In Burma Sahib, Paul Theroux gives us a keen insight into the thoughts and the moral struggles of a young George Orwell, capturing the complexity of his early years in Burma.

A master class in interiority

Paul Theroux’s Burma Sahib is a master class in interiority. Fictionalizing the life of young George Orwell — just leaving his teenage years; stationed in Burma as part of the Indian Imperial Police, and still known as Eric Blair—this novel takes us into the heart and head of the lanky, awkward young man who would eventually write masterpieces such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

So what exactly is interiority? This is what I learned from Stanford University’s Tom McNeely: “There is tremendous power in playing off the inner thoughts of a character with the exterior world—the sum of this interplay of differences is what we call ‘interiority,’ which is not really just interior.” Interiority consists of thoughts, feelings, memories, impressions, opinions, reactions, inner struggles, and subjective interpretation of events.

And how does Theroux utilize interiority?  In every chapter, seemingly on every other page of Burma Sahib, we hear Blair’s self-talk about his ambivalence, unease, and outright hatred of British Imperialism. More often than not, Theroux italicizes this self-talk. It’s right there on page five as Blair is on a ship headed from London to Rangoon (Yangon) via the Suez Canal: “For the rest of the glowing afternoon he remained on the bow deck, peering ahead, thinking, I’m on my way, his decision seeming somehow more serious and strange as the heat of the day burned against his head—this heat reminding him that he was entering a new zone, a new climate, sailing to the far corner of the British Empire…”

An ambivalent worldview

Three pages later, Blair’s interiority signals that while his worldview was not yet fully formed, he was on the side of the oppressed but wanted to hide this treasonous shame from his fellow agents of imperialism: “And something else niggled him about the other passengers, and it was unbearable at times. Listening to them reminiscing about India, or complaining about babus and servants, they spoke in the Anglo-Indian tones of his father and mother, of the chowkidar and the amah, the chai wallah and the syce. The common language was the language of the Raj, and Blair hated being reminded of it. They knew each other well, but he did not want to know them. And I don’t want them to know me.”

Niggled. What a fine word that gets an emergent feeling. And he doesn’t want others—mostly senior to him— know about what niggled him about their pompous, racist superiority. Just as Blair’s ship, the Herefordshire, docks at Rangoon, a porter—a “skinny brown man”—is abused by a Scottish policeman:

“Have a dekko at that monkey.”

Incredulous, Blair responds, “That man?”

The cop says, “That coolie.”

“The porter was unsteady, the tin case swung to the side as he attempted to find his footing at the end of the gangway, and as he tottered the white policeman dashed from the dock and screamed something in Hindi … and kicked the porter in the backside.”

The cop “looked furious, as he clutched his pipe and stabbed with it.” His ugly Scottish burr grates: “Ye dinnae give way tae a native. Ever. Natives are scum.”

“The proper response to this, Blair considered, was: The captain’s steward, Ranjit Singh, fought valiantly at Passchendaele for king and country. And was wounded.

“But he said mildly, ‘And if there’s no room to pass?’”

This is a vivid, painful passage that uses interiority to get at how we all, at times, think one brave thing but stay on the coward’s side of safety. Blair wants to protest the racism, but he takes refuge in a mild safe harbor because a more vigorous complaint might reveal his shameful—to him—Indian connections, including mixed race relations and his own birth in Motihari, Bengal (now in modern-day Bihar) where his father worked as a middling Opium Agent in the Indian Civil Service.

“A Hanging”

Several chapters later, Blair oversees the hanging of an innocent Burmese man. The coolie presages the hanged man. Theroux’s treatment of the hanging is a brilliant re-imagining of what Blair might have experienced in Burma before defiantly writing his testimonial—“A Hanging”— which I and many others have used to protest capital punishment.

While early on, we get a strong sense of Blair’s fair head and empathetic heart, Burma Sahib also gives us a sense of Blair’s hand, but not just as the hand of an emerging novelist who stamped the year 1984 as a symbol of oppressive totalitarianism (indeed, Nineteen Eighty-Four transformed his pseudonym into an adjective describing dystopian surveillance and doublespeak). As part of the Imperial Police, Blair trained his Eton-educated sahib’s hand on many unsuspecting Burmese: “He could drink, he could fornicate, he could rubbish any native—and more than rubbish, he could threaten, he could kick them, bend them over and bamboo them until they howled. But he could not divulge the doubts of his inner thoughts.” This is the affective fallacy that rounds out Blair as fully human, not some saintly savior of the oppressed.

Affective fallacy

So what exactly is affective fallacy? Again, from Tom McNeely: “Does the narrative suggest enough objectivity toward the main character or characters to make them fallible and allow them therefore the possibility for growth, or does it conspire with the character to protect that character from judgment and demonize other characters, thus paralyzing the narrative?”

By unfailingly painting Blair’s dark side, Theroux does not fail the reader. Neither does he fail Blair. In the same scene where Theroux provides a litany of Blair’s failures, he liberates his character by having the disgraced Blair stand up to a superior. “He had violated the code of the pukka sahib, for whom free speech was unthinkable …. He could never divulge the doubts of his inner thoughts … or abuse a superior.” But the possibility of growth is realized; Blair abuses his superior and is banished to Katha, a backwater that becomes the setting for Burmese Days, a work of auto fiction.

Toward the end of the novel, we see our protagonist transformed, prepared to write the novels that would make his adopted name an adjective.

“He knew that man: it was the self who’d hidden within him since Mandalay in 1922, the secret self, his real self—not Blair but that other man who’d never accept the police, who’d hated every moment of his colonial captivity, enemy of the sahib log …“

*In appreciation of Tom McNeely and other Stanford writing teachers (John Evans, Deborah Johnson, Ron Nyren, Angela Pneuman, Eric Puchner, and Dom Russ-Combs) who guided RCO on his path to finding his own secret sharer as a novelist.

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Published under International Cooperation with "Sindh Courier"