See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/357351041

Revisiting Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” through the Lens of Post-Colonial

Ecocriticism

Article in Litinfinite Journal · December 2021

DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50

CITATION READS

1 2,718

1 author:

Sami Chisty
Notre Dame University Bangladesh
4 PUBLICATIONS 3 CITATIONS

SEE PROFILE

All content following this page was uploaded by Sami Chisty on 09 February 2022.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

Revisiting Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” through the Lens of Post-

Colonial Ecocriticism

Sami Hossain Chisty

Lecturer, Department of English Language and Literature, Notre Dame University, Bangladesh.
Mail Id: [email protected] | ORCID ID: 0000-0002-8271-4263

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to break away from the canonical reading of George Orwell’s
most celebrated essay “Shooting an Elephant” and analyze it from the perspective of post-
colonial ecocriticism. Ever since its publication, “Shooting an Elephant” has been viewed as a
literary work that depicts the disturbing nature of imperialism and the impacts of its byproducts
both on the colonized and the colonizer. This paper postulates that employing such an
anthropocentric view while reading a text that projects the predicament of an animal and the
exploitation of nature can be an intellectual misjudgment. The symbiosis of post-colonialism and
ecocriticism ensures a synergy that is essential for contemporary literary criticism.The project of
post-colonial ecocriticism is to re-read the canonical texts common to both fields and trace out
ecocritical concerns in postcolonial literature and postcolonial aspects of environmental writing.
In this paper, the ideas of post-colonialism in “Shooting an Elephant” have been addressed while
keeping the environmental concerns into consideration.

Keywords: Post-Colonial Ecocriticism, Imperialism, Anthropocentric, Symbiosis, Synergy

Introduction

It might sound sharp to the ears, but George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant”
seems to have lost its appeal to the academics. The reason is not necessarily the essay’s inability to
make sense anymore, it is rather an attitude of the critics that they have done enough justice to the
text and its author. If we are to blame anything for the decreasing prominence of this masterpiece in
scholarly articles, we can point our fingers at the canonical reading of the essay. “Shooting an
Elephant” is almost always read as a reaction to British imperialism. I am not denying the fact that
it is a text that projects a vivid picture of imperialism, but what I intend to do is to point out what
else it is about and why it is necessary to revisit the text with a new lens. An ecocritical reading of
this essay will not necessarily reduce it to a talk solely focused on nature, it will rather embed a new
dimension to the text. This paper is mainly focusing on an integrated and emerging way of doing
literary analysis which is Post-Colonial Eco-criticism. As an emerging field, ‘postcolonial
ecocriticism’ combines postcolonialism’s critique of colonial regimes and the workings of

42
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

transnational capitalism with ecocriticism’s focuson the land which has been the crux of such
exploitation (Banerjee 194).

George Orwell’s works have always been celebrated for having multi-dimensional appeal
and “Shooting an Elephant” is not an exception in this regard. It is not only “Shooting an Elephant”
that raises a Zoocritical response, but Orwell’s seminal work Animal Farm also raises the same
concern. Animal Farm has conventionally been read as a political satire, particularly of Stalinist
Russia, or, more generally, human political failings. But Orwell himself claimed that one of the
major motifs for writing the novel had been to protest against the human treatment of animals,
especially farm animals (Huggan and Tiffin 148). Ironically, the critics of Animal Farm overlooked
this claim from the author and kept on extracting the human messages out of the text. Here in
“Shooting an Elephant” the narrator is a colonizer who is also inevitably a human as no other
species have mastered the hideous craft of colonialism though they have experienced it almost
doubly as humans. It also evolves with a “tiny incident” which by the way is the killing of an
elephant that gives the narrator “a better glimpse” of “the real nature of imperialism” (Orwell 36). If
it was only about killing an animal then perhaps a Zoocritical approach would suffice but it is also
about exploiting nature. The anthropocentric shutter on our eyes has always made us think about
the predicament of the dwellers of the land, but we forgot to think about the land and the other
animals that exist and suffer just as much as humans. Therefore, focusing on the impact of colonial
enterprise both on humans and nature is perhaps the most sensible way of thinking which post-
colonial ecocriticism mainly does. In this paper, it is argued that Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” is
a suitable text for reading from the perspective of post-colonial ecocriticism as it involves the
intersections of post-colonial ideas and ecocritical concerns.

