Burmese Days

Burmese Days is the first novel by George Orwell, published in 1934. Drawing on the five years he had spent as a colonial policeman in Burma, then administered from Delhi as part of British India, the book portrays the final years of British imperial rule in the region, shortly before the Second World War. Orwell conceived it as a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj.

Its protagonist is John Flory, a timber merchant of about thirty-five, disillusioned with the life of the small European community in a remote provincial town, the fictional district of Kyauktada, based on Katha, where Orwell had served. Flory has become so rooted in Burma that he cannot return to England; he keeps a Burmese mistress and his only real friend is the Indian doctor Veraswami, with whom he holds long conversations about culture. These talks expose the hypocrisy of an empire that presents itself as civilising while exploiting the people it claims to protect. Flory is a solitary figure, trapped in a system that corrupts the best of human nature.

The plot follows the schemes of U Po Kyin, a corrupt and ambitious Burmese magistrate who sets out to destroy Veraswami's reputation so that he can secure a place in the town's European Club. Meanwhile Flory falls in love with Elizabeth Lackersteen, the niece of a manager at the local timber firm, but her social ambitions, the pressure of her aunt and the arrival of a better-placed army officer undermine their bond. The club, the intrigue, a failed uprising and an anti-British riot provide the setting for depicting the everyday racism of the Europeans and the mutual distrust between colonisers and colonised.

The book was hard to publish in Britain for fear of libel suits, since its characters were drawn from real people. It first appeared in the United States, and a British edition with altered names followed a year later. Some former officials who had served in Burma felt it had unfairly maligned the empire. Orwell, for his part, defended its fidelity to what he had witnessed. Over time it has been compared with works by Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, and it is read as the first step of a writer who would make power and political lies central to his later work.