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Books Like Burmese Days
Colonial Novels Like Burmese Days
George Orwell's Burmese Days is one of the great novels of colonial self-disgust — Flory seeing clearly what the Raj is and being unable to escape it. These 8 novels share its unflinching portrait of the colonial world from the inside, its morally serious protagonists, and its conviction that imperialism corrupts the colonizers as surely as it damages the colonized.
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A Passage to India
by E.M. Forster
Dr Aziz and the British colonial community of Chandrapore — Forster's masterpiece is the finest companion to Burmese Days: the same portrait of the colonial world as a hermetic social system that prevents genuine connection, and the same sympathy for the Indians that the system exists to subordinate; more formally accomplished than Burmese Days but sharing its fundamental political honesty
- 2Buy
Shooting an Elephant
by George Orwell
Orwell's 1936 essay based directly on his experience in Burma — the essay version of what Burmese Days dramatizes; the most direct account of what colonial service felt like from inside, and the clearest statement of what the novel is arguing about the psychological cost of being the man with the gun
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the Congo River to find Kurtz — Conrad's novella is the foundational European text about colonial horror, and Burmese Days is in part Orwell's response to it: where Conrad's darkness is primordial and existential, Orwell's is mundane and institutional — the petty cruelties of the club, the racial condescension of the mess table
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Fowler, a British journalist in 1950s Vietnam, watching the naive American Alden Pyle's idealistic intervention destroy the things it claims to save — Greene's novel shares Burmese Days's portrait of a Westerner who sees through his country's colonial project but is complicit in it anyway, and its interest in the relationship between cynicism, guilt, and inaction
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Kim
by Rudyard Kipling
Kimball O'Hara, the orphan son of an Irish soldier, playing the Great Game between British and Russian intelligence in 1880s India — Kipling's novel represents the colonial adventure narrative that Orwell's Burma writing argues against: the romance of empire that Flory has seen through and cannot recover; reading Kim alongside Burmese Days shows the ideological distance between the two visions
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo's Igbo village and the arrival of British missionaries and administrators — Achebe's novel was written partly in response to Conrad's Africa and the Western literary tradition of which Burmese Days is a part; it tells the colonial story from the colonized side, which gives it a moral clarity that Orwell's novel, however honest, cannot achieve from Flory's position inside the system
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens the butler's decades of loyal service to a Nazi sympathizer, and his belated recognition of what his loyalty has meant — Ishiguro's novel transposes Burmese Days's central dynamic into a domestic English setting: a man of intelligence who has chosen not to use his intelligence for judgment, whose professional loyalty to a flawed institution has required the suppression of his own moral knowledge
- 8Buy
The Raj Quartet
by Paul Scott
The British in India from 1942 to Independence in 1947, across four novels — Scott's monumental sequence is the most sustained fictional examination of the last years of British India; shares Burmese Days's interest in the structural deformations that colonial authority produces in the colonizers, expanded from one man's crisis to a whole society's reckoning
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