George Orwell and the Police

As Eric Blair, the young George Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1929, a time of growing Burmese discontent with British rule. He wrote about Burma in a novel, Burmese Days, and a number of non-fictional writings. This article considers the nature of the law-and-order regime Orwell served in Burma, especially in the light of racial self-interest and Britain's commitment to the principle of the rule of law, and traces the issues of race and the law to his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Behavioral Disorders, 1984

At the '1984 Midwest Symposium for Leadership in Behavioral Disorders held in Kansas City this past February, George Orwell's views of deviance in his classic novel, Nlneleen Eighty-Four, and other works were examined for their relevance to our views and treatment of behavioral and emotignal deviance in 1984. In this paper "George Orwell" is interviewed by a professional special educator about his life experiences that have shaped his views ol deviance. Orwell's childhood and schooling, his experiences in the British Foreign Service, as a down-and-out writer in Paris, as an investigative reporter of social conditions in the British working class, and as an anarchist in the Spanish Civil War provide the basis for discussion. A major purpose ol lhe Conversation with Orwell was to introduce thought-provoking ideas and controversial issues that would elicit self-examination and lively discussion among Symposium participants. For this reason, the authors did not attempt to reach closure on all of the issues that were raised. As much as possible, Orwell's own words in Nineteen Eighty-Four and other writings are used and references are provided, although some quotations have been slightly altered to f it the conversational format. In other instances, "Orwell's words" represent what the authors believe Orwell might say based upon their study of his life and writings. COMMENTATOR: We welcome you to this special event, marking the year that George Orwell chose as the title of his famous book. We are interested today, in asking Mr. Orwell whether or not the predictions he made have come about, and in particular we are interested in his views of deviancea major theme of the book. Mr. Orwell, welcome to our conference. ORWELL: Thank you, Mr. Zabel A conference on "behavioral disorders" sounds ominous to Winston Smith and me, but I am interested in your opinions on that subject also. COMMENTATOR: Does it bother you to be among leaders who work with behavioral disorders? ORWELL: Well, in my day we would not have been so eagerto have called ourselves leaders. We had enough of leaders in "Der Fuhrer" and "il Duce." I hope this is not a training ground for the Ministry of love. Or would you call it the Department of Human Care Services? Perhaps those of you in the university settings would be better suited for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four? COMMENTATOR: Do you really believe that some of us might fall into those categories? ORWELL: Of course, most of us do much of the time. Didn't you find anything in my book that reminded you of the ways you define and treat deviance? COMMENTATOR: A disturbing question. Let's get back tothat later. Mr. Orwell, most of us are familiar with your better known works, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, bul probably know little about your life and your other writings. What can you tell us about your background and the major events which have shaped your views? ORWELL: You would like a biographical sketch? 264 COMMENTATOR:Yes,please. ORWELL: I was born in 1903 in India where my tather was an official in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. COMMENTATOR: Excuse me. Your real name is Eric Blair, isn't it? ORWELL: I am not sure what you mean by "real." I was born Eric Blair. COMMENTATOR: Why do you write under a different name? ORWELL: There is no great mystery. As a writer I use "George Orwell." lt sounds a bit more English, don't you think? COMMENTATOR: As a psychologist something like a name change makes me wonder about the reason. One wonders if you were breaking with your pastcreating a new persona perhaps. I am sorry for the interruption. Please continue. ORWELL: Yes, well. .. When I was very young, my mother took my sister and me back to England where we lived while my father completed his career. (Crick, 1980, pp. 5-7) When I was eight I was sent to a detestable little boarding schoollet's call it Crossgates-where I spent several miserable years. I won a scholarship to Eton where. .. COMMENTATOR: Excuse me, why did you say a detestable little boarding school? ORWELL: Probably the greatest curelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself. By their law I was damned; I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, l'was cowardly, I smelt. The Headmaster let me know in various ways that I was on reduced feesa scholarship boythere on suffrage (Crick, 1980, pp.21-23). My friend Cyril Connolly, who also went to Crossgates, once said, "[The private school] is one of the few tortures confined to the ruling classes and from which the workers are still free" (Stansky and Abrahams, 1972, p. 35). These institutions were where people from my class, the lower upper-middle class, the ones on the edge of the ruling class (the Outer Party, if you will), were being taught our proper roles. COMMENTATOR: Do you think that the role one is expected to assume is set very early in life? ORWELL: One's place in the world-in the systemdoes not depend on one's own efforts but on "what you are" (Stansky & Abrahams, 1972, xviii). COMMENTATOR: Again, sorry for the interruption. Go ahead. ORWELL: I won a scholarship to Eton. There were many other middle class scholarship boys there; they even had a certain prestige that the aristocrats didn't have. I was fairly happy during those three years, but I did not go on to university as I suppose my tutors had hoped. Instead, in 1'922 | enlisted in the Indian lmperial Police and was sent to Burma. COMMENTATOR: Was this a logical decision? | mean, it seems like a waste of your elite education at Eton. ORWELL: lt was a perfectly logical decision, given who I was. My training was in fact to be of service to the British system, and when you consider the family tradition in the colonial service,well .,. COMMENTATOR: You mean, again you were trained for the Outer Party but not the Inner Party as was Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four? ORWELL:Yes. COMMENTATOR: How long were you in Burma? ORWELL: Five years. One tour of duty. I returned in ill health in 1927 and took the opportunity to resign from the Service. COMMENTATOR: Did you write anything during those five years? ORWELL: No. The demands of the policeman's role left me neither time nor initiative to do anything else. COMMENTATOR: But seven years later you wrote a novel, Eurnese Days, and two rather famous short stories set in South Asia. Were these autobiographical? ORWELL: Not exactly, but I think they give accurate impressions of what Burma was like. COMMENTATOR: Were you a critic, at that time, of British rule in the East? ORWELL: British imperialism was a great evil. I knew it then, but I was part of the system. That is the point ot Shooting an Elephant, one of the stories to which you have alluded. I really did shoot a magnlficent animal that had killed an Indian coolie but which probably threatened no further danger. lshot him becausethe Indian crowd expected it of me. At that moment, as I stood there with the rif le in my hands, I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was l, the white man with his gun, standing in 26s

