Why Elephants are Shot

I fell asleep yesterday night while reading Chatterjee before I could post. Had this killer medical gem test yesterday. For that my sincere apologies.

I shall attempt to link the Chatterjee to Shooting an Elephant. The main thing I took away from the reading was that of the deviation of the colonial government in India from the idealised Western modern notion of a democratic government. Under the essay's heading "It Never Happened" Chatterjee discusses the idea of British colonialism as one of a "centralising tendency of 'military-fiscalism' inherited from previous regimes" (27), one that essentially bases itself on differences (in this reading, it is racial differences) in order to perpetuate fiscal power that is in favour of the ruling British power. In relating this to Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", Orwell can be seen as discussing how power structures are created and sustained. Through the narrative's biographical re-accounting of a trivial incident, he draws parallels to empire and its basis of rule. In the nameless narrator's account of how the Burmese, the "yellow faces" egged him "a thousand wills pressed me on" into shooting the elephant, the idea of how power as based on a performative, collective set of rules that the parties agree upon and perpetuate. As the narrator states earlier on, the British individual becomes " a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalised figure of a sahib." In relating this to Chatterjee's article, can we then say that colonialism is merely a replacement of one "native" power regime with another power regime. That all regimes are ones based on differentiation and performative rules.