Orientalism is closely related to the concept of the Self and the Other because as Said points out in his second definition of Orientalism, it makes a distinction between the Occident, i.e. self and the Orient, i.e. the Other. Since the analysis of the relationship of the 'self' and the 'other' is at the heart of Postcolonialism and many define Postcolonialism in terms of the relationship of the self and the Other. For instance, Boehmer emphasizes that ‘Postcolonial theories swivel the conventional axis of interaction between the colonizer and colonized or the self and the Other’.
The Self and the Other can be translated to the Occident / Orient, us /them, The West /the rest,
center/margin, metropolitan/colonial subjects, vocal/silent. In all these cases Western literary and cultural canon defines "its other" in relation to himself, the other is an alien and alter ago, to and of the self, as the inferior reflection of Europe. By the process of Othering, the colonizers treat the colonized as ‘not fully human’, and as a result, it dehumanizes natives. Othering codifies and fixes the self as the true human and the other as other than human. The Colonizers consider themselves as the embodiment of “proper self” while label the colonized as “savages”.
Said focuses on the Myth of purity- which states that everything should be pure,there is no mixing of the language, tradition, culture etc. so the westerns create binary oppositions. “Burmese Days” revolves around the binary opposition of the Self and the Other, and the very essence of the Club is to make the distinction between the whites and non-whites more conspicuous. Hence, all the characters of the novel lay fitly on two categories: The natives and non-natives, the whites and non-whites, the Indians and Anglo-Indians, the familiar or stranger, the civilized and uncivilized or barbaric, the European and Asian, the us and them, and the Self and the Other. In addition, a set of stereotypes and clichés are attributed to the natives that have contributed to Orientalize them.
The Orient and Orientals are stamped with an otherness says Said, and this otherness is a threat that should be avoided. In all colonial novels, some negative attitudes and a set of fixed clichés are ascribed to this otherness. Edward Said underscores that the starting point for all Orientalists is to recognize these stereotypes. It is not a difficult task to see; to some extent these images come true in “Burmese Days”. For instance, all the natives particularly the servants are lazy and lethargic, as Mrs. Lackersteen complains about the laziness of the servants , or Ko S’la, Flory’s servant is lazy and dirty, and his ex-wife as ‘a fat, lazy cat’ .U Po Kyin, more than anyone else stands for cunning, intrigue and flattery which were mentioned earlier. His brain though cunning was quite barbaric . For their distorted minds, Eliza mocks them for blocking up the roadway for spectacle, as Flory answered that ‘there are no traffic regulations here’ . Flory calls Ma Hla May a ‘liar’ when she said no brown hands touched me, however the readers know that she had an affair with a brown man. The Orientals have no nobility and grace except by accompanying and camaraderie with the occidentals. U Po Kyin and Veraswami’s efforts for admission to the Club are for this nobility and prestige, as Dr. Veraswami pointed it in his example of barometer.
For mistreatment to animals, one can remember the scene that ‘a fat yellow woman with her longyi hitched under her armpits was chasing a dog round a hut, smacking at it with a bamboo and laughing.’ Recurring images do not confine to the above mentioned and many other labels such as superstition, strangeness, polygamy are also attributed to the Orientals. The natives believe that the ‘strips of alligator hide’ has magical properties ; Ma Hla May sometimes puts love-philters in Flory’s food; “The Burmese bullock-cart drivers seldom grease their
axles, probably because they believe that the screaming keeps away evil spirits” ; as the medicine, they eat and drink ‘herbs gathered under the new moon, tigers whiskers, rhinoceros horn, urine, menstrual blood!’ And finally Weiksa or magician who distributes magic bullet-proof jackets.
