Imperialism on Trial
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
George Orwell, “Shooting an
Elephant” (1936)
NOTE: The “Raj” is British India- at the time,
the Raj included the present-day countries of
In
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. The wretched
prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces
of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an
intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was
young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter
silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know
that the
One day something happened which in a roundabout way
was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better
glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real
motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector
at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said
that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something
about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old 44
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a
labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf,
winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy
morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to
where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite
information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds
clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the
vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one
direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to
have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a
loud, scandalized cry of "Go away, child! Go away this instant!" and
an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut,
violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed,
clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the
children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body
sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked,
and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant
had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its
trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the
rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot
deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified
and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes
wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable
agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses
I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had
stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I
saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an
elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with
fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that
the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I
started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of
the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting
excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much
interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was
different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it
would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely
uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the
rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a
crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with
the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my
heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields
a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and
dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road,
his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd's
approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to
clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect
certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a
working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of
machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.
And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous
than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of "must"
was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about
until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least
want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make
sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked
the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow
faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of
fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me
as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me,
but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. 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. And
it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I
first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the
East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed
native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was
only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces
behind. I perceived in this moment 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. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the
elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib
has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own
mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two
thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having
done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my
whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be
laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of
grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants
have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was
not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never
wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides,
there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at
least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks,
five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some
experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when
we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said
the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might
charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within,
say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I
could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until
the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I
was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would
sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have
about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not
thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind.
For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the
ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't
be frightened in front of "natives"; and so, in general, he isn't
frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those
two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught,
trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And
if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That
would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and
lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a
deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last,
breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun
after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did
not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary
bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was
sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole,
actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be
further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never
does when a shot goes home – but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up
from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought,
even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over
the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had
altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the
frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him
without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time – it might
have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth
slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have
imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the
second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet
and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third
time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt
his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in
falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath
him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching
skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down
he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground
even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me
across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he
was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his
great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I
could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for
him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining
shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled
out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even
jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause.
He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me
where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put
an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying
there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to
finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his
heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured
gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it
took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing
dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body
almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do
nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to
be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the
Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men
said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an
elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee
coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put
me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it
solely to avoid looking a fool.
Source: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/
Ruyard Kipling, The White
Man’s Burden (1899)
Note: in addition to being a defender of Britain’s historical role in “civilizing” the non-white peoples of world, Kipling is also known for being the author of The Jungle Book.
Take up the White
Man's burden--
Send
forth the best ye breed--
Go
bind your sons to exile
To
serve your captives' need;
To
wait in heavy harness,
On
fluttered folk and wild--
Your
new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil
and half-child.
Take
up the White Man's burden--
In
patience to abide,
To
veil the threat of terror
And
check the show of pride;
By
open speech and simple,
An
hundred times made plain
To
seek another's profit,
And
work another's gain.
Take
up the White Man's burden--
The
savage wars of peace--
Fill
full the mouth of Famine
And
bid the sickness cease;
And
when your goal is nearest
The
end for others sought,
Watch
sloth and heathen Folly
Bring
all your hopes to nought.
Take
up the White Man's burden--
No
tawdry rule of kings,
But
toil of serf and sweeper--
The
tale of common things.
The
ports ye shall not enter,
The
roads ye shall not tread,
Go
mark them with your living,
And
mark them with your dead.
Take
up the White Man's burden--
And
reap his old reward:
The
blame of those ye better,
The
hate of those ye guard--
The
cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah,
slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why
brought he us from bondage,
Our
loved Egyptian night?"
Take
up the White Man's burden--
Ye
dare not stoop to less--
Nor
call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all
ye cry or whisper,
By all
ye leave or do,
The
silent, sullen peoples
Shall
weigh your gods and you.
Take
up the White Man's burden--
Have
done with childish days--
The
lightly proferred laurel,
The
easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes
now, to search your manhood
Through
all the thankless years
Cold,
edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The
judgment of your peers!
Source: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp
New York Times
(Feb. 15, 1899).
NOTE:
by the time this poem was written, the United States had become an imperial
power after taking Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain following
an 1898 war- a war started by the destruction of the battleship Maine in the
Spanish-controlled harbor of Havana, supposedly at the hands of the Spanish.
Take up the White Man's burden;
Send forth your sturdy sons,
And load them down with whisky
And Testaments and guns.
Throw in a few diseases
To spread in tropic climes,
For there the healthy niggers
Are quite behind the times.
And don't forget the factories.
On those benighted shores
They have no cheerful iron-mills
Nor eke department stores.
They never work twelve hours a day,
And live in strange content,
Altho they never have to pay
A single cent of rent.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And teach the
What interest and taxes are
And what a mortgage means.
Give them electrocution chairs,
And prisons, too, galore,
And if they seem inclined to kick,
Then spill their heathen gore.
They need our labor question, too,
And politics and fraud,
We've made a pretty mess at home;
Let's make a mess abroad.
And let us ever humbly pray
The Lord of Hosts may deign
To stir our feeble memories,
Lest we forget -- the Maine.
Take up the White Man's burden;
To you who thus succeed
In civilizing savage hoards
They owe a debt, indeed;
Concessions, pensions, salaries,
And privilege and right,
With outstretched hands you raise to bless
Grab everything in sight.
Take up the White Man's burden,
And if you write in verse,
Flatter your Nation's vices
And strive to make them worse.
Then learn that if with pious words
You ornament each phrase,
In a world of canting hypocrites
This kind of business pays.
Source: http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/