It is not known whether Orwell himself had such an incident with an elephant, but the vividness of the descriptions strengthen such a claim. On the surface level, the essay centers on the inner conflict of a white European police officer in Burma regarding the killing of an elephant which raided the bazaar and caused material damage. It is widely known that Orwell spent some time in the place as a police officer, similar to that of the narrator, but "the degree to which his account is autobiographical is disputed, with no conclusive evidence to prove it to be fact or fiction" (Crick, 1981:1). The narrator in the essay is usually thought to be Orwell himself, as he worked in Burma as a British officer for a couple of years. The colonial domination of England over Burma was narrated by Orwell in his famous essay "Shooting an Elephant", one of his various political essays reflecting his anti-capitalist viewpoint. The British preserved their activism in the territory for much more, covering the time period in which a famous anti-imperialist British writer of fiction, George Orwell, worked as a police officer around the area. The British rule in Burma as a colony lasted over sixty years in which there took place many disputes between the sides and led to the separation of the latter from the British in 1886 and total independence in 1948.
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