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.