It is necessary to understand the relations between eco-criticism and post-colonialism as a

contemporary approach to either of the fields demands it. Ecocriticism, as Glotfelty puts it “is the
study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’’ as it “takes an earth-
centered approach to literary studies” (xviii). Travis et al. also reinforces this idea by stating that
“ecocriticism examines the representation of and relationships between the biophysical
environment and texts, predominantly through ecological theory” (3). Garrard finds ecocriticism to
be unique amongst contemporary literary and cultural theories because of its close relationship
with the science of ecology (5).

As colonialism and post-colonialism have affective relations with ecocritical issues, a

discussion on colonialism/post-colonialism may also be essential before coming into the key
arguments of the paper. Jonathan Bate, the pioneer of Green Studies rightly said in his book The
Song of Earth, “imperialism has always brought with it deforestation and the consuming of natural
resources” (87).In the book The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment, Timothy
Clark points out that “colonialism was and neocolonialism is, primarily a matter of the ‘conquest of
nature, the appropriation of local resources”(123).

Colonialism for its historical presence and theoretical observations does not need any
introduction. Yet it might be insightful to share Mahboob’s observation of colonialism:

43
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

This was when the European powers went out a contest for World Domination. They sailed
across the world either claiming lands as their own or snaking their way into existing
civilizations to take control of them and rule them through both material (physical) and non-
material (socio-semiotic) violence. Once captured, they traded lands and people and animals
between each other and some merging powers.(Colonisation 3.0)

On the other hand, despite the limitations and controversy of this view, the term Post-colonial is
used to “cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to
the present day” (Ashcroft et al. 2).

Post-Colonialism & Ecocriticism: From Differences to Synergy

Post-colonialism and Ecocriticism have their similarities and dissimilarities. The similarities
are two-fold: first, post-colonialism critiques the euro-centric notion of civilization and the West’s
deliberate attempt to undermine the East where ecocriticism almost similarly exposed
anthropocentrism and debunked the myth that humans are essentially in the center of everything
and everything else is orbiting in the periphery to serve and stimulate mankind. Second, both post-
colonialism and ecocriticism pointed out alternative ways of being in the world.

The most essential difference can be found in post-colonialism’s attempt to remain stuck in
the past and write back to the colonizers who have eventually become neo-colonizers. Ecocriticism,
on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the future of both mankind and the earth.

Postcolonialism has often been accused of being concerned with processes of economic and
cultural exploitation while failing to consider the anthropocentrism of such concerns (Hugan and
Tiffin 3).On the contrary, ecocriticism has often failed to address non-Western
concerns(DeLoughery and Handley 9). Non-Western countries are often blamed for neglecting the
ecocritical concerns which Lohmann terms as “Green Orientalism” (202).

“It is only recently that critics have begun to address the synergy which may result from
bringing together postcolonialism and ecocriticism by systematically spelling out points of overlap
between these two fields”(Banerjee 196). Especially in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s and George
Handley’s (2011) edited collection Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment and in Graham
Huggan’s and Helen Tiffin’s (2010) co-authored study Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment, what emerges is the idea that each of these fields may point towards a blind spot in
the other. In postcolonial criticism, metaphors of the land and the rootedness of the postcolonial
subject in his/her geography have always been addressed eloquently. But these references have
generally been read by postcolonial critics only in their rhetorical sense; the material and the
ecocritical dimension of these metaphors has often been ignored (DeLoughrey and Handley 27).

44
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

In order to address and redress the evils of the colonial past, the colonial subject has to bear
witness to cultural, economic, and environmental destruction. Unfortunately, colonialism has also
‘killed off’ the witnesses to its violence. That is why the land remains as the sole spectator of the
past. In this way, ecocritical readings may add to postcolonial critiques another layer of meaning:
Ecocriticism has restored the life of nature that was ignored by post-colonialism. It is in the hands of
the ecocritics that nature has seen its transformation from metaphor to the material. This is what
Huggan and Tiffin call “greening of postcolonialism”(3). So, the project of post-colonial ecocriticism
is to re-read the canonical texts common to both fields and to trace out ecocritical concerns in
postcolonial literature and postcolonial aspects of environmental writing. For example, postcolonial
ecocritics have focused on the often overlooked nonhuman elements within canonical literature and
brought attention to contemporary literature that responds to histories of settlement and
conservation, ecological disaster,and the inequitable distribution of resources and waste (Hugan and
Tiffin 555).

Ecocriticism, Post-Colonialism, and the Animal

Ecocriticism is not necessarily solely concerned with the inanimate objects of nature. It cares
and talks about the animals — an integral part of nature with much eloquence. Although
Zoocriticism addresses issues of animal exploitations more vividly, a post-colonial ecocritical
reading also takes this issue into account. Post-colonial discourse is traditionally anthropocentric
but raising issues like our treatment of the animal world can open a new vista of understanding of
colonialism.

