Burmese Days Research Articles

The death of a tropical neurasthenic in George Orwell’s Burmese Days

ABSTRACT George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, concludes with the suicide of John Flory, a 35-year-old Englishman who spent 15 years working as a timber merchant in British-ruled Burma during the 1920s. This essay argues that Orwell’s Burmese Days integrates the imperial medical discourse of tropical neurasthenia, popularized in the early 20th-century tropical colonies, into the characterization of the protagonist. By examining Flory’s death and his allegedly deviant behaviours in the context of the symptoms and aetiology of tropical neurasthenia, this essay reads Burmese Days as a medical case study of a tropical neurasthenic patient, wherein his suicide is presented as the inevitable outcome of a pathological condition. Given that tropical neurasthenia is intrinsically linked to the tropical climate and white racial anxiety rooted in climatic determinism, revealing the interconnectedness of humans with the broader ecological system, this reading opens a path for a postcolonial ecocritical analysis of the novel.

THE BRITISH COLONIAL POWER IN GEORGE ORWELL’S BURMESE DAYS

This study tried to discover British colonial power in George Orwell’s Burmese Days. Gramsci's hegemony theory regarding to a concept of an integral state was applied. A qualitative descriptive method was used in the study. Data in the study were dialogues and narratives from historical contacts between British and Burmese regarding the British colonial regime. The data consisted intrinsic element of theme, and 2 extrinsic elements of political society and civil society. Both elements were structure in literary works, and represent the British colonial power in George Orwell’s Burmese Days. A theme of colonial was found among the element of fiction. There were extrinsic elements such as political society and civil society. The study concluded that the intrinsic elements forming a story that could representative how the British colonial power appeared on theme. The relationship of both elements form totality of meaning and integrity that how the British colonial power operations in George Orwell’ Burmese Days. Keywords: colonialism, hegemony, integral state, orientalism

A Polyphonic Study of E.M. Forsters A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days

The purpose of this study is to examine the multi-voicedness techniques in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and George Orwell’s Burmese Days, in terms of the narrator’s role and the plurality of voices and consciousnesses. This paper used the concept of polyphony which was coined by Bakhtin as a methodology in analyzing and examining the aforesaid novels. The results of this study showed that; First, both novels used the omniscient narrator as a narrative technique, since the voice of the author was evident on more than one occasion. Moreover, there was an influence by the omniscient narrator on the reader, which might be considered significant on more than one occasion, in controlling and manipulating his decisions and views in A Passage to India, while the influence was minuscule in Burmese Days. Second, this paper proved that the aforesaid novels are polyphonic ones. Finally, both authors gave a considerable margin of freedom for each character to express their ideologies freely.

Nationalism and the Nationalist Ideology in Burmese Days

ABSTRACT Although nationalism, or anticolonial nationalism, which gained momentum after the First World War, especially within the borders of the major colonial states, may not seem to be directly central to George Orwell’s Burmese Days, it incorporates a profound impact on the development of the plot leading to Flory’s suicide at the end. Taking into account the political background of the period in which the novel was written and depicts—denominating a period of about ten years in between—this article addresses the basic tenets and prevailing features of nationalist ideology and its significant place in the novel and manifests the extensiveness and profundity of the way Burmese Days is interwoven with the ideology of nationalism.

Anti-Imperial Discourse and Fallacies of Colonial Ideology in Burmese Days

Anti-Imperial Discourse and Fallacies of Colonial Ideology in <i>Burmese Days</i>

Space and Anxiety in the Colonial Novel: The Concepts of Sanctuary and Confinement in Burmese Days, Max Havelaar, Kim and Midnight’s Children

This article examined the notion of colonial anxiety through the concept of space in the colonial setting, particularly through the usage of signifiers found in colonial literature. The four case studies used are Burmese Days by George Orwell, Max Havelaar by Multatuli, Kim by Rudyard Kipling, and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. These have been investigated in terms of the supposed sanctuary and feeling of unease that the private colonial spaces they present offer to their characters. In this way, it has been argued that private colonial spaces can be discussed in terms of both positive and negative signifiers for those using them. Highlighting the effect of colonial anxiety, this piece is primarily interested in the negative connotations and how the characters deal with these challenges. The emphasis on space focuses on individual locations and structures and how they impacted those inhabiting them, aiming to flag active signifiers of anxiety in terms of space, which connect to the wider debate into colonial anxiety at the literary level.

