12. Emptiness, Racism, and Fat Shaming in Burmese Days

Audio version

Edition used: George Orwell, Burmese Days, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, introd. John Carey (London: Everyman’s Library, 2011). Burmese Days appears at pp. 1-249, and is hereafter referred to as BD. Note: this discussion assumes you’ve read the book. 

Content warning: racism, sexual violence 

Burmese Days (1934) is a novel of empire. In its scathing, self-lacerating account of this subject it tries to pick apart what Priyamvada Gopal has recently called ‘a tenacious colonial mythology in which Britain—followed by the remainder of the geopolitical West—is the wellspring of ideas of freedom, either “bestowing” it on slaves and colonial subjects or “teaching” them how to go about obtaining it.’[1] Rosinka Chaudhuri invites us to consider that the novel’s ‘dehumanization and depersonalization’ of the Burmese, a characteristic of Orwell’s imagination encountered again in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) with the proles, is in fact only half the story, given that the Burmese are not singled out in this respect: ‘every character’s racial characteristics’, Chaudhuri insists, ‘are fiercely, angrily presented in all their ugliness: [Orwell] is equally caustic of the Englishman, the Burman, and the Indian. It would be fair to remark that there is not a single favourable character in the entire book’.[2] So we can see already how Burmese Days operates on several levels at once. Content to attack the ideological systems that took Orwell to Burma, it’s also a novel tangled in the myths and legends of empire, to a certain extent, with what David Dwan calls ‘the full autonomy’ of the colonial subject always hanging in the balance: ‘Orwell’s rhetoric participates in the colonial superiority it indicts, but it also captures well the ironies of domination.’[3]

The novel tells the story of various personalities in the fictional setting of Kyauktada, a town in Burma—now Myanmar—under the dominion of the British Raj, the Crown rule in the Indian subcontinent. Chief among these characters is John Flory, a thirty-five-year-old timber merchant who is bitterly ashamed of the birthmark that runs down the left side of his face. He’s frequently reminded of the birthmark’s supposedly shaming qualities. Flory came to Burma as a nineteen-year-old after an undistinguished education at ‘a cheap, third-rate public school’ (BD, p. 53). The intervening years have been ‘lonely, eventless, [and] corrupting’ (BD, p. 54), years of ageing and degradation, and the novel connects this process of decay with Flory’s physical appearance by emphasizing that years of ‘Eastern life, fever, loneliness and intermittent drinking, had set their mark on him’ (BD, p. 56). Controversially, the birthmark often functions as a sign of Flory’s moral failure, changing in hue, apparently, according to circumstances. He’s treated in what we might now call a ‘lookist’ way by the character Elizabeth Lackersteen, who hates him for his birthmark’s ‘dishonouring’ and ‘unforgivable’ (BD, p. 237) implications.[4] And Burmese Days itself might also be considered ‘lookist’, in turn, for making a birthmark bear the weight of ‘hideousness’ (BD, p. 13) in the first place. Unsurprisingly for an Orwellian protagonist, Flory has something of Eric Blair about him: a moustache, and in many respects a comparable background. Like the writer who became George Orwell, he seems to have been ‘made’ in the dust of the Burmese soil. This has made him what he is: a persistent critic of the imperial system to which, through his occupation, he contributes.[5]

Orwell went to Burma after four years of study as a King’s Scholar at Eton College, the world-famous private school near Windsor, in Berkshire. He started at Eton in 1917 and left in 1921. It would have been common for boys in Orwell’s circumstances to go from Eton to university at either Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, he applied for a position with the Indian Imperial Police. After a week-long examination in mid-1922, in which Orwell showed himself of average academic quality, he was accepted into the programme. In October of that same year Orwell found himself on a month-long voyage to Burma. Once there, and appointed as a Probationary Assistant Superintendent of Police, he went by train to Mandalay, where he began the nine-month training course at the Police School. By the end of his probation, Orwell had worked in various districts across Burma, with varying levels of responsibility. He looked after ammunition stores, trained police constables recruited from local populations, went on and organized patrols, worked in charge of police stations, oversaw investigations of minor crimes, and stood in for his superiors when they were away.[6] Orwell spent his five years in Burma (1922-1927) learning how to be a professional law enforcer. It was also time spent learning the inside workings of a system he would eventually come to despise.

