Burmese Days

by

George Orwell

Themes and Colors
Imperialism and Hypocrisy Theme Icon
Status and Racism Theme Icon
Class, Gender, and Sex Theme Icon
Freedom of Speech, Self-Expression, and Loneliness Theme Icon
Friendship and Loyalty Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Burmese Days, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Status and Racism Theme Icon

Burmese Days suggests that human beings are fundamentally status-seeking creatures and that racism serves to create status hierarchies pandering to the egos of those in power. Set in Burma during its colonization by the British Empire (1886–1948), the novel represents Burma’s British colonial government’s attempt to liberalize its racial politics to forestall anti-colonial Burmese nationalism and maintain power. One way that the government “liberalizes” its policies is to pressure all-white “European Clubs” in Burma to accept a token non-white member. The novel illustrates how this pressure causes tension in and around one such European Club in a remote colonial outpost called Kyauktada. Because in the British Empire whiteness denotes status, most of the Club’s all-white members don’t want to accept a non-white member. They use racist stereotypes and attitudes to justify their exclusion of non-white people, which is ultimately about preserving the social status that whiteness currently gives them. Meanwhile, a corrupt Burmese official named U Po Kyin is determined to become the single non-white member of the European Club because he thirsts for the status that proximity to white Europeans would lend him. His ambition leads him to ruin the life of Dr. Veraswami, the other non-white elite that the Club might conceivably elect, as well as the life of Dr. Veraswami’s one British friend, a disaffected timber merchant named John Flory. Thus, the novel implicitly argues that white racism is ultimately about preserving unearned social status. Moreover, it suggests that status-seeking behaviors, which are very common throughout humanity, lead to pernicious ambitions and immoral behavior.  

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Status and Racism ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Status and Racism appears in each chapter of Burmese Days. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Status and Racism Quotes in Burmese Days

Below you will find the important quotes in Burmese Days related to the theme of Status and Racism.
Chapter 1 Quotes

“But Flory will desert his friend quickly enough when the trouble begins. These people have no feeling of loyalty towards a native.”

Related Characters: U Po Kyin (speaker), John Flory, Dr. Veraswami
Page Number: 12
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Any hint of friendly feeling towards an Oriental seemed to him a horrible perversity. He was an intelligent man and an able servant of his firm, but he was one of those Englishmen—common, unfortunately—who should never be allowed to set foot in the East.

Related Characters: John Flory, Dr. Veraswami, Ellis
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“You’ve got to be a pukka sahib or die, in this country. In fifteen years I’ve never talked honestly to anyone except you.”

Related Characters: John Flory (speaker), Elizabeth Lackersteen, Dr. Veraswami, Ma Hla May
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“Flory’s embraces meant nothing to her (Ba Pe, Ko S’la’s younger brother, was secretly her lover), yet she was bitterly hurt when he neglected them. Sometimes she had even put love philtres in his food. It was the idle concubine’s life that she loved, and the visits to her village dressed in all her finery, where she could boast of her position as a ‘bo-kadaw’—a white man’s wife; for she had persuaded everyone, herself included, that she was Flory’s legal wife.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen, Ma Hla May
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

There was, he saw clearly, only one way out. To find someone who would share his life in Burma—but really share it, share his inner, secret life, carry away from Burma the same memories as he carried. Someone who would love Burma as he loved it and hate it as he hated it. Who would help him live with nothing hidden, nothing unexpressed. Someone who understood him: a friend, that was what it came down to.

A friend. Or a wife?

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. […] What shall it profit a man if he save his own soul and lose the whole world?

Related Characters: John Flory, U Po Kyin, Dr. Veraswami
Page Number: 78–79
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever; with Elizabeth, it was those two terms during which she rubbed shoulders with the rich. Thereafter her whole code of living was summed up in one belief, and that a simple one. It was that the Good (‘lovely’ was her name for it) is synonymous with the expensive, the elegant, the aristocratic; and the Bad (‘beastly’) is the cheap, the low, the shabby, the laborious. Perhaps it is in order to teach this creed that expensive girls’ schools exist.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen
Page Number: 90
Explanation and Analysis:

In anticipation she tasted the agreeable atmosphere of Clubs, with punkahs flapping and barefooted white-turbaned boys reverently salaaming; and maidans where bronzed Englishmen with little clipped moustaches galloped to and fro, whacking polo balls. It was almost as nice as being really rich, the way people lived in India.