“Throughout western intellectual history, civilization has consistently been constructed by or

against the wild, savage and animalistic, and has consequently been haunted or ‘dogged’ by it”
(Hugan and Tiffin 134). The European discourses have a common tendency of constructing Others.
In an odd way, this otherization philosophically and representationally constructs both humans
and animals as animals. Hugan and Tiffin point out different ways “in which serious consideration
of the status of animal seems to be fundamentally compromised by the human, often western,
deployment of animals and the animalistic to destroy or marginalise other human societies”(135).

It is often said that some dominant groups have been treating particular human individuals
and cultures like animals and human slavery and genocide are activities that categorize the
oppressed people as animals. It often remains unnoticed that we condemn such activities inflicted
upon humans, but we take it for granted when it happens with animals. The human notion of
‘cruelty’ thus gets a double standard.

Another tendency is using derogatory animal metaphors in our language. Animal attribution
is used for calling names like ‘you stupid donkey’, ‘capitalist pig’, ‘sexist beast’, and so on. The idea
is while humans are committing hideous activities, it is always indicated that these are animalistic
actions. Quite ironically, if we take a close look at the history of human civilization and
contemporary reality, the most heinous actions are always done by humans and not the animals. If

45
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

a human being commits a derogative action then he is an animal but if an animal does something
noble, like a dog saving someone’s life, then it is addressed to be a ‘humane’ quality in the animal.

“Shooting an Elephant”: Beyond Anthropocentrism

George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” serves as an example of how the oppression of

animals is often overlooked and an attempt is always made to extract human messages even at the
cost of the violation of nature and the animal world. There can be an objection that ‘why worry
about animals when humans are suffering?’ The predicament of the Burmese people under the
tyrannical force of the British empire in heart-rendering, the narrator himself was in great
traumatizing conflicts, a Dravidian coolie died, an owner lost its ‘machinery’, some properties were
ravaged, and a good number of crops was devoured — amidst all these human sufferings, why
should we care about a wretched elephant? The answer is: there is no ‘first-thing-first’ approach in
such matters. The death of humans and the raping of women do not necessarily make animal
suffering a secondary concern. As long as we have a notion of the ethical acceptability of animal
exploitation, the same exploitation can be inflicted upon humans also. As the perversity has already
been taken for granted, it is no wonder that ‘what happens with them can happen with us’ as well.

The focus is not only on the killing of the animal but also the unnoticed hints of the
exploitation of nature in the text which the canonical critics had never time to talk about as they
were pre-occupied with thoughts of imperialism and its evil impact on humans— the only species
with an illusion that they are the ones who feel the pain, crave to be free and love to live in their
fullest at the cost of anything. Post-colonialism forgets the idea that the natives are a part of the land
just like the animals and not the owner of it. So, when the colonizers occupied and exploited the
land, they did not exploit ‘the native’s land’, they rather exploited ‘the natives’ and ‘the land.

If read ecocritically, “Shooting an Elephant”displays the colonization of not only the

Burmese people but also the land — Burma. As it is one of the fundamental beliefs of ecocriticism
that nature is a living thing and it should not be reduced to a mere setting as it can play the role of a
protagonist. Therefore, exercising authority over nature can also be termed colonialism. As we can
see in “Shooting an Elephant”, a tamed elephant escapes from the chain and ravages the locality.
But we know that no elephant is born tamed; it is, by nature, a wild animal. In order to tame an
elephant and make it a ‘machinery’ or a circus attraction, you have to catch it wild first and then
you can expect to make the elephant and its children, if they can produce any, to be your slave. In
the essay, there was the mentioning that “it was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one”
(Orwell 36). Here, there is a hint that it could have been a wild elephant. We know that in
mountainous areas, elephants often enter human villages, but do we really know who is the
intruder here? Is it the elephant or the local people? When settlers or tourists enter indigenous
areas, the indigenous people feel threatened and disturbed. Similarly, when the indigenous or local
people start living in places that somehow belong to the wildlife territory, don’t the animals feel

46
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

equally disturbed? Now, the question is what is the role of colonialism here? Hugan and Tiffin
share the same concern in their book Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment:

