Burmese Days

The lake shone mercury white as the plane began its descent to Mandalay airport. I checked my i-phone’s clock, ‘16:43’, and adjusted it back by 90 minutes to get to local time.

The wistful ‘music-hall’ poem about a serviceman’s longing for the tropics after returning to England was penned by a 24-year-old Rudyard Kipling in 1890 on his own return to England after seven years in India.

But which bay? Mandalay is landlocked. Kipling never came to Mandalay, he only spent three days in Burma (now Myanmar) and mostly in Rangoon (now Yangon). Yet his words are the British-bulldog theme for Burma. Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, came and stayed longer. He traveled and worked in many parts of Burma and certainly traveled to Mandalay, en route to the hill-station of May-Mo (now Pin Oo Lin) where he was stationed for four years as part of the British-India police force.

I always picture Orwell in the latter part of his life — hand-rolled cigarette in mouth, scrappy hair, glasses, and the tatter-tatter of the keyboard. This image was on the back of several of his Penguin published books, including 1984, Burmese Days, and Animal Farm that I read as a schoolboy more than three decades ago. But it is The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out In Paris and London that I remember more vividly. As I walked the streets of Maymo I tried to imagine how Orwell would have felt as a young serviceman in 1920’s Burma, but it was only the tobacco-stained newspaper-man who came to mind.

George Orwell would have read Kipling’s Road to Mandalay. Maybe it was sung in the British Club or the Candacraig hotel in Maymo on the Gin and Bridge nights that feature in his famous Burma tale. Kipling’s son John, to whom the famous poem ‘If’ was written in 1895, died during the First World War at the bloody Battle of Loos in 1915. He had followed Kitchener’s call to serve the nation in the New Army. ‘If’ was widely printed after its publication in 1910, and likely would often have been framed in Officers’ quarters across British India. We also know that Orwell greatly admired Kitchener, and even before arriving in Burma, when the General died at sea at the hand of a German U-boat torpedo, Orwell wrote an obituary.

Burma had a history of British poets and writers grace its shores. Perhaps the earliest was John Leyden, better known to Scotsmen as the poet of Teviotdale, and the friend of Sir Walter Scott. John was a medical doctor who wrote on the languages and literature of the Indochinese nations. He was a surgeon in India, a professor, and also a judge at Calcutta. In1811 he accompanied the Governor-General to Java, and died from a fever caught in the bad air of a warehouse of books he had rushed to examine at Batavia (as Jakarta, the capital, was then known). Sir Walter Scott honoured Leyden's memory with the following:

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