Burmese Women Portrait Under the British Imperialism in Orwell’s Burmese Days

This study aims to expose the Burmese women portrait under British Imperialism. The writer believes that Burmese Days is created as a response to the social phenomenon that was happening during the process of its creation. This study used a qualitative method using a sociological approach by Laurenson and Swingewood. The data of this study were collected from the description and utterances of the characters and narrator in the novel. The result of this study shows that the women were portrayed as the slave of the English men. The women are not valuable, they merely become entertainment for the English men to entertain them. Even, some of the Europeans have concubines to accompany them in killing their time or killing their boredom. It looks like the women are created for the English men as dolls which can be played as often as they can, and of course, like a doll, they can be thrown easily after the English men being bored. As this research limited to the analysis of women portrait as a concubine for the English men, it is suggested for other researchers to analyze and find the relevant problems that still exist around the society, such as social inequality, resistance, obedience, strategy, gender, racism, corruption and other social aspects in the novel Burmese Days.

Predictions of George in His Political Novel 1984

In his literary paper, George Orwell shed a light on different topic e.g. social, political and humanities of the British community in all over the world. He cast considerable light on many issues about human political life in Animal farm and 1984. George Orwell is widely recognized for his literary work views and stances against the tyrant governments; he spent all of his life talking about the tyrant governors and their heavy hands. George Orwell wrote “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933), “Burmese Days” (1934), Keep the Aspidistra Flying...“Shooting an Elephant”...The Road to Wigan Pier... Homage to Catalonia...Coming up for Air... “The Lion and the Unicorn”... and Animal Farm. These works are considered to be a great addition to English literature. He entertains the readers not only in England but in all over the world. What makes him a disguised writer is his talent that enabled him to use symbols top refer to the tyrants Stalin and Lenin in Animal Farm and 1984. He also intended to deliver a special message to the tyrant governors to treat the citizens politely, but unfortunately the solders are the same in all over the world. 1984 was a political novel in which Orwell talked about the absolute control of the party in all the aspects of life in Oscinea. The party used telescreens to control the mobilization of the population and used the children to spy on their parents in addition to the history, all the recorders of the history was changed so as to serve the intention of the party, all of the words that refer to rebellion are deleted from the records of the history. The most dangerous thing is the double think the party use the torture that convinced the opponent to believe 2 + 2 = 5.

Colonial Anxiety Through Literary Signifier

This article seeks to broaden the ongoing debate surrounding the nature and structure of colonial anxiety by incorporating elements of literary discussion into the conversation. It is a commonly experienced problem that the current definition of colonial anxiety is not mutable, and is often viewed as a singular indivisible whole. This, of course, cannot be the case due to the inherent links between anxiety generally, and its sub-set “colonial anxiety”. Whilst there are many methods of examining colonial anxiety, the current study seeks to examine the problem through literature. The investigation will examine George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Multatuli’s Max Havelaar as core texts. Whilst Orwell’s anti-imperial feelings have been well publicized, as has Multatuli’s anti-colonial standpoint, the notion that they were individual colonial servants who likely, it is argued, suffered from colonial anxiety, has not. Also crucial to the discussion will be the attempt to more fully integrate diverse regions such as Burma and Indonesia into the wider debate on colonial anxiety.

