one gets to the event [perhaps truth?], the more complicated and superfluous the event gets. This particular microscopic view provides too many details that one loses sight of the larger “picture” at hand.

The elephant, at a distance, “looked no more dangerous than a cow”. However, the elephant might charge if one went too close to him. This lends to the idea of appearances, and how things appear to us at a distance.

Metaphorically speaking, this idea of appearance and distances can be related to theory and practice. The idea of the modern state as a theory, with its “universality” is well and good. However, the actual practice of the implementation of the modern state seems to be a “misfit” with the colonized country.

Distance, in terms of time, also allows for a “clearer” picture or “different” picture for the viewer. Revisionist history works in the same temper. It is with temporal distance that historians can start drawing links of the events that occurred. I’m not purporting that revisionist history is an objective, detached one. I’m positing that the closer one is to the event, it seems, the more subjective and complicit one may be.

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Framed: the problem with "discursive frameworks"

Aptly enough, the Chatterjee article enacts what it advocates: switching perspectives on colonialism (with a confidence in its agency to do so that we don’t see in Achebe and Fanon) in order to gain new insights into how our perceived reality is dictated by subjective cognitive frameworks.

One such schema is ideology. Chatterjee demonstrates how the meaning of ‘-isms’ – he mainly mentions three: imperialism, capitalism, modernity – can morph according to who defines them. Chatterjee has an invested interest in how these three relate to each other because he writes from the framework of Indian nationalism himself: for example, defining imperialism in terms of capitalism rather than civilizing/power terms calls to mind the Leninist definition of imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism”. The subsequent implication that history progresses in stages (as Marxists argue) strengthens the claim that colonialism is but one stage in India’s history. Frameworks, therefore, shape thought and reality. In Shooting an Elephant, colonial rule manifests itself in frameworks of colonial difference: reference is made to a “Dravidian coolie”, which alludes to (outdated) 19th-century anthropology’s method of classifying race by language families; the narrator’s actions are made “legally…right” by British-imposed law.

However, Chatterjee works on the assumption that one has the power to change one’s framework. Shooting problematises this: cognitive frameworks can be deeply ingrained and might clash. The narrator (like Orwell himself) feels conflicted because he tries to espouse a liberal, anti-imperialist stance but his identity schema as a British officer simultaneously implicates certain views of the colonial subject. There is also the question of how liberating switching frameworks can really be – nationalism and Chatterjee’s conception of indigenous history all seem to fit Western epistemological moulds.

And while Chatterjee and Orwell work in counterpoint showing how frameworks can help shape/ossify reality, there still seems to be something lacking – maybe because language itself is a framework of sorts. Orwell said that “good prose is like a windowpane”, but ultimately a barrier of glass remains, separating window-frame from messy reality.

Magic rifle

It’s difficult to compare this week’s readings, but I’ll give it a shot (pun!) anyway.

To support his claim that “the spread of modern institutions or technologies had not weakened the hold of caste in anyway, Vincent Smith argues that

The necessities of cheap railway travelling compel people to crowd into carriages and touch one another closely for many hours ... The immense practical advantages of a copious supply of good water from stand-pipes in the larger towns are permitted to outweigh the ceremonial pollution which undoubtedly takes place … but such merely superficial modifications of caste regulations.

I have a similar observation in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant. The rifle superficially and temporarily unites the narrator and the Burmese but the essential difference between them as colonizer and colonized are never at anytime or in anyway effaced even though there are moments of shared ‘connection’ between the two.

The narrator “was momentarily worth watching” by the Burmese when he has “the magical rifle” in his hands. The rifle also unites the narrator and the Burmese for the common purpose of hunting down the elephant. The narrator with his “rifle in hand” has “two thousand people marching at my heels” while he tracks down the runaway elephant. The rifle unites the narrator and the Burmese psychologically, albeit in different contexts. The narrator was psychologically pressured by the Burmese to shoot the elephant and exhibit his “sahib” omnipotence, while the Burmese are psychologically excited by the spectacle of the narrator killing the elephant and to scavenge the meat and tusks off the dead elephant. At the pull of the trigger, the narrator “heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd”. Once the rifle has been utilized and the elephant shot, everything reverts back to ‘normal’ (the indifference between colonizer and colonized). The indifference is made more explicit with the discussion of the coolie’s death as measured in his economic value (“elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie”) and as legal evidence to give the narrator “sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant”.