Edward Said points out that Oreint is always seen as mysterious and a muddle for the Occidents. Burma is an exotic place for Westerners and Orientals, strangeness and exoticism generate from that exotic locale. Elizabeth is terrified by this ‘strangeness’, as Adela in “A Passage to India” did. Accordingly, the bushes are foreign-looking, rhythms of the tropical seasons and hollow cries are strange ; Eliza among the natives’ spectacle wishes to escape from this strange place to familiar one, i.e. the Club and she always barked at strange Orientals Ko S’la is an ‘obscure martyrs of bigamy’ and Li Yeik, the Chinese shopkeeper had two girls as his concubines. In short, in Burmese Days like other colonial novels, a web of colonial images and cultural stereotypes are attributed to the Burmese which fix them in their inferior position.
Elizabeth as a memsahib is also bigoted and she felt ‘the hatefulness of being kin to creatures with black faces’ .Eliza’s overt racism is also shown in two occasions: when Flory, assuming that ‘she was different from that herd of fools at the Club’ and she will appreciate native’s culture, took her to a pwe, a kind of Burmese play. Another occasion was when they paid a visit to bazaar. At first she is shocked when she sees how they have blocked the road for their performance, and Flory answers that “there are no traffic regulations here. The native music is a ‘fearful ‘pandemonium, a strident squeal of pipes, a rattle like castanets and the hoarse thump of drums’ . Elizabeth felt insecure to go among ‘that smelly native crowd’ and she watches ‘the hideous and savage spectacle’ with tediousness and horror: It's grotesque, it's even ugly, with a sort of willful ugliness. And there's something sinister in it too. There's a touch of the diabolical in all Mongols. And yet when you look closely, what art, what centuries of culture you can see behind it! …Whenever you look closely at the art of these Eastern peoples you can see that--a civilization stretching back and back, practically the same, into times when we were dressed in woad.
Eliza comes from the ‘civilized places, and her superiority is blatantly expressed when she calls them with a very offensive term even in that time, Mongols. She considers the White racially and civilizationally superior to the Burmese. The word woad signifies that the present-day Burma is less civilized than the ancient Briton (in that times, woad was used for painting their bodies). Furthermore, they are connected to devil and devil worship (as the term diabolical and sinister connote); besides, the dancer girl becomes a ‘demon’ figure for her. She reproaches herself for coming among ‘this horde of natives’ with garlic and sweat smell’ and COARSE-LOOKING; like some kind of animal.
In the bazaar’s scene, Eliza once more humiliates the Orient and Orientals. The bazaar is described as ‘large cattle pen’ by ‘a cold putrid stench of dung or decay’, and ‘Everything's so horribly dirty’. Eliza becomes insecure and asked herself why Flory has brought her to ‘watch their filthy, disgusting habits’ (Ibid). The barbarity of the bazar and absolute savages was stifling her. The natives were ‘damnably dressed’. All the children are naked and one was ‘crawling like a large yellow frog’. The Chinese women practice deforming their insteps, a sign of being ‘behind the times’, an anachronism. She is too arrogant to say thank you to girls fanned them and poured out tea. It is a ‘sort of infra dig’ to sit in their houses. At length Eliza cannot tolerate the ‘absolutely DISGUSTING people’ and ‘beastly Oriental things’ and went out. Flory tries to calm her down that one should not expect all the people behave at the same manner, suppose, for instance, you were back in the Middle Ages.
Flory, the protagonist of the novel, at the first look, is against British Empire and he hates the devotion to Pukka Sahib code. He is ashamed of themselves and wonders how they oppose to Veraswami’s admission in the club only for his black skin. This seemingly animosity toward British Empire is revealed during a long conversation with Dr. Veraswami that he admits that we are here to “rub our dirt on them, and “wreck the whole Burmese national culture”. He goes further and prefers Thibaw, the last king of Burma to his white fellows. He believes that we do not have any “purpose except to steal”.What bothers Flory more than anything else is a lie,‘slimy white man’s burden humbug’, the pukka sahib pose. Flory knows that this lie corrupts not only the natives, but also the Whites themselves. The colonizers ‘build prison and call it progress’.
