The Man Who Would Become Orwell. On Paul Theroux’s Novel 𝐵𝑢𝑟𝑚𝑎 𝑆𝑎ℎ𝑖𝑏
Eric Arthur Blair, the 19-year-old Eaton graduate who would become George Orwell, arrived in Burma (Myanmar) in 1922. For the next five years, he worked his way up the Imperial Police hierarchy, eventually becoming an assistant police superintendent. His posts took him to towns and villages infested with mosquitos, brothels, nationalists, thieves, and roaming armed gangs. Though his time in Burma was relatively short, the sweltering colonial landscape and the policing experience seemed to have left strong impressions and deep scars. Like a refrain, Burma crops up in his writings even when it’s far removed from the main topic.
Orwell left candid accounts of his life as a colonial police officer, most notably in Burmese Days (1934), “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), “A Hanging” (1931), and in passages scattered throughout The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). Burmese Days, for example, is set in the fictional town of Kyauktada, a microcosm populated with archetypal bigots, opportunists, and victims in apartheid Burma. In the essays “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging,” Orwell recounts how he shot a musth elephant that had killed an Indian porter and how he oversaw the execution of a convict in Insein Jail. What comes through in these works is the author’s tortured conscience, torn between the need to prove himself as a young man and to remain decent as a human. In time, Orwell, like his alter ego in his writings, would come to realize that it’s impossible to do both in an inherently unfair system, leading to his abrupt departure from the Imperial Police.
In Burma Sahib, Paul Theroux gives us a fictionalized account of Orwell’s times in Burma, imagining the episodes in his life that might have inspired the events depicted in his writings. Theroux himself has visited Burma numerous times, most notably during Ne Win’s socialist era. With a travel writer’s keen, observant eyes, he recounts his impressions in “The Mandalay Express” in The Great Railway Bazaar (1977): “Sule Pagoda, with its five theatres, was mobbed with people, dressed identically in shirt, sarong, and rubber sandals, men and women alike puffing thick green cheroots.” Due to successive military regimes and long periods of isolation, post-colonial Burma retains much of its characters from the British Raj, its ghosts still trapped in the crumbling mansions that haunt the streets of modern Rangoon (Yangon).
Paul Theroux, Burma Sahib (Boston: Mariner Books, 2024)
In Burma Sahib, Theroux conjures up the country from his recent memory and casts it a hundred years back to Blair’s times:
“[…] the Herefordshire swung sideways and churned the water to brown froth as it approached the pier, the half-naked men on shore, howling with raised arms, calling for the mooring lines […]. To the right, across the harbor, the chimneys, thick black stacks lettered BURMAH OIL, and rising in the distance past the red tile roofs of shop houses, a massive gold stupa, the one sight he’d anticipated, a pagoda looking lazy at the sea, the Shwedagon, like a fabulous bell, upright, at rest.”
Consistent with what Orwell’s own essays reveal and what his biographers have noted, Theroux’s Blair is an antisocial bookworm with a self-loathing streak. When invited to the captain’s table for dinner on the ship to Rangoon, Blair “brooded all the next day, imagining an interrogation, improvising answers and explanations.”
As a white officer, Blair was among the privileged few at the top of the colonial social order. It’s reasonable to conclude his early sexual encounters took place in the brothels that catered to him and his peers. In his biography of Orwell, Michael Shelden notes, “[Orwell’s] poem called ‘The Lesser Evil’ describes a ‘house of sin with dying flowers round the floor.’ An untitled sketch features an unnerving encounter with a young prostitute whose ‘hard mercenary expression’ gives her the appearance of ‘an evil-minded doll.’”
With fictional scenes, Theroux’s novel fills the gap left open by Orwell’s biographers. Here is Blair’s first impression of a brothel: “Blair could not sleep for thinking of the pavilion by the river at Monkey Point, the woman smiling at the upper window, the sylphlike figures drifting inside, their bodies glowing through their gowns.” And his relationship with one of his housemaids: “Like a child in a game she held her hands against her face, peeking through her fingers, as he reached to lift the net. She bowed and as she slipped beneath it, the gauzy net draped her head and shoulders like a bridal veil.”
The Limouzins, Orwell’s French cousins who happened to be living in Moulmein (Mawlamyine), Burma, also appear as characters in Burma Sahib. As one of the family members has married a local woman and fathered a mixed-race daughter, their visits, often with little or no advance notice, bring out Blair’s own discomfort with them, echoing the Europeans’ attitude toward the Anglo-Burmese.
