Burmese Days Study Guide

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903 in Motihari, India, during the United Kingdom’s colonial rule of India, where his father worked in the Imperial Civil Service. In 1904, his mother returned with him to England. As a boy, he won a scholarship to St Cyprian’s School, a prep school he attended from 1911 until 1916. After 1916 he transferred on scholarship first to Wellington College and then to Eton College, arguably England’s most famous private preparatory school. After high school, unable to afford university tuition, he became an imperial police officer in British Burma, which was then part of British India (Burma is now the independent republic of Myanmar). He lived in Burma from 1922 until 1927, when he returned to England and decided to become a writer. He published his first book, a memoir titled Down and Out in Paris and London, in 1933, under the pseudonym George Orwell, which he would use for the rest of his career. In 1934, he published his first novel, Burmese Days, which drew on his experiences in British Burma. In 1936–1937, Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans against the military junta’s Nationalist party. In 1937 he was shot in the throat by a Nationalist sniper, after which he returned to England. During World War II (1939–1945), he was declared medically unfit to fight; he joined the citizen militia known as the Home Guard and worked for the BBC. In 1945 Orwell published Animal Farm, a political allegory satirizing Joseph Stalin’s USSR, and in 1949 he published his most famous novel, the anti-totalitarian dystopia 1984. He died in January 1950 at age 46. 

Burmese Days is set in British Burma. The United Kingdom colonized Burma from 1824 to 1948. The initial colonization occurred during the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–1826), which started as a struggle between the United Kingdom and the Third Burmese Empire (ruled by the Konbaung dynasty) for control of northeastern India. The United Kingdom won the First Anglo-Burmese War, and in the Treaty of Yandabo, which ended the war, Burma was forced to cede some of its own territory to British rule. In the Second Anglo-Burmese War (1852–1853), the United Kingdom—who wanted access to valuable teak forests and a strategic port—conquered all of Lower Burma. Upper Burma stayed under the control of the Burmese monarchy until the Third Anglo-Burmese War, a brief conflict in 1885 that led to the end of an independent Burmese monarchy and the official annexation of all Burma by the United Kingdom on January 1, 1886. The United Kingdom treated Burma as part of the British Raj—British-ruled India—until April 1, 1937, at which point Burma became a separate colony with its own colonial government. Burma gained independence from British colonial rule on January 4, 1948.

George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) narrates the personal and social downfall of a British timber merchant named John Flory, who is alienated by British imperialism, racism, and hypocrisy but who is unable to successfully resist them in colonial British Burma. Earlier novels about British characters struggling and failing to live up to their ideals in imperialist contexts, which may have influenced Orwell, include Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1899–1900), about a British sailor who abandons his passengers on a sinking ship in the Indian Ocean; W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1924–1925), about an adulterous Englishwoman in British-ruled Hong Kong; and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), about the trial of an Indian doctor accused of sexually assaulting an Englishwoman. Burmese Days as an anti-imperialist work also seems to directly criticize previous pro-imperialist literature, most obviously Rudyard Kipling’s racist and jingoistic poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), which the novel directly references. Burmese Days criticizes social inequality and censorship, including social censorship and self-censorship; in this way, it predicts the anti-Stalinist political allegory of Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and the anti-totalitarian dystopian satire of 1984 (1949), in which censorship plays a major role.