The closest point of contact between Burmese Days and Orwell in terms of the views it expresses, through its narrator, lies in the novel’s general response to what it calls the ‘atmosphere’ of imperialism. Flory is motivated by resentment, of others and of himself, just as the social circles in which he moves are peopled by agents of empire who have a lofty, unsustainable view of themselves as morally unchallengeable, and who dismiss the so-called natives as despised inferiors. But what Flory hates above all other things—a hatred the narrator reinforces in the manner of the novel’s telling—is imperialism itself, and the world realized in the British East through its workings:

It is a stifling, stultifying world in which to live. It is a world in which every word and every thought is censored. In England it is hard even to imagine such an atmosphere. Everyone is free in England; we sell our souls in public and buy them back in private, among our friends. But even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism. Free speech is unthinkable. All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself. Your opinion on every subject of any conceivable importance is dictated for you by the pukka sahibs’ code. (BD, p. 57, emphasis added)

Orwell repeated this strategy of opposing a supposedly smothering British-controlled Indian subcontinent to a comparably liberated homeland in The Road to Wigan Pier, which stresses how, in ‘the free air of England’, the ‘stifling, stultifying’ atmosphere of a place like British Burma ‘is not fully intelligible.’[7] Burmese Days focuses on the deceptively ‘agreeable atmosphere’ (BD, p. 81) of supposedly civilized existence—the atmosphere of clubs, and the ‘pukka sahibs’ code’, the code of the true gentleman, this atmosphere strengthens—to argue that the very concept and practice of imperial prestige is itself a kind of lack or absence; a questionable value system whose superiority is far from self-evident. Just as Orwell emphasized in 1940 that the English in India had ‘built up a whole mythology turning upon the supposed differences between their own bodies and those of orientals’, so too in Burmese Days does he call into question the alleged pre-eminence of ‘the atmosphere of Clubs’ in a setting that consistently reveals its racist underpinnings.[8]

Flory is one of several representatives of empire who gather together at the European Club, which encapsulates many of the colonial prejudices of the age and stands as an ironic symbol of a decaying politics. Among the Club’s regulars are Westfield, the District Superintendent of Police; two local businessmen, Mr Lackersteen and the bitterly racist Ellis; Maxwell, a Divisional Forest Officer; and Macgregor, the deputy commissioner whose conversation is modelled on ‘that of some facetious schoolmaster or clergyman’ (BD, p. 22). Flory’s friend Veraswami, a local doctor who idealizes the British, hopes to become a member of the Club. Instead, he’s defeated in the attempt by the crocodilian magistrate U Po Kyin, who spreads false rumours about Veraswami’s supposedly ‘disloyal, anti-British opinions’ (BD, p. 8). U Po Kyin works behind the scenes to spark a political rebellion intended to make him seem like the ‘hero of the district’ (BD, p. 120) for putting down a series of protests that in fact he himself has organized, and for which he intends Veraswami to take the blame. Against this backdrop, Burmese Days recounts the ups and downs of Flory’s attractions to Mr Lackersteen’s niece, Elizabeth, and his horrible treatment of his mistress, Ma Hla May, along with his feelings of inadequacy in the company of Verrall, the polo-playing, poverty-hating, landed gentryman and military police officer who hates the ‘horseless riff-raff’ (BD, p. 174) in places like Kyauktada. The novel ends with Flory’s suicide, U Po Kyin’s ascension to Club membership (before he’s stricken with apoplexy and dies), and Elizabeth’s secure integration into the hierarchies of prestige that the novel has been satirizing all along. A bitter ending for a bitter story. Not even Flory’s dog survives.

There is, perhaps, a hint in the circular reappearance of the European Club in the final chapter of the novel, following its unmissable establishing in its second chapter and at various points thereafter, of the venue’s function as the be-all-and-end-all of imperial life in Kyauktada. The Europeanness of the Club is important, establishing it as a focal point for an international ideology of empire. Just as in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) all of Europe contributes to the making of the wraith-like Kurtz, so too in Burmese Days do the principles of supposed ‘European benefactors’ (BD, p. 7) stand behind the Britishness of the Club, which symbolizes the fate and fortunes of a continent committed in one form or another to invasion, occupation, and annexation. The Club, a ‘dumpy one-storey wooden building’ (BD, p. 13), hardly impresses at first glance. Yet to those with eyes intent on seeing, and seeing falsely, it has the attractive power of a heavenly stronghold of all that’s right and true. There is a lot of play in this: the descriptions of the Club as ‘the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain’ (BD, p. 13) are excessive to the point of being comical, a comedy which is very much the point. Such rhetoric is a time-honoured vector of mockery, and the European Club, like the club in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), is nothing if not mocked. Nevertheless, the Club retains its power, not least in persuading power-hungry local officials, and U Po Kyin in particular, that it remains a ‘mysterious temple’, a ‘holy of holies far harder of entry than Nirvana’ (BD, p. 123).

