I've read something like this before, but Napolean was actually a pig in that one.

"Shooting," an "essay," possessed disputable fictionality, and I quailed to think the narrator's seemingly unconscious hypocrisy might have been Orwell's own. However, in Burmese Days, I find much less 'reproduction of racist structures,' and though I also find everyone disagreeable, there is a certain representational democracy in that. There is a poignant truth in "booze as the cement of empire," (32) especially with the thesis' address to poor 'native intellectual' Dr. Veraswami, who has internalised the coloniser's Manichean delineations. Where "Shooting" exasperated me, here I do grasp the sense of the European protagonist (and writer) as an ordinary, relatively decent man able to see the beauty of an "alien yet kindly land," (249) but caught in the cogs of Empire and the pukka sahib's "Precepts." (39)

The portrayal of the female characters, however, clashes with this fair(ish) representation of both coloniser and colonised. We have discussed the misogynistic impulses of Passage, but where at least Adela is just, Elizabeth is explicitly "silly, snobbish, heartless," (207) with her causes for sympathy outweighed by her "hardness of manner" (263) and "mercenary thoughts" (255) Doubtlessly there is comic irony in the conclusion "she fills with complete success the position for which Nature had designed her from the first, that of a burra memsahib," (263) but it nevertheless bestows the suggestion of 'natural order' upon this "position" and thus upon Imperialism and the 'racial hiearchy' enforced by the "rule of colonial difference," a naturalness underlined by Elizabeth's earlier discriminatory rejection of Flory (and lepers and lunatics) as "instinct…deeper than reason or even self-interest." (255) With the intensely negative portrayals of the women and such suggestions that their unpleasantness and prejudice are naturally part of them, I feel that the otherwise sympathisable portrayal of pukka sahibs as racist imperialist bastards by circumstance is terribly undermined.