Journal of World-Systems Research, 2015

George Orwell is one the best known and highly regarded writers of the twentieth century. In his adjective form— Orwellian—he has become a “Sartrean ‘singular universal,’ an individual whose “singular” experiences express the “universal” character of a historical moment. Orwell is a literary representation of the unease felt in the disenchanted, alienated, anomic world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This towering cultural legacy obscures a more complex and interesting legacy. This world-system biography explains his contemporary relevance by retracing the road from Mandalay to Wigan that transformed Eric Blair, a disappointing-Etonianturned- imperial-policeman, into George Orwell, a contradictory and complex socialist and, later, literary icon. Orwell’s contradictory class position—between both ruling class and working class and nation and empire—and resultantly tense relationship to nationalism, empire, and the Left makes his work a particularly powerful exposition of the tension between comsopolitianism and radicalism, between the abstract concerns of intellectuals and the complex demands of local political action. Viewed in full, Orwell represents the “traumatic kernel” of our age of cynicism: the historic failure and inability of the left to find a revolutionary path forward between the “timid reformism” of social democrats and “comfortable martyrdom” of anachronistic and self-satisfied radicals.

George Orwell Studies, 2021

Eric Frank Seeley (1902-1972) and Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950) first met at Eton College, then reconnected in Rangoon during the mid-1920s. This paper argues that a limited, problematic representation of Seeley and his ‘Indian lady’ in Orwell scholarship has resulted in significant contextual information being suppressed, overlooked or misunderstood. More detailed knowledge of Seeley’s life reveals a web of relationships that broaden our understanding of Orwell’s experiences in Burma and the shaping of his ideas about imperialism. Keywords: Eric Seeley, Eric Blair, Leila Das, J. R. Das, Christopher Hollis, Douglas Woodruff, Peter Stansky, William Abrahams, Bernard Crick, Gordon Bowker, racism, nationalism, imperialism, Rangoon, Burma, Burmese Days

1984

For although he was too strongly independent in his thinking to accept the Marxist or socialist dogmas of his associates, because they did not seem to square with experience, and though he admired the tough resistance of English character and legal institutions to tyranny, Orwell never did tumble to the understanding of man and government which had shaped each over the centuries. Failing to see the constants in human nature as the key to the political problem, he looked around the world both as he perceived it and his literary fellows portrayed it, and concluded that power lust was the strongest social force, and that as "men are infinitely malleable," it would lead power hungry men to shape their fellow creatures to suit their will. This paper explores Orwell’s writings from the perspective of western legal theory and social science understandings of the individual and society to contrast Orwell’s conflicted positions with the educated thought of his own times.