FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

Can we afford to leave anxiety out of the story of the empire? For nearly two hundred years the answer of colonialist historiography to this question has been one in favor of exclusion. It is not anxiety but enthusiasm that has been allowed to dominate its narratives. The latter is a mood which is consonant with all the triumphalist and progressivist moments of imperialism--its wars of conquest, annexation, and pacification in the subcontinent; its interventions in our environment and our economy by industrialization, monetization, and communication; its project of social engineering by administrative measures and its mission of civilizing by education. Its politics of expansion and improvement, its ethics of courage, discipline, and sacrifice, its aesthetics of orientalism have all been assimilated to this mood by a whole range of rhetorical, analytical, and narratological devices, so that enthusiasm has come to be regarded as the very mentality of imperialism itself. The result has been to promote an image of the empire as a sort of machine operated by a crew who know only how to decide but not to doubt, who know only action but no circumspection, and, in the event of a breakdown, only fear and no anxiety. However, the picture does not look nearly so neat when we step outside official discourse and meet individual members of that crew agonizing like Yeats-Brown over the immensity of things in a world whose limits are not known to them.

During the dying days of the empire the complexities of this predicament came to be widely known in the words of another Englishman, George Orwell, who too had gone out to serve the raj. The importance of his essay "Shooting an Elephant" for our discussion can hardly be overstated.8 It speaks from a situation which is not quite so aloof as Yeats-Brown's when he writes of his Indian environment as an "outside" of panoramic proportions viewed by a rider on horseback or a passenger out of the window of his railway carriage. In either case, the scene, described so well in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, is as broad as it is one that is swiftly passing by, so that the observations, for all their anguish, maintain a distance from what is observed. That it is an alienating rather than an inviting distance is witness to the fact that things have lost their significance in this world which the observer, in his anxiety, can apprehend only as an unparticularized whole.

By contrast, there is nothing that separates Orwell from his scene. Indeed the idea of separation would seem to be altogether out of place in the drama of that morning's events some seventy years ago in an obscure corner of Britain's South Asian empire, a small town of Burma called Moulmein. An elephant in a state of must had gone berserk, killed its mahout, destroyed parts of a slum, and was on a rampage threatening more lives and properties (see "SE," p. 5). The police officer, called to help, felt beleaguered as he found some thousands of the local population closing in to watch him shoot the beast. Packed with crowds and action, this is not just an outline sketched hurriedly from afar. To the contrary, the details of an involvement in a fast-approaching danger clutter the text. Yet as the crisis ticks away, a terrible sense of isolation gathers in the midst of that tumult, lifts off, and extends beyond the town to all of the empire--to all that goes by that name territorially as well as conceptually. It is precisely this unforeseen and somewhat abrupt development that deflects what might have shaped up as fear from its object and turns it into an anxiety addressed to nothing in particular--no elephant, no yellow face which Orwell so intensely dislikes, not even the dilemma of having to destroy the animal he would rather leave alone.

8. See George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant," in "Shooting an Elephant" and Other Essays (New York, 1950), pp. 3Ü12; hereafter abbreviated "SE."

Ranajit Guha is the founding editor of Subaltern Studies. His publications include A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963, 1996), Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983), and Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (forthcoming).