CAUSE OF CONFLICT BETWEEN TWO INDIGENOUS CHARACTER AS THE IMPACT OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM IN ORWELL’S BURMESE DAYS

This study aims to outline the cause of conflict between two indigenous chatacter in Orwell’s Burmese Days. During the process of its creation, the writer believes that this novel is created as a response from the author to the social phenomenon at that period. Qualitative is used in this study and genetic structuralism by Lucien Goldmann is the theory which will be applied. The main sorce of this study is collecting the description and utterances of the characters and the narrator. The result of this study indicates that the main conflict between two indigenous is caused by the new regulation of the English Men by announcing that they will accept on an indigenous to be a member of European Club. European Club portrays as the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. By joining this Club, the indigenous self-regard will be the same as well as the English Men. An nalysis of the cause of conflict between two indigenous is the main object of this research, it is suggested to other writersto analyze other aspects in Orwell's Burmese Days, such as: social inequality, gender, obedience, racism, and other social aspects.

“The Reasons are Not Clear”: Traumatic Experiences and Dialectical Relations in George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934)

“The Reasons are Not Clear”: Traumatic Experiences and Dialectical Relations in George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934)

Burmese Days

POETRY Burmese Days by Shahilla Shariff I The alleys are blind, the streets are worn. Everyone has left, but tea is offered. Bone china cup, we’re together in a room with high ceilings, huge windows, polished floors. Overhead, a whirring fan. Outside, a city bares its soul through broken shutters and peeling walls. Lacquered silence. A river’s black onyx silts pure melancholy. Life here has the air of a dying art. 26 WLT SUMMER 2020 PHOTOS: SHAHILLA SHARIFF II Nothing is whole: a boy slices into his bone sawing a jade green stone; a girl spins silver thread stolen from the moon. There, one story ends and another begins, two characters in search of a future. Author’s note: After five years of exile in colonial captivity, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon on November 7, 1862. Frail and humiliated, nearing ninety years of age, he disappeared without a trace; the grass grew over his unmarked grave, making it impossible to locate. A Sufi and a poet, just before his death he wrote: “Not to be heard, not a spirited song; I am the voice of anguish, a cry of colossal grief. . . . Life comes to an end, dusk approaches; in peace I will sleep, sheltered by the grave.” Shahilla Shariff’s first poetry collection, Life Lines, was published in 2012 by Proverse Hong Kong. Her work has been featured in various anthologies and journals (see WLT, January 2017, 38). Born in Kenya, she is Canadian and lives in Hong Kong. III Tamarind, turmeric, betel nut. A monk billowed in sunset orange. A novice draped in shadowy dawn. Everything is stained, dyed or shorn. A cage loses its author, a tree begets a shrine, a wilted traveler drinks water from an incidental clay pot. The heat is trapped, but prayers are born. An old woman peers out of her window. A pigeon alights on a blackened ledge. A gray hair drifts into the pale light. A gray light drifts onto her pale hair. An anguished voice, its colossus grief, a lost emperor’s grave, his scripted sleep. We are all exiles here, but for a moment we abandon our fear, call that which is torn. WORLDLIT.ORG 27 ...

