Traces of a Prophet

...In Orwell's day a vicious crime wave resulted from the total dislocation of Burmese life by the intrusion of the English, who replaced respected elders with their bureaucrats and the traditional monastic schools with the British educational system...

...In Moulmein, where Orwell headed the police in 1926 and his mother, Ida Mabel Limouzin, grew up, Larkin is able to trace a few biographical strands...

...She suggests that Orwell's political novels are also connected to the situation in what is now called Myanmar...

...People in teahouses change the subject when unknown customers take a nearby table...

...He was prescient about the political debacle that would engulf the Burmese nation, she argues...

...Nevertheless, Finding George Orwell is a fascinating, sensitively written book with superb insight into current conditions in Myanmar...

...His background led him naturally to the job...

...In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) he wrote of beating servants: "Nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking...

...Larkin's volume is organized around chapters related to the towns Orwell served in...

...The money from Burma's resources, including opium derivatives, along with aid received from China, Singapore and Japan, goes to support an Army almost as large as that of the U.S...

...Initially he was enthusiastic about being posted there as a police officer, but he ended up hating both the territory and the British Empire...

...He spent nine months in the prosperous oil town of Syriam (now called Thanlyin) and six in Insein, site of the most secure British prison-currently the most notorious Burmese prison...

...All Larkin reports is that the Katha Tennis Club-Britain's legacy-is still in operation with its one court...

...Apparently some Burmese agree: One old scholar she interviewed refers to Orwell as "the prophet...

...Today it is almost impossible not to pass university exams...

...As in Mandalay, she is struck by the slowly decaying, haunted architectural remains of the empire...

...She discovers a small street named for the family...

...His youth in a private school under vicious authoritarian management must also be taken into account...

...The cost of removal and revision falls on the publisher...

...It was once the wealthiest in the region, exporting 3 million tons of rice in the 1920s-half of the world's supply-much of it from the Delta's incredibly rich soil...

...After those accompanying her arrive, he is blank-faced when she tries to talk to him, claiming he cannot understand her...

...Emma Larkin follows their lead with Finding George Orwell in Burma...

...Facts about Orwell's time in Burma are few and scattered...

...Whether ornot Orwell's experience in Burma was central to the writing of those novels, his ideas about totalitarianism and its effects on human nature are now being played out in the imperial backwater he left behind...

...Most of Larkin's information centers around Orwell's time in Rangoon, and none of it is complimentary or suggestive of someone awakening to the cruelties imposed on the poor...

...There were too many contributing events over the years-the Spanish Revolution, Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, World War ? , to name just a few-that surely provided him with material...

...Besides studying the Indian Penal Code and other necessary technical books, Orwell became fluent in Hindustani, Burmese and Karen, the language of a local ethnic group...

...He was out of the tropical morass of the Delta and could enjoy cigars and French wines...

...Larkin then travels farther north to Maymyo, a hill station where her subject spent a month doing military exercises...

...Magazines are submitted to censorship after they are printed...

...Htin Aung, who grew up to be vice chancellor of Rangoon University, witnessed a friend slashed by Orwell's cane when the boy accidentally rolled under the officer's feet...

...Katha, a small town beyond Mandalay, was Orwell's final Burma posting and the primary locale of Burmese Days...

...Because of the government's fear of students in groups-many of the 1988 antigovernment demonstrations started at the universities-it has instituted a program of "distance education"-learning by television and correspondence...

...Maymyo's new inhabitants are retired generals and drug lords (Burma is the world's second largest producer of heroin, after Afghanistan...

...His friend Christopher Hollis recalled Orwell being every inch the imperial policeman who loved singing bawdy songs and believed corporal punishment necessary to control the Burmese...

...We're just not free to publish it...

...Her premise, however, adds a new twist...

...Certainly something happened to Orwell in Burma, but Larkin's suggesting it was the principal inspiration for Animal Farm and 1984 seems a stretch...

...Larkin speculates that he may have taken a Burmese mistress, given his poems about prostitutes and liaisons between Burmese women and Englishmen...

...Thus she begins in Mandalay, where he was trained to be an assistant district superintendent...

...his mother's family traded in teak and built ships in southern Burma...

...That Burma and his experience of empire, which he came to loathe, may have helped to lay the base of his political convictions is likely, but by the 1940s it must be seen as one experience among many weighing on the writer's mind...

...Once he finished his training in January 1924, he was assigned to Myaungmya, in the Delta region of the Irrawaddy, famous for mosquitoes, humidity and its monotonous landscape...

...When the author asked why particular things in a magazine were marked for removal, a printer told her, "I don't think even the people at the censorship board know why any more...

...They knew, for instance, that the banks were in trouble when banking suddenly was not mentioned in newspapers and magazines...

...Reviewed by Karen Swenson Author, "A Daughter's Latitude, "The Landlady in Bangkok," "A Sense of Direction" Over the last 15 years a genre has emerged that attempts to elucidate an author's works on the basis of his foreign travels...

...Moulmein is the setting, too, for "Shooting an Elephant," Orwell's masterful essay depicting the lose-lose situation of a colonial power...

...The result is that Burmese learn to read between the lines...

...the headstone of Eliza Emma Limouzin, first wife of Ida's father...

...But when Orwell returned to England on leave in June 1927, to his family's horror he announced he was not returning to Burma and intended instead to become a writer...

...No letters ofhis from this period survive...

...Following A year in the Delta, Orwell was relocated to the fringes of Rangoon...

...In another location in the Delta, as she leaves a village by boat, all the villagers line up to see her off, but when she waves, none respond...

...Operating electronic equipment, telephones, fax machines, or modems without a government license entails heavy fines...

...According to Larkin, "Every word on every page" produced by every press in Burma is checked by government censors...

...The nation has been ground to dust by its governing generals, formerly known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council, now transformed into the State Peace and Development Council...

...Anyone may be a potential Military Intelligence informer...

...In one guesthouse where Larkin stayed, they added to her bill a charge for copying documents the police required about her...

...and the birth certificate of a George Limouzin...

...Born Eric Blair in northern India, he did not arrive in England until he was almost two...

...One Burmese writer explained, "In Burma we are free to write whatever we want...

...And a joke has it that rather than writing one novel about Burma, Burmese Days (1934), he wrote threethe other two being Animal Farm (1945) and 7954(1949...

...His father worked all his life in the Indian colonial service...

...All this, of course, is reminiscent of Animal Farm and 1984 and supports the other halfofLarkin's argument...

...The author tells of meeting an elderly man on a swampy path who asks her in Burmese what she thinks of the fine Burmese highway she is traversing...

...a friend can only recall that in the first he wrote to her he said she could not, without being there, imagine how horrible his existence was...

...Today it is the site of the central military academy, used to train officers...

...In her travels Larkin was under continuous surveillance, as is every Burmese...

...Hunger now stalks the land...

...But most interesting is her uncovering some Anglo-Burmese relatives of Orwell's, who had lived in a section of town called "Little England" and left in the early 1960s after General Ne Win seizedpower...

...Burmese farmers are forced to sell to the military below market prices...

...Burma once had a very high literacy rate and one of the best educational systems in Asia...

...The nation once had a thriving oil industry but is now limping along with the aid of Unocal...

...Although George Orwell only spent five years in Burma, they may well have contributed to the development of his political thinking...

...The government has intentionally dismantled it...

...She finds the Officers' Mess where he lived, but a guard refuses to let her enter because it still houses policemen...

...Burma has the lowest income level of any South Asian country...

...Gavin Young's In Search of Conrad (1991) and Peter Hopkirk's Quest for Kim (1997), on Rudyard Kipling, are among the best of these books...