Misrepresentation of the Occident and the Orient in George Orwell‟s Burmese Days: A Postcolonial Reading

Abstract

This thesis attempts to illustrate how Westerners exploit, dominate and misrepresent the non-westerners in the name of civilization, on the one hand, and how non-westerners themselves misrepresent their own land, people and culture as inferior due to their colonial mentality on the other hand. Colonial discourses have created various images to represent the Eastern countries and people as the others. It establishes a created form of reality in the readers‟ mind. It functions as a power to dominate, educate and govern over the non-Western countries. Behind every misrepresentation, there lies the motive of colonization and dominate the Orient. Colonial discourses have functioned as power to create hierarchy of race and color that assist the colonizers to centralize them and inferiorize others, which provides an approach to project Westerners‟ stereotypes of others. George Orwell‟s Burmese Days textualizes the misrepresentation of Burma and hostility between White colonizers as „We‟ and Burmese people as „Other‟. Orwell has partially expressed his love-hate attitudes towards the Burmese people and the white imperialists through his characters.