A second problem arises when, as in so many contemporary instances, humans are pitted
against animals in a competition over decreasing resources. Peoples forced off their land to
provide game parks for foreign tourists (or sometimes more insidiously included in ‘native’
displays as part of the local flora and fauna) understandably resent not just the implicit
‘animal’ comparisons, but also the physical presence of animals themselves. (137)

As my key focus in this paper is on issues of post-colonial ecocriticism, I would like to pin-
point how the colonized were treated as animals in the description given by the narrator: “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 flogged with bamboos – all these
oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt” (Orwell 36). The narrator who felt sympathy for
the tortured colonized people were also disgusted by the treatment that he received from the
natives and at one point, he too used animal terms like” evil-spirited little beasts” (37) to call names
the Burmese and show how hideous they were. Another quotation from the title essay of the book
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (1950) can help us illustrate the comparison of the colonized to
animals. In the very first paragraph of the essay, it was mentioned that “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” (35). It reminds us of the protest and expression of hatred of the
monkeys that are either caged or disturbed by humans. Obviously, the monkeys do not have the
ability to raise a riot but they do not miss any opportunity to show their disgust towards their
human colonizers. Here the intention is to point out when animals are colonized by humans their
reaction is almost the same as ours. Colonialism, if viewed ecocritically, seems like a complex
system that may often create a fellow filling in the minds of the colonized people if they can only
feel the identical sufferings of the animals.

The traditional critics always wanted to focus on the metaphors of “Shooting an Elephant”
whereas the concrete fact is always right before our eyes. Some viewed the “slow death of the
elephant as an allegory of imperialism” (Meyers 24) while others argued that the death of the
elephant symbolizes the death of the empire. Edward Quinn said that the elephant represents
“traditional Burmese culture” (307). These metaphors and symbols served the purpose of
distracting the discourse. Canonical reading often takes the reader away from the fact and
“Shooting an Elephant” is an example of that. Let us take a look at the story through the lens of
post-colonial ecocriticism. First of all, the killing of the elephant, which by the way was the first
time for the narrator, is described as such: “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”(Orwell 36). The ghastly murder is referred to as a “tiny incident” and
the lesson that was learned was about imperialism and its true motifs. This is what ecocritics call
‘extracting human messages’ out of the sufferings of nature and the animal world. Secondly, the
destruction done by the animal is described with vivid details:

47
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

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 violence upon it. (37-
38)

What is ironic here is the reason behind this aggressive behavior of the elephant does not get much
highlight in the narration. It simply says the beast “had gone must” (37). The elephant was being
denied to fulfill its biological necessity and was chained so that it can suffer in a handicapped way.
This is a common practice of human civilization. We sometimes castrate bulls and sometimes make
cows get pregnant against their will. We master over the social and biological life of animals.
Thirdly, as we notice in the essay that the killing could be avoided. The animal was almost pacified
and when it was eating paddy peacefully in the paddy field, it looked “no more dangerous than a
cow” (39). The narrator even said that all he was supposed to do was to observe the beast’s actions
and if it does not go wild then leave it alone until the mahout comes. Fourthly, the narrator did not
want to kill the animal primarily because “It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is
comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery” (39). Animal life seems less
valuable than the monetary value that humans add to its life. Finally, we can ask the question what
made him kill the animal then? The answer is obviously given in the text that he had to act like a
sahib and do what the crowd wanted him to do as he could not afford to look foolish in front of the
colonized. Here the observation of Hugan and Tiffin seems to be relevant:

That western exploitation, both past and present, has resulted in the murder, displacement
and impoverishment of people, animals and their environments; and it has also generated
apparently ‘either/or’ situations in contexts of land and resource scarcity or degradation.
(137)

Here the moral degradation of the narrator is also an “either/ or” situation and we see that in such
sort of situations, the Westerners always pick to destroy the resource instead of their image or
interest.

Although the white colonizers are generally blamed for exploiting the nature and animal
world, the colonized too are in no way different in their attitude towards the animals. The colonized
despite being the victim of racism, commit speciesism. This anthropocentric attitude is common
regardless of ethnicity, geographical position, and political status. Elephants have always been a
target of humans for meat and ivory. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and Barbara Gowdy’s
The White Bone (1998) give us the account of human cruelty to elephants regardless of their
ethnicity. Gowdy was the most radical author in this regard as she did not even employ
anthropomorphism (attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities) in
her narrative technique, she rather gave us the elephants’ perspective in a way that is remote to
human perception. Gowdy shared the idea that since the elephants’ contemporary killers are likely
to be both black and white, race is of no importance it is the species itself that, after the advent of
the Darkness, has become evil (93).An almost similar situation can be traced in Orwell’s “Shooting
an Elephant” where the white man kills the animal and the natives make him do that for

48
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

theiramusement and most importantly for the meat. When the narrator gave the first shot he heard
a “devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd”(42). This monstrous celebration indicates that
it does not matter whether you are a colonizer or colonized, you still belong to a species that is more
dangerous and crueller than any animals in the jungle. It was the natives who wanted the meat, and
they used the white man because they knew, with his gun, he is a better killer of the wild.

