Orwell’s View on Imperialism in Shooting an Elephant

Louis Cazamian in A History of English Literature declares George Orwell’s work as a whole to be “the citizen’s manifesto against the powers that be”. Even from his youth, Orwell rejected many of the accepted social and political conventions, and his novels and essays clearly reveal him as a non-conformist. In all his novels and in many of his essays, his strongly dissenting voice can be clearly heard. And though Shooting an Elephant is a narrative essay, it gives us a fairly clear idea of Orwell’s view of British imperialist domination in the East.

Even from the start of his career as a police officer in British occupied Burma, Orwell was not favourably disposed to the British imperialist policy. He had a genuine sympathy for the oppressed native people, and he hated himself for being a tool of imperialist domination. But even so, he did not quite realise how utterly futile was the white man’s domination in the East. This he came to realise through an experience which has been described in his essay Shooting an Elephant.

The author was then a sub-divisional police officer in Moulmein. a township in Lower Burma. One morning, he received the news that an elephant, under the attack of ‘must’ had broken its chained was ravaging the bazaar area. So he started out with his light rifle to see what the matter was. On his way, he received a lot of conflicting reports on the behaviour of the elephant. Finally he reached the locality where the animal had been last seen. Then the veils of a woman attracted his attention. As he went forward the dead body of a black Dravidian coolie came into his view. He had been trampled to death by the elephant. At once the author sent an orderly who fetched an elephant rifle for him. At the sight of this weapon, the people who had gathered there became greatly excited because they now took it for granted that the sahib was surely going to shoot the elephant. But, till that moment, the author did not have the slightest intention of killing the elephant.

Originally published in https://www.eng-literature.com/2020/06/shooting-elephant-critical-analysis.html