I might be pushing this a bit far, but the various steamships in Heart of Darkness, the Patna in Lord Jim, and the trains and cars in A Passage to India seems to provide spaces for the colonizer and colonized to come together?

Shooting an Imperialist…

(I hope all we have to read is "Shooting an Elephant" the short story, rather than the anthology!)

Every time I read "Shooting an Elephant" I find myself hoping it's ironic rather than faithfully autobiographical. If it's the latter, Achebe should switch targets, because for an 'anti-imperialist' text, "Shooting" is sure racist. Perhaps Orwell was aware that serial imperialists could probably be best persuaded to drop the 'white man's burden' by considering that "when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom he destroys," but the sheer negativity of Orwell's portrayal of the Burmese makes you wonder why his narrator even bothers to mention his imperialist "guilt." For all his anti-imperialism, his words embody the white supremacist's ideology - that "an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie" is reflected well in his respective descriptions of the "preoccupied grandmotherly" animal he hated to shoot, and the "sea of yellow faces above…garish clothes" that "[push]" him "to and fro" like an "absurd puppet," of whom he was "very glad the coolie had been killed."

It reminds me very much of the revisionist case Chatterjee covers, where historians such as Washbrook, ostensibly attempting to "restore the 'Indianness' of this historical narrative and 'recover the subject from European history,'" (30) put forth a history that "can with such ease spirit away the violent intrusion of colonialism and make all of its features the innate property of an indigenous history." (32) Of this and Orwell, as a postcolonial subject I can't help but think, 'if you're on our side, I'd hate to see who's against us.' If we recall that imperialism is, as Chatterjee points out, predicated on the "mark[er of difference [that] is race," (19) in replicating this racist presentation with no recourse, "Shooting" technically replicates too imperialist ideology, and is thus, despite its claims, ultimately a text that testifies to the 'truth and justice' of imperialism.

(P.S. Dr Koh, a thousand - nay, million - apologies for erroneously bothering you about the readings! The corrective email had totally slipped my mind through, er, post-mid-term amnesia doubtlessly fuelled by vain hopes of not having to read another article for my presentation week… *kowtow, kowtow, grovel*)

Ripon and The Shooter are homies

I got this sense from Chatterjee that the Whites themselves were divided into opposing camps and that the colonial regime was a struggle for them too. I don’t just mean that on the level of liberal vs. conservative but on a greater level, between doing something which was right for everyone and doing something which was right for a select few and in line, for oneself. Between believing that theory and practice ought to reflect each other and “sensibly” believing that theory is just easy talk and practice is a whole other matter. The Ilbert Bill Affair was damning evidence, for me at least, that some Whites earnestly wanted to help develop India and its people. Ripon was particularly interesting because as a liberal, he introduced the bill but as a politician, he took it back.

And Ripon was who I thought of as I read Orwell and followed the thoughts/feelings of the protagonist. The protagonist says “Theoretically-and secretly, of course- I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British” but practically, he cannot be so. The incident of shooting the elephant he says, better highlighted to him “the real motives for which despotic governments act” which is basically, the need to maintain that position of authority/of being stronger and wiser than the native. That is why Ripon and the protagonist struck me as being stuck in the same situation of having to do what was necessary over what felt right to oneself. Ripon may have genuinely wanted to help correct the “anomaly” but to rectify that “error in tactics”, he had to retreat and allow the “European British subjects” to maintain their position of privilege. The protagonist wanted to spare the elephant but to maintain his position of authority, he had to shoot the elephant.

Manderlay

A film by Lars von Trier, possibly relevant to our module.

Link: http://hd.tudou.com/program/11869/

Shooting an Elephant- a different kind of anti-colonial text

“Shooting an Elephant” is to me an anti-colonial text that is very different from the way Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist. This stems from the fact that Orwell evaluates colonialism from the standpoint of the coloniser and how it affects him adversely, rather than from that of the colonised.