In Burmese Days, the principal character John Flory faces a dilemma when Dr. Veraswami, an admirer of the British Raj, seeks his support to become a member of the exclusive European club. In Burma Sahib, Blair too gets into a similar bind when Thackeray, an Indian merchant, attempts to become a member of the European-only Katha Club. “Membership is all I desire. Even if I were elected. I should not of course ever presume to visit club […]. Goodness, no. I would not force myself upon European gentlemen. I would simply pay subscription. That is high enough privilege for Mahadev Thackeray,” he says.
Like Orwell’s narrator in his essays, Theroux’s Blair would also be ordered to shoot an elephant, and witness a hanging. In both cases, the backstory Theroux adds gives some extra weight. In his own account of the hanging, Orwell remains vague on the guilt or innocence of the convict; he merely describes the horrific act he’s called to witness. In Burma Sahib, Theroux recreates the incident in a chapter, also titled “A Hanging,” but in his version, what Blair knows about the circumstances of the crime makes the hanging even more devastating.
As part of his police training, Orwell would have had to learn Burmese. According to Jeffrey Meyers’ biography (Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Nation), Orwell’s Burmese impressed the Burmese historian Maung Htin Aung. “[…] he passed without real effort all the compulsory examinations in Burmese and the highest ‘proficiency’ test.” Theroux’s Blair also shows the same aptitude for language in various scenes:
“I told her you’re glad to see her. There’s a nice word in Burmese for that. Pyaw-shwin-sa-yar-par. ‘Ecstatic.’” Blair repeated the word …
“Belu is ogre,” Blair said. “Kyun is island.”
At one point, Blair is ordered to deal with an anti-colonial monk, a cultic figure. Theroux names the character after Wirathu, the Mandalay-based hate preacher who made headlines for inciting violence against Muslims. In the July 2013 cover of Time, he is labeled “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Theroux’s choice of name serves as a reminder that the line between nationalism and extremism is a murky one.
Though labeled “a novel,” Burma Sahib hews closely to biographical facts. The little flourishes Theroux uses to build character—like how Blair privately thinks of his cousins, the Limouzins, as “the Lemonskins”—can be traced back to Orwell biographies. With fidelity to documented details, Theroux has managed to assemble a series of meticulous character studies. Together, they add up to a sensitive, poignant portrait of a young colonial officer’s struggles, escapades, heartaches, and disillusions in Burma.
Theroux’s challenge is that he’s competing with Orwell himself. Whatever he might say about colonial Burma or Blair, Orwell had already said in his own writings. Comparing Burma Sahib to Burmese Days is almost unavoidable, because both are inspired by Orwell’s colonial police experience. In that context, Orwell’s version is much more fast-paced, with a predictable story arc and a climax. Theroux’s novel on the other hand is a slow burn, in which Blair’s bitterness against the empire smolders but is not allowed to self-destruct, as Flory’s did in Burmese Days.
Theroux’s blend of facts and fiction closely mirrors Orwell’s own approach in his confessional essays and memoirs. Orwell’s biographer Meyers, who managed to track down a contemporary of Orwell from his times in Moulmein, notes “The simple, straightforward job described by [the eyewitness] Stuart differs in many details from Orwell’s ‘Shooting an Elephant.’” Orwell recognized that the elephant could be exploited as a symbol representing something larger than life, an insurmountable force, like the British Raj. So he skillfully reworked a routine incident into a sketch about his regret at becoming a participant of the Imperial system. And in studying Orwell’s early life and writings, Theroux seems to have found an ideal setup to tell the story of a young Englishman discovering the unsavory truth about the social order into which he was born. Theroux’s novel and Orwell’s own essays also reveal something unsavory about the art of storytelling: Often, truth alone isn’t enough.
In 1948, two decades after Orwell left, Burma became independent. With the departure of the British, the apartheid system depicted in Burmese Days and Burma Sahib faded away. But in 1962, a military coup changed the fledgling country’s destiny once more, spawning a new system of inequality. During General Ne Win’s quasi-socialist rule, and during the numerous military regimes that followed, the top echelon of the socialist party and the Burmese army became the privileged few. They were–and still are–unaccountable to the people, the court, or the law, like Blair and his fellow white officers once were. The latest coup in Burma occurred in February 2021. Since then, 5,000 people have been killed, and 26,000 arrested.
Kenneth Wong is a Burmese-American author, translator, and language teacher. Born and raised in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma (Myanmar), he currently lives in San Francisco, California, and teaches Burmese language at UC Berkeley. His essays, short stories, articles, and poetry translations have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Irrawaddy, Myanmar Times, Two Lines Press, Portside Review, and The Journal of Burma Studies, among others.