The Club thrives on an exclusiveness aimed not only at preventing ‘Orientals’ from membership, but also at keeping them snugly in the lower reaches of a supposedly incontestable racial hierarchy. Veraswami has internalized the assumptions of this pyramidal structure. An ardent devotee of Western values, he maintains with ‘positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belong[s] to an inferior and degenerate race’ (BD, p. 32). Flory disagrees, and hopes, on the grounds of ‘common decency’ (BD, p. 38), to help Veraswami gain entry to the Club he so intensely wishes to join. Ellis, by contrast, as the most xenophobic Club member, is all too eager to believe in Veraswami’s lowliness. Ellis hates the idea of ‘electing a native’ (BD, p. 23) to the European ranks: ‘this Club’, he says to his fellow members, ‘is a place where we come to enjoy ourselves, and we don’t want natives poking about in here. We like to think there’s still one place where we’re free of them’ (BD, p. 24). Such a language of ‘us’ and ‘them’ emphasizes Ellis’s conviction in his own racial superiority, detesting as he does the local population ‘with a bitter, restless loathing as of something evil or unclean’ (BD, p. 19). At all times ‘spiteful and perverse’ (BD, p. 20), with a taste for filthy jokes, Ellis is a racist homophobe who likes to drag women’s names through the mud (BD, p. 93) and who can be ‘counted on to say something disagreeable about anyone who [has] just left the room’ (BD, p. 27). He embodies many of the worst characteristics of the British presence in the Indian subcontinent. Yet his prejudices are far from atypical.

Just as Ellis turns up his nose at the apparently ‘unclean’ locals, so too, for example, does Elizabeth Lackersteen recoil at the thought of going in among a ‘smelly native crowd’ (BD, p. 87). Flory falls in love with Elizabeth and idealizes her to some extent, but the novel makes it clear that her reductively binaristic code of values is highly questionable, with goodness ‘synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic’, and badness with ‘the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious’ (BD, p. 76). Although Elizabeth views the local Burmese ‘natives’ as interesting, they are to her ‘finally only a “subject” people, an inferior people with black faces’ (BD, p. 100), an attitude that leads her to be repelled not only by Flory’s admiring view of their ‘filthy, disgusting habits’ (BD, p. 108) but also by her own kinship—by virtue of her womanhood—with the local Burmese ladies, who revolt her more than the men. Viewing Burmese women as people ‘just like a kind of Dutch doll’ (BD, p. 73) or wooden puppet (see BD, p. 83), Elizabeth cannot help but dismiss them as objects best avoided and ignored. Flory is slow to realize that his constant efforts to interest Elizabeth in the local culture strike her ‘only as perverse, ungentlemanly, [and] a deliberate seeking after the squalid and the “beastly”’ (BD, p. 113). When she suspects that Flory has a ‘sneaking sympathy with the Eurasians’, too, she can’t help herself from putting down what she considers these ‘awfully degenerate types’ as ‘half-castes [who] always inherit what’s worst in both races’ (BD, p. 104). Her true colours are shown.

There’s an emptiness to Elizabeth, a lack suggested not only by her attitudes and code of values but also by the first syllable of her surname (Lackersteen). In this regard she’s a model ‘type’ of those who tend to desire the ostensibly ‘agreeable atmosphere of Clubs’ (BD, p. 81), which on closer inspection turns out to be all hollow insubstantiality and deathly indolence. The jesting Westfield, for example, has trouble saying meaningful things because everything he says is ‘intended for a joke’, a blankness matched by the ‘hollow and melancholy’ (BD, p. 15) tone of his voice. Westfield’s ‘gloomy’ (BD, p. 23) manner is of a piece with the ‘horrible death-in-life’ (BD, p. 239) Flory sees as the characteristic purview of existence in Kyauktada, and which is mirrored in the midday ‘death-like sleep’ (BD, p. 75) that provides temporary release from the sun at its apex. The large number of suicides among the European population in Kyauktada (see BD, p. 245) may be meant to suggest that the death drive at work in the settlement, and elsewhere in Burma, emerges from a general indolence generated by the ‘empty’ nature of imperialism as well as from deeper traumas like the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 (see BD, p. 26). The ‘rather sinister’ English cemetery, with its glittering, whitish tombstones (BD, p. 51), stands as a memento mori, a reminder of death like the ‘dusty skulls of sambhur’ (BD, p. 16) in the Club, in the midst of a life verging on deathliness. Even the Lackersteen residence smells like dying flowers (BD, p. 75). The ‘reassuring atmosphere of Club-chatter’ (BD, p. 114) may, then, be a kind of compensatory self-comfort, a ‘desolating’ (BD, p. 100) mode of talk indulged in by the Club members to keep their minds away from the evident morbidity of the lives they lead, and of the world to which they belong.

