Summary of George Orwell’s Shooting an Elephant
This essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is written by George Orwell as he himself was a police from the British Empire in Burma in 1936. He was born in 1903 and died in 1950. The essay explores an apparent paradox about the behavior of Europeans, who supposedly have power over their colonial subjects. Orwell begins by relating some of his memories from his time as a young police officer working in Burma. Although the extent to which the essay is autobiographical has been disputed, we will refer to the narrator as Orwell himself, for ease of reference. He, like other British and European people in imperial Burma, was held in contempt by the native populace, with Burmese men tripping him up during football matches between the Europeans and Burmans, and the local Buddhist priests loudly insulting their European colonizers.
The writer says that these experiences confirmed his view, which he has already formed, that imperialism was evil, but it also inspired hatred of the enmity between the European imperialists and their native subjects, and Orwell understands why the Buddhist priests hate living under European rule. He is sympathetic towards such a view, but it isn’t pleasant when you yourself are personally the object of ridicule or contempt. He finds himself caught in the middle between ‘hatred of the empire’ he served and his rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make the job impossible. The main story which Orwell relates takes place in Lower Burma. An elephant, one of the tame elephants which the locals own and use, has given its rider or mahout the slip and has been wreaking havoc throughout the bazaar. It has destroyed a hut, killed a cow, and raided some fruit stalls for food. Orwell picks up his rifle and gets on his pony to go and see what he can do. He knows the rifle can’t be good enough to kill the elephant, but he hopes that firing the gun might scare the animal. Orwell discovers that the elephant has just trampled a man, a coolie or native laborer, to the ground, killing him. Orwell sends his pony away and calls for an elephant rifle which would be more effective against such a big animal. Going in search of the elephant. It has calmed down, but by this point, a crowd of thousands of local Burmese people has amassed and is watching Orwell intently. Even though he sees no need to kill the animal now it no longer poses a threat to anyone, he realizes that the locals expect him to dispatch it, and he will lose ‘face’ – both personally and as an imperial representative – if he does not do what the crowd expects. So he shoots the elephant from a safe distance, marveling at how long the animal takes to die.
Analysis: This is about more than the killing of the elephant but it gave a better glimpse of the real nature of imperialism. The despotic governments don’t impose their iron boot upon people without caring what their poor subjects think of them, but those despots care about how they are judged and viewed by their subjects. The essay is about how those in power act when they are aware that they have an audience that is about how so much of our behavior is shaped, not by what we want to do, nor even by what we think is the right thing to do, but by what others will think of us. Orwell confesses that he had spent his whole life trying to avoid being laughed at, and this is one of his key motivations when dealing with the elephant. Note how ‘my whole life’ immediately widens to ‘every white man’s life in the East: this is not just Orwell’s psychology but the psychology of every imperial agent.
Orwell imagines what grisly death he would face if he shot the elephant and missed, and was trampled like the hapless coolie the elephant had killed: ‘And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.’ The stiff upper lip of this final phrase is British imperialism personified. Being trampled to death by the elephant might be something that Orwell could live with, but being laughed at? And, worse still, laughed at by the ‘natives’? And from this point, Orwell extrapolates his own experience to consider the colonial experience at large: the white European may think he is in charge of his colonial subjects ironically, the white man turns a tyrant for freedom and becomes a sort of hollow. Imperial rulers and despots actually care deeply about how their colonized subjects view them colonizes and the one who colonizes loses his own freedom. The Burmese natives are the ones with the real power in the essay because they are the natives who outnumbered the lone policeman