Shooting An Elephant

Topsy, Orwell, and Paul Theroux's Burma Sahib

My background reading to researching and writing the biography of Topsy the Elephant takes me to surprising places. The more I follow her leads, the larger the circle expands with her at its centre.

Topsy takes me to such places as the history of amusement parks and filmmaking in the United States, the War of Currents between Edison and Westinghouse over the electricity of AC and DC, the cruel methods to capture wild elephants and train them to perform in circus rings, and the links between the slave trade and wild-caught animals for zoos.

One recent excursion took me to a new novel, Burma Sahib, by Paul Theroux. This is a fictionalised account of the life of a real Englishman, Eric Blair, who, in his late teens and early twenties, went to Burma (now Myanmar) in the 1920s to train as a probationary Assistant District Superintendent. He discovered the inherent injustices required by the colonial British Raj to maintain law and order after witnessing a series of events and relationships subjugating native peoples.

Thus, the Eton-schooled Blair became George Orwell, the socialist author. His duties enforcing the colonial rule of law on behalf of the British Empire led him to write hugely successful books about poverty and civil war, Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933 and Homage to Catalonia published in 1938. And, of course, such modern classics as Animal Farm in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949.

Orwell was a prolific journalist and essayist writing articles attacking and exposing social and economic injustice. One of them led me to want to read Theroux’s novel to see how he integrated the true story into the novel. Published in 1936, Shooting an Elephant is an account of a British policeman, Blair, who’s called upon to kill a male elephant in musth who had killed one man. Musth is the periodic natural hormonal condition when testosterone in male elephants surges making them unusually aggressive and unpredictable in their behaviour.

Shooting an Elephant is a shocking and compelling read from the perspective of the elephant’s death and highlighting colonialism’s cruel futility. Very large crowds of local native people expect Blair to shoot the elephant. They watch him shoot the elephant several times and how the animal dies a slow, painful death. Elephants were considered valuable possessions who worked in the country’s logging industry. The Hindu elephant god, Ganesha, is one of the most popular deities.

Blair is distraught at the cruel pointlessness of killing an elephant.

Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.

Theroux’s description of the elephant shooting incident occurs toward the end of the 400-page novel.

Blair hated the natives screaming at him, he hated the timber merchants for enslaving the elephants, he hated the police, he hated the empire—most of all he hated himself. [p. 309]

Reading Burma Sahib helped me to see more clearly how human nature and political ideology impact the lives of animals. This fictionalised account of this brief but important period in Blair’s life inspires me as I write Topsy’s biography as narrative nonfiction—the art of writing nonfiction with the techniques used to write fiction.