Why I Write

Orwell’s narrative essay on the hanging of an Indian prisoner he witnessed while in Burma explore the implications of imperialism and its representation in current literature. Orwell wrote the essay in first person. The reader can assume that the speaker is Orwell himself, but Orwell never explicitly stated what role he played in Burma. At one point he wrote: “The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind” (96). Orwell could either have been a magistrate, which would imply that he occupied a significant official position while in Burma, or he could have been part of “the like,” a broad term used to designate all of the English-born officials stationed and working in India at the time.

This ambiguity reflects the overall vague, ambiguous, and undefined nature of an Englishman’s relationship with their country’s imperial practices. Orwell left himself anonymous as the speaker and protected under the generalized term “the like.” The term Empire functions in the same way in that it encompasses nuanced ideas and cultural relations while never pining the responsibility for the Empire’s doings on a single person.

Ambiguity and the protective distance of generalization is reflected in the text by the disciplinary figures directly responsible for the prisoner’s death: they are all Indian born. Francis, the Dravidian (or, southern Indian and possibly Sri Lankin) jailer, the wardens, and the convict-hangman, are all Indian born. They are the ones who physically touch the prisoner and are directly implicated in the man’s death. The English superintendent merely gives the orders, and Orwell’s group merely watches. The actual responsibility for the death of this Indian man is thus shifted to the Indian natives willing to do the biding of the English Empire.

By distancing themselves in such a way, the English present in “A Hanging” represent the moral distance England allowed its citizens when colonialism was discussed. By not physically “touching” the crime or criminal, the English could continue with their hypocritical and willfully ignorant approach to imperialism as defined by Orwell in the essays “Why I Write” and “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius.”

Furthermore, the style of “A Hanging” directly reflects the points discussed in “Why I Write” on political purpose and aesthetics. This essay is written in a style that incorporates narrative devices such as characterization and the use of the stray dog as a metaphor for colonial subjects encountering a colonizer. This essay is also political and demonstrates Orwell’s first-hand experience of colonialism. “A Hanging” unites both Orwell’s aesthetic tendencies and his desire to center his writing around a political purpose. This is best reflected in the final paragraph of the essay, in which the men still living attempt to cope with the suddenness of death by drinking and laughing. The essay’s final lines jerk the reader back to moral reality like the noose jerks against the prisoner: “The dead man was a hundred yards away” (101). This ends the essay ominously; the reader does not finish on the image of men living, but with the discarded corpse, the implication being that these laughing men will continue to cope with their imperialistic duties and order executions.