Shooting an Elephant (1936) | George Orwell

_{In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so.} 

Over time, Orwell’s 1936 essay, Shooting an Elephant has become a metaphor for colonialism. It relates an incident that may or may not have occurred during Orwell’s time in Burma as an assistant superintendent in the British Indian Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927. The conflict or tension centres around the narrator’s ambivalence towards his job and his sympathetic attitude towards the Burmese (and the elephant) with his sense of responsibility to do his job properly and his knee-jerk reaction to the taunts of the locals – “none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.“

_{All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.} 

But he was young and inexperienced and a long way from home, caught between his “hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” When an elephant breaks free of its master and runs amok, he is called upon to shoot the wild beast, even though he doesn’t want to. “And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.“

From this point on, the narrator feels like “an absurb puppet” and realises that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him.” In this case, he has to shoot an elephant even though he has no idea how to go about it, “a sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.”

What follows is a rather gruesome account of said shooting.

I’m not usually squeamish with the written word, but even I found the slow death of the elephant distressing. It seemed like a very harsh, unnecessary outcome to simply save oneself from being laughed at or “to avoid looking a fool.” I have to assume that Orwell deliberately chose to include all the grisly, inhumane details that followed to highlight the cruelty of colonialism.

Shooting an Elephant is an uncomfortable read on many levels. The narrator, although sympathetic, finds himself entrenched in colonial behaviours, acting out of character, to preserve the character of Empire instead. The absurdity lies between the individual, personal fear of being humiliated and the impact an audience can have on how we act. “Every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at“, but the locals fate was far more desperate, often a life or death struggle to survive and feed themselves.

If you act the part, for whatever reason, of tyrant long enough, you will eventually become one. This is how Empires sustain themselves.

The reason I read this essay now, was once again thanks to Deborah Levy and her ‘living autobiography.’ In The Cost of Living, she mentions Shooting an Elephant in relation to gender politics and the role of women in the home.

_{The moody politics of the modern home had become complicated and confusing… Orwell, in his 1936 essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, noted that the imperialist ‘wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it’. The wife also wears a mask and her face grows to fit it, in all its variations.}

• Shooting an Elephant can be read on The Orwell Foundation website.
• It was first published by New Writing, 2, Autumn 1936
• #ReadingOrwell24
• Date read: 22 March 2024

This post was written on the traditional land of the Wangal clan, one of the 29 clans of the Eora Nation within the Sydney basin. This Reading Life recognises the continuous connection to Country, community and culture of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are the traditional custodians of the lands, seas, and skies on which we live and they are this nations first storytellers.