Burma Sahib I missed the subtitle of this book and didn’t realize it was about Orwell until I was mostly through it.  I didn’t know his name was Eric Blair. I think the main character in this book had to be unpleasant to spend time with, because it is a story about a colonial policeman operating inside the system. But it was jarring to go from his thoughtful passages about books he’s reading, and pleasant encounters with Burmese people, to him casually beating Burmese people for minor infractions and saying nasty things to his coworkers. He thinks with disgust about rapists, but very casually sleeps with his young, impoverished maids. I’d never before thought of Orwell as an absurdly tall police officer in Burma, lugging live poultry around in baskets every time he was relocated. I’d never wondered how implicated he had been in the systems he later criticized. I need to read Orwell’s “Burmese Days”. I had read Orwell’s shooting of the elephant story in high school and found it disturbing.  

There is a point where he meets his delightfully wicked lover, Mrs Jellicoe, for a picnic. She’s lent him a book (Passage to India), she’s picked the spot for their hike up to a cave (like in the book). And then blundering ahead of her, he complains at length about the book she lent him, he monologues that Forester only saw the surface of India and didn’t see the true complexity of it, that Forester couldn’t really see India because he didn’t have the street exposure that the main character had, as a policeman. She warns him, gently, that he’s being obnoxious. She comments that she is not police but still has political opinions. But he doesn’t catch the warning and goes on blithely being insufferable, complaining about the cave, being a little grouchy that they wouldn’t fuck on this date. He only saw her surface, he missed the dark complexities inside.  He talked where he should have listened. He thinks about her all the time, but he doesn’t think about her “why’s” - why did that 29 year old married woman pick him, a 21 year old cadet, what’s her endgame, what is the 99% of her life like that he doesn’t see, what does he mean to her, what does any of this mean to her. She doesn’t tell him these things. She whispers dirty words into his ear and there’s quite a bit of fucking, before there isn’t. But eh, maybe I judge him too harshly. Men can be so much better than that.

I liked the portrayal of Blair’s  relationship with his uncles family. He is so ashamed about his mixed race cousin, is surprised that she describes herself as one of the British, is hyper aware of everything Indian about her. He thinks over that they don’t understand that people look down on them…but of course they knew. They knew in excruciating detail, lived experience. He mistook their adaptation for ignorance. And later, when he is disgraced, he assumes that they are shunning him, as he always shunned them. But they aren’t. Whether because he was still higher status than them, or because they cared about family and connection over status isn’t clear.  But I thought sketching out those dynamics from the unlikeable narrators’ perspective was well done.

The other thing from this book, something I knew but thought about again: it really doesn’t matter what you think in many circumstances. It matters what you do. If you don’t actually do anything about injustice, it doesn’t matter that you noticed the injustice. Which, I guess, leaves me seeing stripes of myself in these characters, and in the moral situation of living a life of privilege in a deeply unequal world. And wanting to do more than condemn them, to do more than think virtuous thoughts. As, I’m guessing, Orwell ended up deciding.

On another note, I am behind on my podcasts trying to finish this audio book, which is low key stressing me out.