Shooting an Elephant

E. M. Forester's novel, A Passage to India, is what I would place in the category of ticklish as far as a text to teach when talking about India's history of the British Empire and the Raj, especially when the audience is the high school students at the Antwerp International School, or AIS, in Antwerp, Belgium.

A few years ago I was hired as a long-term substitute teacher for the English and Theory of Knowledge component at AIS for the IB program/me there. As a result, by and large, the texts and subjects were already chosen and I had never read the novel, so it was going to be a new experience for me as well. Forester was heavily criticized and shunned by both sides of the equation when he wrote his controversial piece.

On the one hand, he was shunned not only for his personal lifestyle as a homosexual, but also because he painted a rather bleak picture of how the British treated the Indians, both upper and lower classes. On the other hand, he was criticized for taking the position of the Indians, or at least showing their perspectives as Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. His crime? He was an outsider to both societies, so both societies felt he did not have the right to speak his voice. He was not for the British and he wasn't Indian by birth, so he was doomed by the public to be an authorial mongrel, a literary slumdog.

One of the more scathing portraits of the British Raj is Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days, a highly-depressing tableau of the English in Southeast Asia, portending the end of the Empire to say the least. However, it is a rather more concise essay called, "Shooting an Elephant" that captures quite vividly the impossibility of the situation.

Orwell was a mid-level civil servant, young and away from his native England, stationed as police officer in Burma when an elephant goes on a rampage in the village. As the officer of the law, and symbol of the "power," Orwell is faced with an impossible decision. When the elephant is finally tracked down and cornered, its "rampage" is over. However, by this point the entire village has become excited and is waiting to see what Orwell will do. His choices are: don't shoot the elephant and loose the respect and fear of the indigenous population; or, shoot and "innocent" animal and doom it to a slow, painful death. Surrounded by the mob, Orwell makes a decision, he shoots the elephant.

In Forester's novel, there is a running motif of the fact that when one visits India, the trip is not "complete" until you ride an elephant. All of the people back in India will have one burning question upon your return from the sub-continent, "Did you ride an elephant?" Cultural and societal expectations run deep when you travel, both from those whom you have left behind, and with those whose culture you are visiting. In A Passage to India, the Indians feel obliged to supply an elephant ride at some point for the visitors, both parties knowing how staged the event actually is.

The student body of AIS is rather unique. Because Antwerp is the world's diamond clearing house (at least 75% of all of the world's diamonds pass through it), the private school caters to the diamond industry, specifically Indian diamond cutters and traders. Roughly half of the population is made up of these diamond families from India. The other half of the student population is mostly British, South African, Belgian, and Dutch. From that group, there is also a portion of families who are part of the diamond trade as well.

When reading A Passage to India, there are some rather "ticklish" situations in which an Indian is condemned of doing something unsavory to a British woman in a series of caves, which were supposed to be part of an excursion, including, elephants. The court case becomes a highly divisive event in the town and between the British and the Indians and within the Hindu and Muslim communities it is both divisive and cohesive against a common enemy.

We watched a part of David Lean's epic rendition of the novel, and I was surprised to see who plays the most educated Indian in the story, Professor Godbole, (a sort of Voltairian Pangloss), Alec Guinness. I found this a bit odd, sort of a British blackface role. I asked the students if they found it odd that a white guy was made up to be an educated Indian professor, as if there were not enough Indians to find to fill the role.

The response was guarded, and for the most part, the "white" students found no problem at all, while the Indians seemed uneasy. I let it go for the moment, and later in the novel's discussion a few days later, we got to the more controversial part of the novel that got Forester in trouble by both sides of the story, the idea that perhaps Britain should leave India. Looking at my student composition, I could not let this go, and asked the question of what they thought about the partition. Again, very guarded response. For the most part, the "white" kids shrugged, and the Indians tried not to engage.

Finally, the tension broke, the elephant in the room was shot. One of the wealthiest female students in the room, (her family owns one of the largest diamond companies in the world), blurted out, "my grandfather was a slave during the Raj empire." At that point, all the Indians began to relate similar stories, at which the "white" kids, more or less, gaped with disbelief. They had no idea. When the movie Blood Diamonds had come out a few years before, apparently there had been a similar, "huh???" as these kids did not know about this aspect of the diamond business. And, more recently, when I was teaching there, "Slumdog Millionaire" came out and many of the more wealthy Mumbai students, mired in denial, said, "That is not India!"

We are often put in such situations, whether willingly or not, when facing other cultures because there are so many "ticklish" political, social, economic, or otherwise questions that we are often either aware of and in denial about, or completely oblivious to until confronted by the elephant in the room. It is highly likely that the "white" kids' grandparents or great-grandparents were those who "owned" the great-grandparents and grandparents of the now, über-rich Indian kids. The ensuing discussion got pretty heated to say the least because once the elephant was shot, there was nothing to do but to examine the corpse.

These kids will soon be leading these large diamond companies, both Indian and non. They, like ourselves, will continue to face their own elephants, just as I will soon face, both literally and figuratively when I journey to India as a "white" guy. Although I am an American, I will nonetheless be seen as a part of the West, and as a westerner, I will be traveling to the East. I imagine that I will encounter some "ticklish" situations and have to make decisions with regards to whether I take a metaphorical or physical elephant ride, or not.