All the Asians in “Burmese Days” are re-presented as racially, civilizationally, and humanly inferior to the Europeans. They blackmail, accepts bribes, betray and believe that the end justifies the means. They are lazy, superstitious, primitive, awkward and clumsy─ for example for speaking English─ and demote their own culture and promote European culture. Orwell is guilty of commodification and essentialism. Commodification is an act of turning the natives into a commodity and essentialism, as Wisker points out, is the representation and construction of the people as if each individual were the same as the next and that people. It is ‘a reductive way of labeling and stereotyping colonized people’. In the course of the novel, the narrator lowers the natives to the level of inanimate creatures, less than humans. Using the expressions such as HORDE of natives, Burmans, servants; or a FLOCK of pot-bellied, naked children, SWARMs of stocky peasants, black CLOUDs; a MOB of People, a KNOT of Burmans, STRING of Burmans, a SWATH of hay are a way of labeling them. Furthermore, Orwell designates the Burmans in the manner he describes the animals. The old Mattu, the Hindu who looked after the European church is a ‘fever stricken creature, more like a grasshopper than a human being’. ‘He bends like a caterpillar; the oval faces of girls are compared to kittens’ ; the villagers with their rustic faces are like wild animals, and rebels like an enormous swarm of bees with their ‘animal heat’ are just some examples. Dr. Veraswami calls them ‘barbarous cattle’.
CONCLUSION:
The relationship between the European and the non-European in “Burmese Days” is in accordance with Said’s concept of the Self and the Other: the familiar ( Europe, The West, “us”) and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”). The gulf between the Occidentals and Orientals is so enormous that keeps them fixed in their own positions the former as superior and the latter inferior.
In “Burmese Days”, the Burmese culture, people and lifestyle are in the background, they are on the periphery and marginalized by their white settlers. The story swivels around the axis of the Anglo-Indians, focusing mostly on them. The very reality of the Club is to highlight the line between the natives and non-natives. The opposition of European community to the native’s admission signifies that the Burmese are less human than their white masters. All the Anglo- Europeans are bigoted, racist, mistreating the natives. Flory ruins a Burmese woman, Ellis blinds a school boy, Elizabeth disparages the Burmese culture, and all of them are affected with tropics and colonialism.
They keep a distance from the natives and Flory tries to come close to the natives unsuccessfully. Flory has taken a double perspective about natives that makes him
alienated and estranged which ends in committing suicide. He cannot come to terms with his situation as an expatriate in foreign land which does not have any end except to steal and to destroy the Burma economically and culturally and a moral internal conflict. Their faces are hidden behind the masks and their faces grow to them. This mask is ‘civilizing mission’, a slimy lie that undergoes to uplift their black brothers. Flory’s suicide displays a deep pessimism about the relationship of the natives and non-natives. Flory as the protagonist not only can erase this dividing line between the Anglo-Indians and Burmese, but also by his duplicity and cowardice and devotion to pukka sahib beatitudes make this line clear and visible.
On the other hand, the natives such as U Po Kyin, Dr.Veraswami, and Ma Hla May, among others are in the unprivileged positions. Ma Hla May is double colonized by Flory as a male and as an agent of the empire. Dr. Veraswami or as Ellis calls him Dr. very-slimy is a mouthful of the British Empire and in spite of his adoration for her, demotes at the end. U Po Kyin is a typical Oriental, though cunning but quite barbaric. He believes that end justifies the means and for gaining his goal i.e. to become a club’s member, he does the most vicious deeds.
Because of the imaginary line between these two poles, some stereotypes and clichés are attributed to the Orientals such as cunning, treachery, lethargy, mendacity, superstition, etc. They are reduced to the level of objects and animals.
As a result, the representation of the Self and the Other in “Burmese Days” and designation of some stereotypes and clichés to the Orientals follow Said’s model which is elaborated in his Orientalism. As Said himself alleges, one cannot get around this binary opposition and others like it and pretends that they do not exist. Therefore, we cannot disregard the Orientalist distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
REFERENCES:
Ashcroft, Bill and Pal Ahlawalia. (1999). Edward said: Paradox of Identity. London: Routledge.
Ashcroft, Bill, et al (ed). (1995). The Post-colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge.
by
saharu (student)
