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Hanging in
Burma by George Orwell
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like
yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were
waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars,
like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was
quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some
of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their
blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged
within the next week or two. One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a
puny wisp of a man, with a shaven
head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too
big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six
tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows.
Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others
handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their
belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about
him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though
all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling
a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood
quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly
noticed what was happening. Eight o’clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the
wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail,
who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with
his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey
toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God’s sake hurry up,
Francis,’ he said irritably. ‘The man ought to have been dead by
this time. Aren’t you ready yet?’ Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and
gold spectacles, waved his black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,’ he
bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared.
The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.’ ‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can’t get their
breakfast till this job’s over.’ We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the
prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against
him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and
supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind.
Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without
any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened – a dog, come
goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us
with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild
with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly
dog, half Airedale, half pariah. For a moment it pranced round us, and then,
before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping
up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to
grab at the dog. ‘Who let that bloody brute in here?’ said the
superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!’ A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog,
but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part
of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried
to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its
yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two
warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the
hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then
we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the
dog still straining and whimpering. It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back
of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound
arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never
straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the
lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on
the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder,
he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means
to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to
avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a
life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just
as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels
digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming –
all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he
stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a
second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his
brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about
puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing,
feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden
snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less,
one world less. The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of
the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection
like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams
and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in
the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted
us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two
warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed
him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman
climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner’s neck. We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle
round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began
crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!
Ram!’, not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but
steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the
sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a
small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner’s
face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over
again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!’ The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes
seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on,
‘Ram! Ram! Ram!’ never faltering for an instant. The
superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his
stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed
number – fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The
Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were
wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to
his cries – each cry another second of life; the same thought was in
all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he
made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!’
he shouted almost fiercely. There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had
vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it alloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when
it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of
the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We
went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner’s body. He was dangling
with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a
stone. The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body;
it oscillated, slightly. ‘He’s all right,’ said the superintendent.
He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody
look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch.
‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that’s all for this morning,
thank God.’ The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and
conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of
the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into
the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of
warders armed with lathis, were already receiving
their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round
ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging.
An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an
impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began
chattering gaily. The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come,
with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead
man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of
his cell. From fright. – Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you
not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah,
two rupees eight annas. Classy European
style.’ Several people laughed – at what, nobody seemed certain. Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously.
‘Well, sir, all hass passed off with the
utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished
– flick! like that. It iss not always so
– oah, no! I have known cases where the
doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and
pull the prisoner’s legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!’ ‘Wriggling about, eh? That’s bad,’ said the
superintendent. ‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they
become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely
credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each
leg. We reasoned with him. "My dear fellow," we said, "think
of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!" But no, he would not
listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!’ I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even
the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You’d better all
come out and have a drink,’ he said quite genially. ‘I’ve
got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.’ We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road.
‘Pulling at his legs!’ exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly,
and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment
Francis’s anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink
together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred
yards away. |
