please chose a discussion question or study question that is provided in the beginning of the pdf and write a short essay with a introduction, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion, so that’s 5 paragraphs answering the discussion question about the article.

What do you think is the most important lesson about the nature of European imperialism that Orwell is trying
to tell us in his story about shooting an elephant in Burma?
2. “Although they disagree about the nature of imperialism, Orwell and Kipling share certain similarities in how
they depict the conquered populations under British imperial control.” To what extent do you agree with this
statement?
3. On what points do Kipling and Crosby most strongly disagree about the nature of Imperialism?
George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936)
NOTE: The “Raj” is British India- at the time, the Raj included the present-day countries of Sri Lanka, Pakistan,
Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Burma as well as India itself.
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been
important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty
kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went
through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an
obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football
field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened
more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after
me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There
were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street
corners and jeer at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil
thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all
for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I
can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners
huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of
the men who had been Bogged with bamboos – all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could
get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence
that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I
know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was
stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make
my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something
clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest
joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal byproducts of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave
me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic
governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the
phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not
know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle,
an old 44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem.
Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild
elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.” It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their
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attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who
could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve
hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population
had no weapons and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and
raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped
out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had
been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a
steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the
case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the
vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child!
Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing
away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there
was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the
mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The
people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put
its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had
scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply
twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an
expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have
seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a
rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had
already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived
and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward
practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and
were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant
when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to
them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention
of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to
have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and
an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a
metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from
the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards
us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against
his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is
a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery –
and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant
looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing
off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I
did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not
turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the
least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow
faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to
be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but
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with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to
shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills
pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first
grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun,
standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an
absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the
white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the
conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the
“natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face
grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has
got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that
way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing
– no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was
one long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that
preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I
was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always
seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was
worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had
got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked
them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone,
but he might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and
test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the
mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground
was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about
as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of
the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary
sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in
general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans
would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that
happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim.
The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed
from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing
with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar
running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his
ear-hole, actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick – one never does when a shot goes home – but I
heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have
thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred
nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the
frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time –
it might have been five seconds, I dare say – he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous
senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the
same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly
upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see
the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a
moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his
trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly
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towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise
again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side
painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited
a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where
I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not
even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in
great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got
to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet
powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into
his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the
ticking of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans
were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the
afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but
he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be
killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I
was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was
worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me
legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the
others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
Source: http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/
Ruyard Kipling, The White Man’s Burden (1899)
Note: in addition to being a defender of Britain’s historical role in “civilizing” the non-white peoples of world, Kipling
is also known for being the author of The Jungle Book.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild–
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
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The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper–
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard–
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:–
“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Ye dare not stoop to less–
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Have done with childish days–
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!
Source: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp
Ernest Crosby, The Real “White Man’s Burden”
New York Times (Feb. 15, 1899).
NOTE: by the time this poem was written, the United States had become an imperial power after taking Puerto Rico,
Guam, and the Philippines from Spain following an 1898 war- a war started by the destruction of the battleship Maine
in the Spanish-controlled harbor of Havana, supposedly at the hands of the Spanish.
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Take up the White Man’s burden;
Send forth your sturdy sons,
And load them down with whisky
And Testaments and guns.
Throw in a few diseases
To spread in tropic climes,
For there the healthy niggers
Are quite behind the times.
And don’t forget the factories.
On those benighted shores
They have no cheerful iron-mills
Nor eke department stores.
They never work twelve hours a day,
And live in strange content,
Altho they never have to pay
A single cent of rent.
Take up the White Man’s burden,
And teach the Philippines
What interest and taxes are
And what a mortgage means.
Give them electrocution chairs,
And prisons, too, galore,
And if they seem inclined to kick,
Then spill their heathen gore.
They need our labor question, too,
And politics and fraud,
We’ve made a pretty mess at home;
Let’s make a mess abroad.
And let us ever humbly pray
The Lord of Hosts may deign
To stir our feeble memories,
Lest we forget — the Maine.
Take up the White Man’s burden;
To you who thus succeed
In civilizing savage hoards
They owe a debt, indeed;
Concessions, pensions, salaries,
And privilege and right,
With outstretched hands you raise to bless
Grab everything in sight.
Take up the White Man’s burden,
And if you write in verse,
Flatter your Nation’s vices
And strive to make them worse.
Then learn that if with pious words
You ornament each phrase,
In a world of canting hypocrites
This kind of business pays.
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Source: http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling

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