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 sub-divisional police
officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European
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 none of them seemed
to have anything to do except stand on 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 like 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 roundabout
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 the 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 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 stock; 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 palmleaf, 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 round 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 mad 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. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was
merely ravaging their homes, 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 metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields
a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains
and 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 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.
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 behavior. 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 knew 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 in front of ‘natives’; and so,
in general, he isn’t 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 feel 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 paralysed 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 upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward
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 dash 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.
1936 |