Shooting an elephent

3. What is the conclusion an exhortation (formaning) in stanza 7?4. How are the natives looked upon?5. Kipling is an idealist, a realist, a racist, or a _________________? Give reasons for your choice.6. What may today’s reader object to in Kipling’s poem?______________________________________________________________7. What poetic devices are used in the poem? What effect do they create?Grammar questionsTake a closer look at any 1 or 2 stanzas of the poem.1. Which 2 word classes are dominant?a) _____________________b) ________________________ (which form?) ____________Explain: why is this the case? Think about the contents and the purpose of the poem…1Shooting an ElephantGeorge Orwell (c. 1936)IN MOULMEIN, IN LOWER BURMA, I was hated by large numbers of people–the only time inmy life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional policeofficer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter.No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alonesomebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvioustarget and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me upon the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelledwith hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces ofyoung men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance,got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were severalthousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except standon street corners and jeer at Europeans.All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind thatimperialism 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. In ajob like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddlingin the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, thescarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos–all these oppressed me withan intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and illeducated and I had had to think out myproblems in the utter silence that is imposed on everyEnglishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I knowthat it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knewwas that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evilspirited little beasts who tried to make myjob impossible. With one part of my mind I thought ofthe British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum,upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the worldwould be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal byproducts of imperialism; ask anyAnglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tinyincident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature ofimperialism–the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the subinspector at a police station the other endof the town rang me up on the phone and said that anelephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did notknow what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony andstarted out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but Ithought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and toldme about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one whichhad gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of“must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, theonly person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had takenthe wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephanthad suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and were quitehelpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raidedsome fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, whenthe driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences uponit.2The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarterwhere the elephant had been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboohuts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy,stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where theelephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably thecase in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get tothe scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gonein one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to haveheard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies,when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away,child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the cornerof a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed,clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought notto have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was anIndian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes.The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut,caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was therainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and acouple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted toone side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning withan expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful.Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot hadstripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man Isent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent backthe pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile someBurmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a fewhundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flockedout of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that Iwas going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when hewas merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was abit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made mevaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant–I had merely sent for the rifle todefend myself if necessary–and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marcheddown the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growingarmy of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there wasa metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yetploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant wasstanding eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice ofthe crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees toclean them and stuffing them into his mouth.I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I oughtnot to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant–it is comparable todestroying a huge and costly piece of machinery–and obviously one ought not to do it if it canpossibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no moredangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was alreadypassing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout cameback and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I wouldwatch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.3But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immensecrowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a longdistance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces allhappy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. Theywere watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me,but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly Irealized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and Ihad got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it wasat this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness,the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,standing in front of the unarmed native crowd–seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but inreality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. Iperceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that hedestroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” andso in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and hisface grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when Isent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know hisown mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand peoplemarching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing–no, that wasimpossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East,was one long struggle not to be laughed at.But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against hisknees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that itwould be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I hadnever shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a largeanimal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worthat least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds,possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who hadbeen there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They allsaid the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if youwent too close to him.It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-fiveyards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice ofme, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was goingto do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which onewould sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about asmuch chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of myown skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watchingme, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A whiteman mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The solethought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see mepursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And ifthat happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on theroad to get a better aim. The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of peoplewho see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were goingto have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I4did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar runningfrom ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimedstraight at his ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain wouldbe further forward.When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never does when a shotgoes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, intoo short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terriblechange had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body hadaltered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frighfful impact ofthe bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouthslobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imaginedhim thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did notcollapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legssagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You couldsee the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. Butin falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemedto tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted,for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash thatseemed to shake the ground even where I lay.I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that theelephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically withlong rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wideopen–I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die,but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where Ithought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did notdie. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued withouta pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from mewhere not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to thatdreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move andyet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle andpoured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression.The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half anhour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs and baskets even before I left, and I was told they hadstripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. Theowner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had donethe right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it.Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger mensaid it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant wasworth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie hadbeen killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting theelephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoidlooking a fool.