The Club members ignore their own beastly qualities by imagining—that is, by inventing—the beastliness in others, and then through scheming to keep it at bay. The most obvious instance of this is Ellis’s frothing incredulity at Flory’s proposal to admit Dr Veraswami to membership, which prompts Ellis to begin a campaign of racist hate against the doctor and against Flory’s support of him. Ellis is the Club’s most foregrounded die-hard xenophobe, but Mrs Lackersteen runs him a close second, with her fears (exacerbated in turn by U Po Kyin’s machinations) about the ‘insolence’ of the local population (which makes them ‘almost as bad as the lower classes at Home’; BD, p. 23), and her distress at the thought of ‘being raped by jet-black coolies with rolling white eyeballs’ (BD, p. 118). This is startling, offensive language, and it’s meant to be—it gives a sense of just how paranoid about the local Burmese population Mrs Lackersteen has allowed herself to become. Her plot to marry off her niece, Elizabeth, to a suitor more respectable than Flory, who in her eyes is little more than a ‘drunken wretch’ (BD, p. 168), is bound up with class prejudice (Verrall being higher up the pyramid, in this respect, than Flory), and with racial intolerance. There’s an evident relish in the way Mrs Lackersteen reveals to Elizabeth that Flory has been ‘keeping a Burmese woman’ (BD, p. 168), and this penchant for stirring up trouble may in turn be a consequence of her devilish nature—a detail suggested by the way she loops about the Club lounge’s chairs ‘like a hysterical snake’ (BD, p. 213) and clasps her niece’s shoulders with ‘saurian hands’ (BD, p. 82).[9]

The taint of the club’s degradation is visible in its members’ behaviour, and it’s just as clear in its furnishings and paraphernalia. Unlike the ‘shiny illustrated papers’ (BD, p. 16) which adorn the Club’s main lounge, its ‘library’—the mocking scare-quotes are Orwell’s—is a ‘forlorn’, pitiful space comprising a mere five hundred novels, all of which are ‘mildewed’ (BD, p. 15); that is, infested with mould. An enlivening home for repositories of knowledge the club is not. Just as Flory’s bedroom includes ‘some rough bookshelves containing several hundred books, all mildewed by many rainy seasons’ (BD, p. 41), the club maintains a respectably ‘enlightened’ façade that hides a rot within. Talk in the club is marked by the ‘banality’ of interminable discussions of ‘gramophone records, dogs, [and] tennis racquets’ (BD, p. 100), and the light that streams into its interiors through its ‘green-chicked windows’ makes eyes ache and fills heads with stuffiness (BD, p. 28). A haunt for fat men, it has something of the air of Conrad’s imperial and metropolitan interiors—particularly those described in The Secret Agent (1907), which are frequented by fat men in offices of power.[10] Given that Orwell was a confirmed fan of Conrad’s writing, there is perhaps something Conradian about the ‘florid, fine-looking, slightly bloated man of forty’ who sprawls across the lounge’s ‘table with his head in his hands, groaning in pain’ (BD, p. 16), a sign, presumably, of the previous night’s indulgence; and about U Po Kyin, the scheming magistrate, whose ‘elephantine body’ (BD, p. 87) and plateau-like posterior (BD, p. 226) mark out a hungriness that’s perfectly in keeping with his political appetite, which from the start of the novel is signalled as a desire to batten on to British rule like a ‘parasite’ (BD, p. 3).

