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Themes
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Hanging, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
“A Hanging” is fundamentally concerned with the mechanisms of imperialism, and it suggests that colonialism is cruel not only for the viciousness of its practices, but also the mindset it encourages among the colonizers. Orwell, narrating the story of the hanging of an Indian prisoner in British-occupied Burma (present-day Myanmar) in the first person, does not question the death penalty or the subjugation of the indigenous people at the beginning of the story: he reports what he sees objectively, and he, like the superintendent, is only waiting for the hanging to be over. When a dog runs into the prison yard and fails to recognize any difference between the prisoner and the white authorities, Orwell begins to more directly question the superiority his fellow colonizers assumed they commanded. Then, when the prisoner side-steps a puddle, Orwell begins to press home for readers just how human the condemned man is. The prisoner’s decision to step around the puddle proves that he is a living, thinking, and reasoning person, and Orwell highlights how terrible it is that this man’s life is about to end at his oppressors’ hands. By calling attention to the prisoner’s humanity and then focusing on the imminent end of that life, Orwell offers readers a glimpse into the inhumanity of the imperial system.
Ultimately, then, Orwell uses the episode of the hanging to prick readers’ consciences not just about this specific instance of the death penalty, but about the system of colonialism more broadly. By zeroing in on moments that highlight the condemned man’s humanity, like the incidents with the dog and the puddle, Orwell suggests that colonialism is built upon and sustained by dehumanizing colonized peoples and urges readers to recognize the same.
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The Cruelty of Colonialism ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of The Cruelty of Colonialism appears in each chapter of A Hanging. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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The Cruelty of Colonialism Quotes in A Hanging
Below you will find the important quotes in A Hanging related to the theme of The Cruelty of Colonialism.
A Hanging
Quotes
We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot for drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
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[The guards] crowded very close about [the prisoner], with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
A dreadful thing had happened—a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. […] For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner and, jumping up, tried to lick his face.
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At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.
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And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out to his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!” not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine.
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We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries—each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
“Do you know, sir, our friend [he meant the dead man] when he heard his appeal had been dismissed he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwalah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.”
We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis’ anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
