Burmese Days

Burmese Days is the first novel and second book of the English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. It is set in British Burma during the waning days of the empire, when the country was ruled from Delhi as part of British India.

At the centre of the novel is John Flory, a lone and lacking individual trapped inside a bigger system that is undermining the better side of his own nature. What the book describes is both the corruption of the local administration and the bigotry of the imperial one, in a society where the working assumption is that the local people are interesting but finally inferior.

The novel was published first in the United States, because of concerns that it might be libellous: the real provincial town of Katha had been described too realistically, and some of the fictional characters were based too closely on identifiable people. A British edition followed a year later with some of the names changed. Some old Burma hands felt that Orwell's harsh portrayal of colonial society had rather let the side down.

In a letter written in 1946, Orwell said that the book was unfair in some ways and inaccurate in some details, but that much of it was simply reporting what he had seen for himself.