The dying process of the elephant has been portrayed with vivid description by Orwell in
“Shooting an Elephant.” It tells us about the great agony of dying and ghastliness of killing but
unfortunately, this too has been interpreted as the metaphor of the slow decay of the British Empire.
The anthropocentric critics never cared about descriptions like “the bullet had paralyzed him”, he
looked “thousands of years old”, “the agony of it jolt his whole body”, “he trumpeted for the last
time”, “his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling”, “the thick blood welled out of him
like red velvet” “He was dying, very slowly and in great agony”, “ the great beast lying there,
powerless to move and yet powerless to die”, and “the tortured gasps continued as steadily as the
ticking of a clock”(41-42).It is quite shocking that we still manage to overlook this heart-rendering
description of the murder of such a large animal and replace it with thoughts of human power
politics. The narrator acknowledged that it was a clear murder, and his ending remarks are yet
more shocking.

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. (42)

It clearly shows that the death of the collie was just an excuse, and this hideous task was done only
to keep the masterly image of the white colonizer intact. The narrator admitted that he did not want
to look like a fool, but what could be more foolish than murdering an innocent creature when it
could have been easily avoided? Here comes the idea of the human ego and self-centeredness. We
humans have always participated in the race of becoming superior. We try to be superior among
our own species and we take it for granted that we are by default superior to other creatures. This is
how post-colonialism and eco-criticism play the same tune from two different flutes.

Conclusion

George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” can be considered to be a text which still has much
to give to the critics and readers. This essay is a brilliant example of rethinking a text from a green
perspective. The ecocritical reading does not reduce the colonial message of the text. It still keeps its
post-colonial value, but the employment of a double-coded approach is all we need in today’s ever-
changing world of academia. Reading “Shooting an Elephant” through the lens of post-colonial eco-
criticism serves as a reminder that there is the urgency of such synergy in the process of
knowledge-making if we aim at renewing our thoughts to match with our contemporary and the
days ahead.

49
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)
 Litinfinite Journal, Vol-3, Issue-2, (2nd December, 2021)
ISSN: 2582-0400 [Online], CODEN: LITIBR
DOI: 10.47365/litinfinite.3.2.2021.42-50
Page No: 42-50, Section: Article

References

Ashcroft, Bill, et al. The empire writes back. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002.
Banerjee, Mita. “Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and
Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 194, 196.
Bate, Jonathan. The Song of Earth. Picador, 2000.
Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment.
Cambridge University Press. 2011.
De Loughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of
the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Glotfelty, Cheryll. Introduction. Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis, by
Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, p. xviii.
Gowdy, Barbara. The White Bone. Picador, 1998.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Lohmann, Larry. “Green Orientalism.” The Ecologist, vol. 23, no. 6, 1993, p. 202.
Mahboob, Ahmar,. "Colonisation 3.0." We Mountains, 12 May 2020, wemountains.com/05/12/1596/.
Accessed 12 Nov. 2021.
Meyers, Jeffery, The Critical Heritage: George Orwell. London: Routledge, 1975.
Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant.” Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays.
Penguin, 1950, pp. 36-39, 41-42.
Quinn, Edward. Critical Companion to George Orwell: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. Facts on
File, 2009.
Mason, Travis V., et al. "Introduction to Postcolonial Ecocriticism Among Settler-Colonial Nations." ariel: a
review of international English literature, vol. 44, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1-11.

Sami Hossain Chisty is a Bangladeshi academician, creative writer, and public speaker. He is currently
working as a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at Notre Dame University
Bangladesh. He is also the director of Free Linguistics Conference, University of Sydney.

50
Litinfinite Journal Is Indexed By MLA Directory Of Periodicals & MLA International Bibliography, DOAJ, EBSCO, ProQuest, SCILIT, Ulrichsweb & Ulrich’s
Periodicals Directory, ICI World Of Journals, ERIH PLUS, J-Gate, JISC-Sherpa Romeo, DRJI, EuroPub & Other Major Indexing Services. (This Open Access
article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License.)

View publication stats