> In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he wrote: For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable reme

> In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he wrote: For five years I had been part of an oppressive system, and it had left me with a bad conscience. Innumerable remembered faces—faces of prisoners in the dock, of men waiting in the condemned cells, of subordinates I had bullied and aged peasants I had snubbed, of servants and coolies I had hit with my fist in moments of rage (nearly everyone does these things in the East, at any rate occasionally: Orientals can be very provoking)—haunted me intolerably. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate. The first and last sentences of this oft-quoted passage are typically shared with an ellipsis, omitting the offensive part. I assume this erasure occurs because it is difficult to read the middle sentence and find sympathy for the man who wrote it. It affords a glimpse of the Raj’s daily violence and admits what a tormented man held festering in his heart. very powerful