This is evident when it is the Europeans who are targeted by the natives rather than the other way round, as typically depicted in anti-colonial texts. In Chatterjee’s article, she discussed the idea of “colonial difference” and how differences between the cultures of the colonised and coloniser were what legitimised the power and authority of the coloniser. I find it interesting that Orwell depicts the reversal of this situation and shows how it is precisely this difference that causes the European coloniser to be “baited” and mocked at by the natives. This difference, which initially distinguished the Europeans as being superior has now become the very thing that marks their victimisation.

Orwell also evaluates colonialism from the standpoint of the coloniser by showing how colonialism takes freedom away not from the colonised but from the coloniser himself, as evident when the narrator felt compelled to shoot the elephant just to live up to the expectations of the natives. The fact that the narrator could even envision himself as “a puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces” further proves how he has fallen under the control of the colonised peoples, moving solely according to their will. Colonialism, here, deprives the coloniser and not the colonised of freedom. As the narrator says, “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”.

It is for these reasons that SAE strikes me as very different kind of anti-colonial text.

Powerful Laughter

Far from feeling sadness at the 'black dravidian coolie['s]' death, the elephant's demise, or the police officer's gross misjudgment, I found "Shooting an Elephant" rather funny. Sardonic humour seems to delicately lace the text, affording a story that is more ridiculous than appalling.

Consider the shooting of the elephant. The first shot is anti-climatic, with neither the 'bang' nor 'kick' heard or felt, and the 'knocking down' of the elephant taking 'five seconds'. The elephant is personified as a 'senil[e]' old person 'sagg[ing] flabbily' and 'slobber[ing]', evoking images directly in opposition to concepts of aging gracefully. This denies the elephant a grand, tragic death, but instead turns the affair into a tragicomedy. In addition, laughs are extended to the bumbling police officer whose idiocy is behind this botched shooting. By failing repeatedly to shoot fatally, the officer's attempts to 'struggle' against being 'laughed at' by the crowd are, ironically, futile. Worse, readers are added to the laughing crowd.

What then is the significance of the employment of sardonic humour? Here, Orwell departs from Conrad's formal and serious tone in "Heart of Darkness" where 'the horror' of the imperialist enterprise is revealed as something obviously and overtly terrible. Instead, Orwell's use of sinister comedy allows us to laugh at it in a shifty fashion, and this goes further in critiquing imperialism. Our scornful laughter is more powerful than merely agreeing with 'the horror' in Conrad's text- laughing implicates us in the matter, forcing our subscription and attestation to colonialism's macabre face. The colonial enterprise is then fiercely critiqued for its capitalization on incidental 'pretext[s]' that make them 'legally in the right', while really, all that is craved for is 'solely [the] avoid[ance] of looking a fool'. This, being exposed covertly through the tragicomedic mode, is to me a stronger statement.

(299 Words)

To Live and Die in Colonial Difference

To live and die in the landscape of colonial difference, the elephant is the metaphor of the liberty and historicity of the colonized. The villagers’ living in servility to the European law of their land is the elephant’s submission to be chained when in “must”, their useful deaths (to justify the European’s killing of the elephant) if trodden by the elephant becomes the elephant’s own death to justify the European’s worth in the larger context of the colonial enterprise and his respect demanded of the colonized.
Just as Chatterjee’s argument sketches the colonised’s need to be similar to the coloniser and yet maintain internal differences, we see in Orwell’s short narrative the nationalism that Chatterjee prescribes to be vaguely forming. The Burmese live the compartmentalized lives as dictated by the Europeans, but at the same time unveil the similarities of the European to their own selfish needs when Orwell’s narrator, in killing the elephant for his selfish ends, see the Burmese selfishly interested in the elephant for its flesh.
Do we then think of it as how Chatterjee plays with the “[turning]” of “tables”, that colonialism was brought on by the way the Burmese behave and might have in the past, or is it a symptom of “culture system” that the colonizers have manipulated the way the colonized behaved to suit their progression? The elephant then, in being killed by the European and consumed by the Burmese, lives the life of Chatterjee’s “historical theory” personified, an interaction of the indigenous history and the European history of the colonial state.

historical context

In considering imperialist texts that arguably display a certain measure of racism (Conrad leaps to mind...), one way to "forgive" the faults of the writers is to invoke "historical context": Conrad may have objectified his Africans (and some might say, his South East Asians), but perhaps there wasn't any other way for him to act, given the historical circumstances of the time.