Imperialist shame and indigenous guilt: George Orwell’s writings on Burma

ABSTRACTIn literary studies, the concepts of ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’ are often associated with sentimentalism, passive agency or politics of victimhood. By drawing upon the recent ‘affective turn’ in cultural theory, this essay uncovers the unavoidable collusion and complicity between what I call ‘imperialist shame’ and ‘indigenous guilt’ in George Orwell’s writings on Burma – ‘Shooting an Elephant’, ‘A Hanging’ and Burmese Days – that sustain the relationships of dominance and subservience in colonial Burma. Existing readings of Orwell’s writings on Burma have tended to emphasise its pseudo-critical treatment of imperialism, and its liminal positioning between imperialism and anti-colonialism. This essay contends that shame, guilt and their micro-political trajectories such as ‘narcissistic shame’, ‘residual guilt’ and ‘shameless guilt’ serve as the affective triggers of Orwell’s ambivalence towards imperialism.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Jane M. Ferguson This issue of the Journal of Burma Studies proudly presents a special collection of papers on the topic of progress and what the term might mean in relation to Burma/Myanmar studies. News reports and scholarly works on Myanmar politics in recent years, particularly following the State Peace and Development Council regime change, the elections, and the electoral wins of the National League for Democracy have used the moniker “transition” or “opening up” to describe the ongoing situation in the country. For this issue, instead, we solicited ideas around the broad—and value-laden—idea of “Progress for Whom? And for What?” This issue offers a variety of considerations of how the concept might be understood or animated at different political, social, and cultural moments. The term “progress” is surely not without its baggage; it should not be taken to represent any sort of clean escape from the broken record of transition. European colonial empires frequently justified their expansion through the promotion of ideologies of progress. Colonial officials stationed in Southeast Asia as well as advocates for empire elsewhere were often adamant that their roles as conduits of cultural contact with the West signified “progress.” The idea that contact would be of some unqualified benefit to those of the colonized “traditional” societies perhaps willfully ignored the disparities in wealth accumulation across empires. It also instilled a notion of positive historical time, which meant a measure of cultural distance between the West and non-West (Chakrabarty 2000: 7). In one study, sociologist Robert Nisbet suggests that “the idea of progress holds that mankind (sic) has advanced in the past—from some aboriginal condition of primitiveness, barbarism or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future. . . . It (progress) is inseparable from a sense of time flowing in unilinear fashion” (Nisbet 1984: 4). [End Page vii] For Burma Studies, discussions of Colonial-era notions of progress conjure up scenes from Rudyard Kipling poems. Colonial foresters in Burma, for example, saw the application of Western science and technology as a way to bring progress (and economic prosperity) to Burma; science would manage the forests better than people had done previously with local methods (Bryant 1996: 170). Although the pith helmet version of the juggernaut for progress has (almost) been buried in the past, Orientalist stereotypes of peaceful, simple livelihoods of farmers persist, as do the denizens of neoliberal economic integration. In economic terms, it was Latin American post-colonial scholars who started to point to a structural connection between Western progress and non-Western poverty (Owen 2005: 161). Where progress was lauded, however, it was not without its cynics. In the book Burmese Days, one of George Orwell’s characters noted, “They build a prison and call it progress” (Orwell 1962: 42). This notion of a progress toward a modern civilization emplaced in colonial contact zones of Southeast Asia, however, was not necessarily lost in translation. Prestigious locals meaningfully fused it with existing concepts. In the nineteenth century in neighboring Siam, for example, elites resignified the Khmer word charoen from meaning cultivating merit, Buddhist awakening, making (someone) happier to a word that meant worldly development and technological advance, in other words, secular progress (Thongchai 2000: 531). Secular modernity and progress became coterminous. Furthermore, the utility of progress as a term or concept has been identified at points in history in which there is a shift, a rupture between expectation and experience. This perceived gap between expectation and experience has only grown wider in modern times (Koselleck 1985; Kosselleck and Presner 2002: 128). But the term progress need not be the exclusive preserve of the powerful or those cynical of the elitist underpinnings of its usage. Social movements could reject their oppressors’ notion of progress and use it to galvanize opposition. Writer and orator Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist and former American [End Page viii] slave, began his 1857 “West India Emancipation” speech with the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” Within definitions of liberalism, progress is coterminous with “social change for the better” (Fawcett 2018: 10–11). News events and their treatment by people in power in Myanmar create...

