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?