Related Characters: Elizabeth Lackersteen
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

It was not the pwe girl’s behaviour, in itself, that had offended her; it had only brought things to a head. But the whole expedition—the very notion of wanting to rub shoulders with all those smelly natives—had impressed her badly. She was perfectly certain that that was not how white men ought to behave.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

He so wanted her to love Burma as he loved it, not to look at it with the dull, incurious eyes of a memsahib!

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

The European Club, that remote, mysterious temple, that holy of holies far harder of entry than Nirvana! Po Kyin, the naked gutter-boy of Mandalay, the thieving clerk and obscure official, would enter that sacred place, call Europeans ‘old chap,’ drink whisky and soda and knock white balls to and fro on the green table!

Related Characters: John Flory, U Po Kyin, Dr. Veraswami, Ma Kin
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

She had brought back to him the air of England—dear England, where thought is free and one is not condemned forever to dance the danse du pukka sahib for the edification of the lower races.

Related Characters: John Flory, Dr. Veraswami
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:

It was true what she had said, he had robbed her of her youth.

Related Characters: John Flory, Ma Hla May
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

If only he would always talk about shooting, instead of about books and Art and that mucky poetry! In a sudden burst of admiration she decided that Flory was really quite a handsome man, in his way. He looked so splendidly manly, with his pagri-cloth shirt open at the throat, and his shorts and puttees and shooting boots! And his face, lined, sunburned, like a soldier’s face. He was standing with his birth-marked cheek away from her.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen
Related Symbols: Birthmark, Leopard Skin
Page Number: 161–162
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

He had not even the heart to be angry any longer. For he had perceived, with the deadly self-knowledge and self-loathing that come to one at such a time, that what had happened served him perfectly right. For a moment it seemed to him that an endless procession of Burmese women, a regiment of ghosts, were marching past him in the moonlight […]. He had dirtied himself beyond redemption, and this was his just punishment.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen, Ma Hla May , Mrs. Lackersteen
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

They would all have fallen at the feet of a lieutenant the Honourable if he had shown the smallest courtesy; as it was, everyone except the two women detested him from the start. It is always so with titled people, they are either adored or hated. If they accept one it is charming simplicity, if they ignore one it is loathsome snobbishness; there are no half-measures.

Related Characters: Elizabeth Lackersteen, Mrs. Lackersteen, Verrall
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

He unrolled it on the table they had just picked up. It looked so shabby and miserable that he wished he had never brought it. She came close to him to examine the skin, so close that her flower-like cheek was not a foot from his own, and he could feel the warmth of her body. So great was his fear of her that he stepped hurriedly away. And in the same moment she too stepped back with a wince of disgust, having caught the foul odour of the skin. It shamed him terribly. It was almost as though it had been himself and not the skin that stank.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen, Ma Hla May
Related Symbols: Leopard Skin
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

U Po Kyin’s version (he had a way of being essentially right even when he was wrong in detail) was that Elizabeth had been Flory’s concubine and had deserted him for Verrall because Verrall paid her more.

Related Characters: John Flory, U Po Kyin, Elizabeth Lackersteen, Ma Hla May , Verrall
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“Order the police to open fire at once!” shouted Mr. Macgregor from the other side. “You have my authority.”

“And tell them to aim low! No firing over their heads. Shoot to kill. In the guts for choice!”

Related Characters: Mr. Macgregor (speaker), Ellis (speaker), John Flory, Maxwell
Page Number: 250
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

Verrall, it was quite certain, would never marry Elizabeth; young men of Verrall’s stamp do not marry penniless girls met casually at obscure Indian stations.

Related Characters: John Flory, Verrall
Page Number: 260
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Her servants live in terror of her, though she speaks no Burmese. She has an exhaustive knowledge of the Civil List, gives charming little dinner-parties and knows how to put the wives of subordinate officials in their places—in short, she fulfills with complete success the position for which Nature had designed her from the first, that of a burra memsahib.

Related Characters: John Flory, Elizabeth Lackersteen, Mr. Macgregor
Page Number: 287
Explanation and Analysis: