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Prompt-Define social pressures as illustrated by Orwell and Hughes in their writings.(Compare and analyze the texts)Do submit your assignment to the turnitin link that has been provided for it.
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Shooting an Elephant
by George Orwell
In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people–the only time
in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was subdivisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way antiEuropean feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European
woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over
her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it
seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and
the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous
laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of
young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe
distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all.
There were several thousands of them in the town and non of them seemed to have
anything to do except stand on the street corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind
that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of
it the better. Theoretically-and secretly, of course-I was all for the Burmese and all
against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly
than I can perhaps make clear. In a job that you see the dirty work of Empire at close
quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the
grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had
been flogged with bamboos-all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt.
But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to
think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the
East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it
is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew
was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against
the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of
my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something
clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with
another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet
into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a round-about way was enlightening. It was a
tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real
nature of imperialism-the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one
morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of town rang me up on the
‘phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do
something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was
happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44
Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be
useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the
elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which which
had gone “must”. It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their
attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped.
Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out
in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey
away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The
Burmese population had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already
destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and
devoured the stack; also it had met the municipal rubbish van, and, when the driver
jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon
it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the
quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of
squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I
remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began
questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone, and, as usual, failed to get
any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds
clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it
becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some
said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any
elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when
we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away,
child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came
around the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some
more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was
something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s
dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost
naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the
elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its
trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season
and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of
yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to
one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and
grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that
the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction
of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a
rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to
borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go made
with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and
meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy
fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the
whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had
seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant
when he was merely ravaging their home, but it was different now that he was going
to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they
wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the
elephant-I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary-and it is always
unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and
feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people
jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metaled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across,
not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains dotted with coarse grass. The elephant
was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the
slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating
them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty
that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant-it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery-and obviously one
ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating,
the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now
that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely
wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did
not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while
to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an
immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the
road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the
garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the
elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a
conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in
my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should
have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do
it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at
this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the
hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. 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 hells, 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.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass
against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It
seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish
about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to.
(Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the
beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred
pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly.
But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had
been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving.
They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within say,
twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behaviour. If he charged I could shoot, if
he took no notice of me it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But
also I know that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the
ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged
and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller.
But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful
yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not
afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man
mustn’t be frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong
those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced
to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite
probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one
alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get
a better aim.
The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the
theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to
have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair
sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an
imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant
was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole; actually I aimed several
inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or fell the kick-one never does when
a shot goes home-but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In
that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get
there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor
fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken,
immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without
knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time-it might have been five
seconds, I dare say-he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An
enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him
thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not
collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright,
with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did
for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant
of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind
legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upwards like a huge rock toppling, his
trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And
then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the
ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious
that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very
rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and
falling. His mouth was wide open-I could see far down into caverns of pale pink
throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I
fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The
thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not
even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He
was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where
not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that
dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to
move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for
my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They
seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking
of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him
half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I
was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the
elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing.
Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a
mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided.
The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an
elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn
Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it
put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the
elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely
to avoid looking a fool.
Autumn 1936
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