The crowd (motif)
The large crowd appears and reappears in the essay, looming over Orwell as he self-consciously faces the elephant and prepares to shoot it. As a motif, the crowd reflects the eyes of Burmese society, closely observing their colonizers, waiting for a wrong move. The crowd doesn't reflect a physical threat, however, so much as the threat of delegitimization and humiliation.
The act of shooting the elephant (allegory)
The actual shooting of the elephant works as an allegory for the British colonial project in Burma. Orwell feels that it's wrong to kill such a large and wild animal. This feeling represents the guilt of attempting to commandeer an entire culture and society. On top of this, shooting the elephant does not kill the elephant; just as policing Burmese society does not put them under the colonizer's control. Orwell puts multiple bullets into the elephant, but in the end he has to leave to bleed to death. This scene reflects the nature of colonial power of Burmese society: the British are incapable of ultimately fulfilling the punitive end of their project in Burma.
The policeman (symbol)
As a police officer, Orwell's presence holds symbolic power within Burmese society. He explains this in clear terms in the essay: the Burmese people at once despise him, ridicule him and expect him to perform on behalf of the empire that he symbolizes. When he goes to shoot the elephant, he does so as a police officer representing British colonial authority. The people expect him to demonstrate this authority. If he fails, the British imperial project will be shown to fail. The policeman, in this way, upholds the image of the authority that it represents.
The tortured body (symbol)
Early in the essay we see an image of a naked, scarred buttocks of a prisoner. This image has a symbolic function that resonates through the essay. The beaten flesh of the Burmese prisoner represents the power structure at play in the broader essay. The British police hold the whip; the Burmese people submit. Nonetheless, we see how precarious that dynamic is when we see Orwell forced to perform his authority for the massive, unwieldy Burmese crowd.
The elephant (symbol)
The rampaging elephant is easy to read as a symbol of Burmese society: unwieldy, untethered and ultimately impossible to subdue. Orwell shows the Burmese people as having a particular power over their colonizers that expresses itself in the form of ridicule. In the way that the elephant runs amok, and is impossible to contain without violence, the Burmese defiance of British rule is a constant, making itself known by jeers and humiliation. In the way that "the white man" or British officers in Burma must rely on force, and specifically on torture, to have the upper hand of the Burmese people, so Orwell must fall back on an unnatural use of force to demonstrate his power over the elephant. When we see him shooting the elephant, we are seeing the same demonstration of force the British imperialists use over the Burmese people.
