“Shooting an Elephant”

In “Shooting an Elephant” the Burmese and Britishers are the visible enemies of each other.

Burmese evidently hated British army as they had marched into their land and were treating them as slaves. Secondly, Britishers were the enemies of Burmese on the origin of their color, race, all their differences and most importantly, Britishers were ruling the land which in real didn’t belong to them and were using that power on the people it actually belonged to, who were Burmese themselves.

For Burmese, the other enemy could be the vicious elephant, who was threat to the entire village at least according to them it was because the elephant in this story was portraying role of British Raj in the sub continent. It was fierce and killing people for no reasons. It was a danger for the people. But its fate led it to a painful death when it was least expected.

George Orwell’s enemy is his helplessness in his situation and position. Regardless of the hatred he had for imperialism, he had to be a part of it, as they already used to make fun of him and used to treat him very badly because of him being an European and he didn’t wanted that to happen again, so had to play a convincing role to impress the local people.