I tend to have some problems with this line of reasoning, although I don't think its invalid: it helps explain, at least in my own case, a certain resistance to hard-core postmodernity that deconstructs all meanings and binaries. But on the other hand, it seems to gloss over questions such as individual responsibility and the relationship of the individual with received ideologies. At its least sophisticated, it seems to imply that individuals cannot act outside a certain historical framework at all, or worse, that we 21st century individuals are somehow free (or at least 'more free') than our nasty, racist predecessors.

I find Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" helpful in trying to understand this concept: the narrative comes an officer in British Burma, from within the "historical context" of imperialism rather than from its margins, or from a different temporal vantage point. Seen from the inside, one speaks less of ideologies than experience: what turns the officer against British imperialism is the "dirty work" he witnesses, the prisoners and the tortured; at the same time what turns him against the Burmese is the physical and verbal insults.

Such a text is helpful, i think, in reminding us that we (and our predecessors) have more than mere "historical context": we do possess the ability to consider our relationship with given ideologies, and, if unable to transcend them, at least problematise or resist them.

The creation of colonial history

In “Shooting an Elephant”, the narrator is pressured by the natives to kill the elephant against his own will. I am wondering if this idea of the colonizer as merely a “puppet”, “expected to perform certain roles”, can be seen in relation to the revisionist argument cited in Chatterjee’s article. In the revisionist history, Indians can be constructed as “active agents and not simply passive bystanders and victims in the creation of colonial India” (29) – that as subjects in their own history, they play a central role in the continuity of India from pre-colonial to early colonial, which thus posits colonialism as “a rather brief interlude, merging with the longer narrative” (30). Although “Shooting an Elephant” is not on Indian colonial history, but in a similar sense, the colonizer in “Shooting an Elephant” seems to play little function in the creation of Burmese history. It is the natives who construct the white man’s role. Whatever power he possesses is sustained by the natives, who appear as “active agents”, insistently pushing the White Man along to fulfill certain roles. Thus the shooting of the elephant can be seen as perhaps a symbolic loss of the colonizer’s power and the "influential" role he is “expected” to play in the making of a colonial history. In that light, we can see how subjectivity can be restored to the natives.

Violence in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

The mere title blasts at you the idea of physical Violence in the word “shooting”. It connotes a deliberate desire to inflict pain through violence, and placing it in terms of modernism, the symbol of the gun (the mechanized weapon) is metaphorical of the other kinds of violence the West inflicts on the east. In terms of Social Violence we see strict classifications of class &capabilities where the “sub-divisional police officer “ suffered “anti-European feeling” and the locals are seen as merely a blur, a mass, “an immense crowd” and the victim as “ an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie”. The locals are identified as a large statistic, the colour of their skin, or by nature of the fact that in opposition to the intellectual, rational, modern west, theirs is physical work. Looking at psychological violence, we see the need to perform role(s) because of pressure from others, pressure of institution(s); The colonizer as colonizer and the colonized as the “other”. Linguistic Violence sees tensions between English and the native tongue in the difficulty of expression on an individual and communal level. The narrator describes the elephant as being one that while was not wild, was one “which had gone “must”. This (mis)use of language shows the inability to reconcile cultural differences in language and the way of life; the narrator’s rejection of his position as imperial authority, and as a westerner entrenched in the east. We see violence on language in the forced way in which the locals’ speech is mapped onto western tones/sentence structures. When the old lady warns, “Go away child! Go away this instant!”, the formal language of the west (which can be seen perhaps as the formal institution of imperial bureaucracy) imposes itself on the eastern speech(which can be seen perhaps as the ability for the east to be truthfully expressed).Linking this to Chatterjee, does this suppose that violence is also then a site of colonial difference?