However, his comments are breathtaking given that such unguarded public criticism of government would have landed him in a cramped cell just three years ago.

The average annual income of a low-level civil servant was around 300,000 kyat (approximately $300) in 2010, according to the United Kingdom’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His remarks ring true: Myanmar is ranked one of the 20 most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International.

A government civil servant can’t live on their earnings,” Kyaw Swe said. “There is a little bit of the ‘tea-money’ culture left. Indeed, Orwell’s publishers considered the original text of Burmese Days to be too realistic and made him change the names of some characters to avoid accusations of libel. In the book, U Po Kyin supplements his meagre salary by accepting bribes from both litigants, known euphemistically in Myanmar as taking “tea money”. Some of Orwell’s depictions, particularly the fictitious magistrate U Po Kyin, are as apt today as they were when he served as a colonial policeman in Katha, Kyaw Swe said. Astonishingly, it won a government award for literature last year. Orwell said the town had “not changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910”, when the British established a railway terminus.Ī century later, horse-drawn Hackney carriages can still be seen whisking people past the colonial prison, school, hospital, tin-roofed church and pagoda, which “rose from the trees like a slender spear tipped with gold”.Įighty years after its original publication, Burmese Days is enjoying a revival thanks to its recent translation into Burmese. The remote town, thinly disguised as Kyauktada in the book, is the real-life setting of Orwell’s first novel, which is no kinder to the “natives” than to the bigoted, brandy-soaked empire-builders of the British Raj. As residents of the quiet riverside town of Katha, they are successors to the “Orientals” reviled in the book by Orwell, the British satirist who went on to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It is no coincidence that Kyaw Swe and his colleagues are debating the once-banned semi-fictitious novel set in the 1920s. “The judge’s character is most like the Myanmar character.” The way it shows Myanmar people,” said Kyaw Swe, a baker, railing against one of the characters in the book, the scheming judge U Po Kyin. “I don’t like the behaviour of the Burmese in the book. Nibbling on finger-food at a low breakfast table in northern Myanmar, members of the Katha Township Development Committee sat and discussed the novel Burmese Days, George Orwell ‘ s caustic homage to the “ dirty work of Empire “.

Burmese days