To Live and Die in Colonial Difference

To live and die in the landscape of colonial difference, the elephant is the metaphor of the liberty and historicity of the colonized. The villagers’ living in servility to the European law of their land is the elephant’s submission to be chained when in “must”, their useful deaths (to justify the European’s killing of the elephant) if trodden by the elephant becomes the elephant’s own death to justify the European’s worth in the larger context of the colonial enterprise and his respect demanded of the colonized.
Just as Chatterjee’s argument sketches the colonised’s need to be similar to the coloniser and yet maintain internal differences, we see in Orwell’s short narrative the nationalism that Chatterjee prescribes to be vaguely forming. The Burmese live the compartmentalized lives as dictated by the Europeans, but at the same time unveil the similarities of the European to their own selfish needs when Orwell’s narrator, in killing the elephant for his selfish ends, see the Burmese selfishly interested in the elephant for its flesh.
Do we then think of it as how Chatterjee plays with the “[turning]” of “tables”, that colonialism was brought on by the way the Burmese behave and might have in the past, or is it a symptom of “culture system” that the colonizers have manipulated the way the colonized behaved to suit their progression? The elephant then, in being killed by the European and consumed by the Burmese, lives the life of Chatterjee’s “historical theory” personified, an interaction of the indigenous history and the European history of the colonial state.