Burmese Days by Gorge Orwell Essays

Burmese Days by Gorge Orwell Essays Burmese Days by Gorge Orwell Paper Burmese Days by Gorge Orwell Paper or Ko S’la, Flory’s servant is lazy and dirty, and his ex-wife as ‘a fat, lazy cat’ . U Po Kyin, more than anyone else stands for cunning, intrigue and flattery which were mentioned earlier. His brain though cunning was quite barbaric . For their distorted minds, Eliza mocks them for blocking up the roadway for spectacle, as Flory answered that ‘there are no traffic regulations here’ . Flory calls Ma Hla May a ‘liar’ when she said no brown hands touched me, however the readers know that she had an affair with a brown man. The Orientals have no nobility and grace except by accompanying and camaraderie with the occidentals. U Po Kyin and Veraswami’s efforts for admission to the Club are for this nobility and prestige, as Dr. Veraswami pointed it in his example of barometer. For mistreatment to animals, one can remember the scene that ‘a fat yellow woman with her longyi hitched under her armpits was chasing a dog round a hut, smacking at it with a bamboo and laughing. ’ Recurring images do not confine to the above mentioned and many other labels such as superstition, strangeness, polygamy are also attributed to the Orientals. The natives believe that the ‘strips of alligator hide’ has magical properties ; Ma Hla May sometimes puts love-philters in Flory’s food; â€Å"The Burmese bullock-cart drivers seldom grease their axles, probably because they believe that the screaming keeps away evil spirits† ; as the medicine, they eat and drink ‘herbs gathered under the new moon, tigers whiskers, rhinoceros horn, urine, menstrual blood! ’ And finally Weiksa or magician who distributes magic bullet-proof jackets. Edward Said points out that Oreint is always seen as mysterious and a muddle for the Occidents. Burma is an exotic place for Westerners and Orientals, strangeness and exoticism generate from that exotic locale. Elizabeth is terrified by this ‘strangeness’, as Adela in â€Å"A Passage to India† did. Accordingly, the bushes are foreign-looking, rhythms of the tropical seasons and hollow cries are strange ; Eliza among the natives’ spectacle wishes to escape from this strange place to familiar one, i. e. the Club and she always barked at strange Orientals Ko S’la is an ‘obscure martyrs of bigamy’ and Li Yeik, the Chinese shopkeeper had two girls as his concubines. In short, in Burmese Days like other colonial novels, a web of colonial images and cultural stereotypes are attributed to the Burmese which fix them in their inferior position. Elizabeth as a memsahib is also bigoted and she felt ‘the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces’ . Eliza’s overt racism is also shown in two occasions: when Flory, assuming that ‘she was different from that herd of fools at the Club’ and she will appreciate native’s culture, took her to a pwe, a kind of Burmese play. Another occasion was when they paid a visit to bazaar. At first she is shocked when she sees how they have blocked the road for their performance, and Flory answers that â€Å"there are no traffic regulations here. The native music is a ‘fearful ‘pandemonium, a strident squeal of pipes, a rattle like castanets and the hoarse thump of drums’ . Elizabeth felt insecure to go among ‘that smelly native crowd’ and she watches ‘the hideous and savage spectacle’ with tediousness and horror: Its grotesque, its even ugly, with a sort of willful ugliness. And theres something sinister in it too. Theres a touch of the diabolical in all Mongols. And yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it! †¦Whenever you look closely at the art of these Eastern peoples you can see thata civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times when we were dressed in woad. Eliza comes from the ‘civilized places, and her superiority is blatantly expressed when she calls them with a very offensive term even in that time, Mongols. She considers the White racially and civilizationally superior to the Burmese. The word woad signifies that the present-day Burma is less civilized than the ancient Briton (in that times, woad was used for painting their bodies). Furthermore, they are connected to devil and devil worship (as the term diabolical and sinister connote); besides, the dancer girl becomes a ‘demon’ figure for her. In the bazaar’s scene, Eliza once more humiliates the Orient and Orientals. The bazaar is described as ‘large cattle pen’ by ‘a cold putrid stench of dung or decay’, and ‘Everythings so horribly dirty’. Eliza becomes insecure and asked herself why Flory has brought her to ‘watch their filthy, disgusting habits’ (Ibid). The barbarity of the bazar and absolute savages was stifling her. The natives were ‘damnably dressed’. All the children are naked and one was ‘crawling like a large yellow frog’. The Chinese women practice deforming their insteps, a sign of being ‘behind the times’, an anachronism. She is too arrogant to say thank you to girls fanned them and poured out tea. It is a ‘sort of infra dig’ to sit in their houses. At length Eliza cannot tolerate the ‘absolutely disgusting people’ and ‘beastly Oriental things’ and went out. Flory tries to calm her down that one should not expect all the people behave at the same manner, suppose, for instance, you were back in the Middle Ages. Flory, the protagonist of the novel, at the first look, is against British Empire and he hates the devotion to Pukka Sahib code. He is ashamed of themselves and wonders how they oppose to Veraswami’s admission in the club only for his black skin. This seemingly animosity toward British Empire is revealed during a long conversation with Dr. Veraswami that he admits that we are here to â€Å"rub our dirt on them, and â€Å"wreck the whole Burmese national culture†. He goes further and prefers Thibaw, the last king of Burma to his white fellows. He believes that we do not have any â€Å"purpose except to steal†. What bothers Flory more than anything else is a lie,‘slimy white man’s burden humbug’, the pukka sahib pose. Flory knows that this lie corrupts not only the natives, but also the Whites themselves. The colonizers ‘build prison and call it progress’.