Such narrative details confirm that Orwell invested fully in the imaginative potential of what we would now call fat shaming, attaching moral and ideological stigma to obesity. Think, for example, of the way he represents Squealer in Animal Farm (1945) and Parsons in Nineteen Eighty-Four, two characters from either end of the moral spectrum—the one a double-dealing ideologue; the other a naïve party liner—whose fatness, we’re encouraged to think, makes them respectively untrustworthy and abject. (The most fat-shamed character in Orwell’s work, and arguably the best evidence of his own lipophobic sentiments, is George Bowling, the protagonist of Coming Up for Air (1939).) Burmese Days is full of the language of lipophobia (fear of fatness), from its representations of U Po Kyin, who is ‘so fat that for years he [has] not risen from his chair without help, and yet [is] shapely and even beautiful in his grossness’ (BD, p. 3); its view that Flory does ‘not look older than his age’ because he’s not ‘grown fat or bald’ (BD, p. 13); and its depictions of a mass of overweight minor officials, from the groaning man in the club, to the ‘fat Sub-inspector’ (BD, p. 61) noticed by Westfield, the ‘fat but ravenous pleaders’ (BD, p. 14) in Kyauktada’s courts, and the ‘stout, rollicking, chuckle-headed youth’ with ‘fat fresh cheeks’ (BD, p. 228) who assumes Verrall’s command. Orwell’s narrative attitude to all of this aims at even-handedness; white men ‘sag and bulge’, just as the Burmese ‘grow fat symmetrically, like fruits swelling’ (BD, p. 3). Even so, the novel’s lipophobic dimensions are questionable. Burmese Days draws on a pecking order of physical ‘betterness’, with the Club as its centre point, in order to articulate its moral and political opposition to empire and its champions.

In the end, it’s all too clear that the sense of prestige associated with membership of the Club gives a misleading impression of the values it promotes. Dr Veraswami’s yearning for the ‘cultured conversation’ (BD, p. 29) he believes is exchanged within the Club’s teak-clad walls is a yearning for something that doesn’t exist: the conversation, as we’ve seen, is all bigotry and triteness. Described as a ‘spiritual citadel’, its function in the novel is more akin to a fortress designed to keep the despised locals at bay—something like but not quite the same as the ‘huge, durable jails which the English have built everywhere between Gibraltar and Hong Kong’ (BD, p. 14). This hatred of such a symbolic focal space for empire, in Orwell’s case, emerged from an insider’s knowledge acquired through actually being there, on the ground, in the realms abroad from which, and in managed exploitation of which, the home country (Britain) secured its political, military, industrial, economic, and cultural power. It was vital, he argued, to have an insider’s view in order better to formulate and express the necessary degree of loathing:

In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears—indeed, it is—benevolent and even necessary; and so no doubt are the French rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo, for people usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves. But it is not possible to be part of such a system without recognising it as an unjustifiable tyranny. (RWP, p. 134)

The European Club sits squarely at the centre of that hate, and anyone tuned into the irony of the narrator’s style will recognize the fun the novel has with the Club’s representation: with the idea of a private members’ club as a ‘citadel’ of spirituality, such institutions not usually being known for their saintly rectitude; with the related suggestion that such a club might be the ‘Nirvana’ of British power in Kyauktada, the place in which the soul is released from its earthly, material entanglements; with the self-serving xenophobia of the club’s personnel; and with the implied link between the mockingly presented club and the ‘glittering’ Irrawaddy river, its diamond-like reflections echoing the club’s function as a focal point for the glitzy depthlessness of spectacle and play.

[1] Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (London and New York: Verso, 2019), p. 447.

[2] George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), ed. Rosinka Chaudhuri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. xxii.

[3] David Dwan, Liberty, Equality & Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 38.

[4] For a philosophical discussion of the questionable links between moral values and socially constructed standards of beauty, see Heather Widdows, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

[5] Timber, used in the construction of sea vessels, and the material Flory appropriates, was one of many key substances (among others including coal, oil, and rubber) which made empire possible.

[6] See J. R. Hammond, A George Orwell Chronology (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 10-14.

[7] George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), introd. Richard Hoggart (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 134. Hereafter RWP.

[8] George Orwell, ‘Notes on the Way’ (1940), in The Complete Works of George Orwell—Volume 12: A Patriot After All, 1940-1941, ed. Peter Davison, with Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, rev. edn (London: Secker & Warburg, 2002), pp. 121-7, at p. 122.

[9] These ‘beastly’ comparisons also encompass throughout the novel, as Chaudhuri notes, ‘the common colonial trope of finding equivalence between the colonized races and animals’ (Orwell, Burmese Days, ed. Chaudhuri, p. xxv).

[10] For more on this, see Avrom Fleishman, ‘The Symbolic World of The Secret Agent’, ELH, 32.2 (June, 1965), pp. 196-219.