George Orwell
A Hanging
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 galloped 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.
