Psychology of the Colonizer: Orwells Burmese Days

The purpose of this essay is to examine a topic of colonization and its psychological aspects in the selected bibliography of an English writer George Orwell. Most of his novels and essays focus on social criticism that are supported by his personal experience of working as a policeman in Burma, which was a British colony at the time (Glover, 2014). Therefore, Orwell put a huge emphasis on the critique of colonization, since he went through this experience personally.

To examine the psychology of the colonizer in Orwells works, one should turn to Burmese Days. The scene of this novel is colonized Burma, located in Southeast Asia. In order to demonstrate the duality of colonization, Orwell describes the clash between two colonizers with polar points of view: Flory, who is disillusioned, and Dr. Veraswami, an enthusiast. The latter advocates that Britain brought a variety of positive changes to Burma, since British construct roads, they irrigate deserts, they conquer famines, they build schools, they set up hospitals, they combat plague, cholera, leprosy, smallpox, venereal disease (Orwell, 1934, p. 34). He wholeheartedly supports colonialism and is not able to see that British influence does not help, but instead robs the locals of opportunity to develop on their own.

There are other works by Orwell that depict the psychology of the colonizer. For instance, in Shooting an Elephant the narrator, a policeman, is pressured to shoot a rebellious elephant b to show his superiority to the crowd. That way, Orwell (1936) elaborates on the fact that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys (p. 4). Additionally, Orwell reflects on colonizers psychology in his essay A Hanging, where he describes how he witnessed an execution of an unknown man. Initially, he saw it as a mundane routine without realizing how tremendous that was to kill a healthy man who is just like him. Overall, taking all the above examples into account, it can be concluded that Orwells work includes a variety of takes on the psychology of the colonizer.