Violence in Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant

The mere title blasts at you the idea of physical Violence in the word “shooting”. It connotes a deliberate desire to inflict pain through violence, and placing it in terms of modernism, the symbol of the gun (the mechanized weapon) is metaphorical of the other kinds of violence the West inflicts on the east. In terms of Social Violence we see strict classifications of class &capabilities where the “sub-divisional police officer “ suffered “anti-European feeling” and the locals are seen as merely a blur, a mass, “an immense crowd” and the victim as “ an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie”. The locals are identified as a large statistic, the colour of their skin, or by nature of the fact that in opposition to the intellectual, rational, modern west, theirs is physical work. Looking at psychological violence, we see the need to perform role(s) because of pressure from others, pressure of institution(s); The colonizer as colonizer and the colonized as the “other”. Linguistic Violence sees tensions between English and the native tongue in the difficulty of expression on an individual and communal level. The narrator describes the elephant as being one that while was not wild, was one “which had gone “must”. This (mis)use of language shows the inability to reconcile cultural differences in language and the way of life; the narrator’s rejection of his position as imperial authority, and as a westerner entrenched in the east. We see violence on language in the forced way in which the locals’ speech is mapped onto western tones/sentence structures. When the old lady warns, “Go away child! Go away this instant!”, the formal language of the west (which can be seen perhaps as the formal institution of imperial bureaucracy) imposes itself on the eastern speech(which can be seen perhaps as the ability for the east to be truthfully expressed).Linking this to Chatterjee, does this suppose that violence is also then a site of colonial difference?