George Orwell’s Imperial Bestiary: Totemism, Animal Agency and Cross-Species Interaction in “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”

AbstractThis essay argues that Orwell’s representation of animals as companion species offers a strikingly new, as-yet largely neglected view of animal agency and interiority in his work. In “Shooting an Elephant”, Burmese Days and “Marrakech”, the writer’s focus on the social reject is supplemented by a marked sense of community implying human tragedy yet framing it within precariously situated human-animal, colonial or urban-imperial transitions that visualise animals as agents of change and co-shaping species interdependent with the lives of the humans that utilize and domineer them. Animals are required whenever Orwell aspires to shift from isolation to communality, from the self-conscious outsider to the larger realm of ideas framing the world in which his characters strive to overstep the accepted lines of social performance and conformity. Read in and around disciplinary structures of rationalization, Orwell’s animals appear to secure themselves, quite paradoxically, a place within the normative anthropocentric framework excluding them. They extend beyond anthropomorphising or allegorical modes of description and open up bio-political perspectives within and across regimes of knowledge and empathy. Orwell’s writings thus present a challenge to the culturally accredited fantasy of human exceptionalism, collapsing any epistemic space between humans and animals and burying the idea of sustaining radical species distinction.

Burmese Days: A Fraction of Hope in the Ruin

Burmese Days: A Fraction of Hope in the Ruin

Crisis of Identity and Mimicry in Orwell�s Burmese Days Seen through a Local Native Character U Po Kyin: A Postcolonial Readin

This study analyzes how crisis of identity and mimicry occurs in the postcolonial discourse. A local native character whose name is U Po Kyin is the focus of the study. As a native character, he holds a high ranking position for local in the British Raj in Burma. However, he is portrayed as a corrupt official as he accepts bribes and denounces his rival. His ambition to get the membership, an elite European Club, drives him infuriated to destroy his rivals reputation because naturally it is him who would be elected as the first local member of the Club. At the end of the novel, Kyin finally secures his membership but he fails to atone his evil-doings by building pagodas as a Buddhist. Kyins attitude is seen as how he manages to deal with his inferiority towards the British. He is also observed to mimic the British as his strategy to erase the idea of being colonized.There are two problem formulations in this study. The first is to find out how U Po Kyin suffers from crisis of identity through his characterization in the novel. Then, the second objective is to understand how his crisis of identity leads him to mimic the British.This study condludes that U Po Kyin suffers from crisis of identity. He is oppressed conscious and unconsciously by the British. This causes his self-image to be eroded. Even though he is relatively wealthier than his fellow natives, he still craves for more as he realizes that there is something more than money. He wants to be detached from his inferiority. The elite European Club represents his ambition because it offers him status to be like the British. That is why he schemes to crush his rival. In his schemes, denigrating his rival means to mimic the British because he needs to differ himself from the natives. However, he is still powerless because the British still consider him as the subject of colonialization. Keywords: crisis of identity, mimicry, postcolonial reading

Imperialism and Gender Space : The Defence of Imperialism through Gender Ideology in Burmese Days

Imperialism and Gender Space : The Defence of Imperialism through Gender Ideology in Burmese Days

Law and Race in George Orwell

As Eric Blair, the young George Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1929, a time of growing Burmese discontent with British rule. He wrote about Burma in a novel, Burmese Days, and a number of non-fictional writings. This article considers the nature of the law-and-order regime Orwell served in Burma, especially in the light of racial self-interest and Britain's commitment to the principle of the rule of law, and traces the issues of race and the law to his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Colonial Relationship and Cultural Reflection: George Orwell̛s Early Works based on His Experience in Colonial Country

The great English writer George Orwell had lived in Burma as the British colony for five years. Focusing on the works based on his own life experience in Burma such as A Hanging, Shooting an Elephant and Burmese Days, the paper argues that they reflected his rethinking of the dilemma of cultural identity as a colonist and critical consciousness to social reality. The two of his best known essays, A Hanging, Shooting an Elephant, presented directly his experience and feeling as a policeman worked there. The novel Burmese Days was more complicated because of more characters and plots. In the works, the power relations between the colonizers of the British Empire and the colonized in Burma, the writer’s rethink of imperialism as the setting of the plots all are described in the details of his personal experience in the essays and the hero images of literary construction in the novel.