ABSTRACT
The White Tiger was one of the big books of 2008. It won the Man Booker Prize, and Aravind Adiga was named Borders bookstore Author of the Year as well. It is a rags-to-riches tale and a bildungsroman. The narrator, Balram, is a poor man from the Indian state of Bihar, which he detests and deems ‘the Darkness’, and with ample reason: despite considerable academic promise, at a young age he is removed from school to work in a tea shop; and, in a dilapidated hospital that no doctors deign to visit, he witnesses his father’s death from tuberculosis. Longing for escape and attracted to the uniform, he decides to seek work as a driver, becoming a servant for the same powerful family that lords over and impoverishes his fellow low-caste villagers. By turns cunning and obsequious, Balram is soon selected to move to
Gurgaon with his boss, Mr Ashok, and boss’s wife, Pinky Madam. This is ‘the modernest suburb of Delhi’, Mr Ashok boasts, ‘the most American part of the city’ (Adiga 2008a: 101). It is full of shopping malls and posh apartment complexes, spheres of luxurious life and leisure from which Balram is mostly excluded. There, after months of tortured introspection and psychological decline, Balram kills his boss and steals money that was expropriated through landlordism and political corruption to begin with. He then departs for Bangalore, where he starts a taxi company that serves call-centre employees. He hires drivers, promotes his services (their motto: ‘We Drive Technology Forward!’; Adiga 2008a: 258) and achieves considerable success, all the while trying to appear blithely unconcerned about the anticipated revenge killing of his family. In telling this story, Balram imagines that he has as a narratee Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is on a trade visit to India. Indeed, he presents his autobiography as a corrective to what he expects the Premier will be told by more official sources. Adiga appears to have little in common with his protagonist. Before he
published this, his first novel, he attended Oxford and Columbia, and then worked as a journalist specializing in finance. He covered US politics for The Financial Times until 2000, and since then Indian politics, culture and finance for the Time International group. He has lived in Delhi, and did so while writing The White Tiger, but he spent much of the last ten years abroad. Amitava Kumar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, both well-known commentators on
Indian literature and politics, critique Adiga’s work in light of this background. Subrahmanyam is particularly unconvinced by the portrait of Balram – ‘This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty’ (Adiga 2008a: 43) – and he suggests that the book’s success measures two kinds of middle-class angst: within India, the novel indulges ‘the neocolonial imagination’ of the bourgeois city-dweller, for whom villages, increasingly ‘asphyxiated by Delhi’s expansion’, produce servants who threaten to morph into disgruntled and terrifying ‘criminal castes’; outside India, it feeds liberal objections to the country’s ‘archaic and primitive’ class relations (Adiga 2008a: 42). Kumar is from Bihar, and his take on the novel is not unlike Subrahmanyam’s. Responding to a scene in which Balram takes Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam on a driving tour back through the old village, he asks:
Who is looking here? The village to which the car is returning is not only the employer’s village but also [Balram]’s – he is returning to the place where he was born and grew up and has only recently left. Yet does it appear to be the account of a man who is returning home? He recognizes no landmark or person, he has no emotion, he has no relationship to the land or the people.
