Chatterjee and Burmese Days

I think Chatterjee’s article has certain resonances in Burmese Days, because language is indeed a “simple and practical sign of difference” (Chatterjee 25) between the colonizer and colonized in the text. This is evident when Ellis tells his butler, “Don’t talk like that, damn you—“I find it very difficult!”…“Please master, can’t keeping ice cool”—that’s how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well. I can’t stick servants who talk English” (23). I think Ellis is infuriated precisely because that which differentiated his butler and him as different peoples has been lost—the colonized native can now imbibe the white colonial master’s speech perfectly, what then separates them and marks Ellis as superior?

This idea of language being a sign of difference is also evident in Verswami who is constantly depicted as speaking with an ‘s’ at the end of some words like “iss”, “wass”, “hass”. By showing how Veraswami speaks a less perfect form of English, the text inadvertently shows how he is different and ultimately inferior to his colonial master.

However, there is one occasion where I feel that the difference that is based on language is shown to be reconcilable. This is the scene where Flory and Elizabeth are on a canoe together and Flory asks the canoewoman “How far, grandmamma?’ (163):

‘The distance a man can shout’, she said after reflection.
‘About half a mile,’ Flory translated.

Despite the apparent differences in the languages of the colonized and the colonizer, here, there is a very successful translation from a language that is based on sentiment to one that is based on rationality and I thought this was a very brief moment where differences were shown to be reconcilable and meaning translatable across culture and language.