In the classic essay "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell, the narrator, presumably Orwell himself, works as a police officer in Moulmein, a city in Burma, during the era of the British Raj. He receives orders to track down a rampaging elephant. He eventually shoots it, but he thinks that killing the elephant is unnecessary, and its suffering grieves him.
Orwell makes his sentiments clear early in the essay. He sympathizes with the Burmese and feels that the imperialism of the British is evil.
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.
He then explains in more detail the guilt that he feels when he sees Burmese prisoners in filthy lock-ups, their buttocks scarred from beatings with bamboo sticks. However, his feelings about the Burmese are ambivalent. Although he sympathizes with their situation as an oppressed and subjugated people, he is also annoyed and frightened by them. He calls them "evil-spirited little beasts" and confesses that sometimes he thinks it would give him pleasure to bayonet a Buddhist priest. In the incident with the elephant, he doesn't want to shoot it, but he feels like a puppet that must do the bidding of the huge crowd behind him. He has to play the role of a traditional white man whether he likes it or not.
As a man with relatively progressive political views, Orwell regarded British imperialism as morally wrong, in spite of being a policeman himself in Burma and therefore someone whose job was (at least indirectly) to enforce imperial rule. He knew that the British had no right to take over other people's countries and exploit them. Yet, as he states in "Shooting an Elephant," he could not help but feel a visceral dislike of many of the Burmese simply because of the hostility they understandably showed towards him. He describes the Buddhist priests as seemingly having nothing to do but stand on the street corners and jeer at English people such as himself. Under these conditions, it was impossible not to have mixed feelings, to put it mildly, about his role in Imperial Burma.
The dysfunctional situation comes to a head with the elephant incident. Orwell knows that the elephant, though it has been violent and has killed a man during its attack of "must," has now become harmless and that there is no reason to kill it. But a huge crowd of Burmese has gathered and egged him on to do something. Since the British are the ones in charge, he is expected to act, even against his own better judgement. This is where he has an epiphany: "when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys." He sees himself as a prisoner of the whole imperialist system, forced to become a kind of "hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib." He fires shot after shot into the elephant until it finally dies, and he realizes he has done it merely to "avoid looking a fool." In some sense, he finds himself hating both his own country and the people whom his country has exploited and victimized.
In this essay, Orwell expresses his feeling that imperialism as exerted by the British in Burma was "an evil thing." As such, he is, in theory at least, "all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors." His feelings, however, are conflicted, not least because, in performing a job he hated, he is also widely hated by every Burmese person he meets. The Buddhist priests in particular are an annoyance to him, and he harbors secret fantasies of killing them while also feeling guilty about it. Orwell explains that this kind of conflict is very commonly found in Anglo-Indian officials and anyone else who has served an imperialistic empire which is not doing him much good, but meanwhile he seems to impose tyranny upon the locals. In the moral, theoretical part of his mind, Orwell knows imperialism to be wrong, but in his day-to-day life, he feels mistreated by the Burmese, who hate him every day for doing his job.
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