If Eric could not become a scholar, he knew that he had a good chance at becoming a servant of the Empire which had employed his father for 30 years. He announced to his parents that he wanted to become a police officer in India, and they approved. Inspired by the status of the position, the good wages he would earn, and perhaps by a desire to see remote parts of the world, Orwell took and passed the admission test for the Imperial Police. When asked to name the Indian province to which he would most like to be assigned, Eric requested Burma — a shocking answer for a man his age, since Burma was an often lawless place, high on crime but low on comforts. He had little experience as a soldier (save for the Officer Training Corps at Eton) and none in a police force. There was also a great amount of tension in Burma between the British and Indian populations. Despite these apparent deterrents, in November, 1922, Eric arrived in Mandalay, Burma, to begin his new career as an Assistant Superintendent of Police in the Indian Imperial Police Force.
While in Burma, Eric developed a great distaste for the British rule of India and for imperialism altogether. As a police officer, he was expected to maintain order in a population that detested him. In turn, he also sometimes hated those he was being paid to protect. As he describes in “Shooting an Elephant” (1936), imperialism destroys both the rulers and the ruled: “I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” His experiences in Burma would find their way into his essay “A Hanging” (1931) and his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police Force in 1928 and returned to England, a 25-five year-old determined to become a writer able to comment on his ever-growing political consciousness.
