Insidious Absorption?

Chapters 1 to 18 of Orwell’s Burmese Days was, in my honest opinion, are the most painfully racist writing I have read. In fact, in shifting the reader’s perspective between the omniscient narrator, Flory and the other characters, Orwell’s writing insidiously aligns the reader with the racism, even though the surface text is revolting in its raw prejudice, and shows the reader how he has been tricked into it.

Perhaps how Orwell’s writing subtly allies the reader with the imperial racism of the text is the description of the landscape. This can be clearly seen in the way Flory’s perspective of the wretched landscape is continued from the omniscient narrator’s introduction of the township to the reader (14-15). From the “scorched and khaki-coloured” maidan, the “wastes of paddy fields” and the “blackish hills” (14), Flory’s description of the place in his loneliness (of suitable European companionship) is simply a “bloody” hole improvised into a song as he “switched at dried-up grasses with his stick (15).

The about-turn comes when Flory describes gardening as the “greatest consolation” in Burma, which includes how phloxes, African marigolds and zinnias grow in the land (84). Interestingly Flory starts saying how he loves “that somber yellow colour [of] the maidan”, when Elizabeth remarks “what a perfectly divine view you have”(85).

And what else can we say about the racism in Orwell’s writing when not just the landscape is preferential to the enjoyment by Europeans, but animals as well? Flory’s dog Flo, upon meeting Elizabeth, tries to get her attention by “frisking” around her (84). The most hilarious line I have found is perhaps this:

“She always barked at strange Orientals, but she liked the smell of a European.”

Whether Orwell can be qualified as a racism by our terms and conditions in this present day, there is no doubt that his writing is obviously showing us the most extreme sense of racism, and perhaps in revealing it to us in this way, parodying it cleverly.