ABSTRACT
This chapter reads Aravind Adiga's Booker winning novel The White Tiger as a spatial allegory, suggesting that this novel's representation of India challenges the neoliberal celebration of the heavily commoditized urban as the space of freedom and advancement. Contesting Swaralipi Nandi's claim that TWT is a critique of India's feudal and socialist past and is a celebration of its neoliberal present, this essay argues that such a reading of Adiga's work elides its critical presentation of India's uneven development and masks the real object of the novel's critique. Cognitive mappings of such nature, this chapter argues, vest the rural with the attributes of the feudal, divesting it from its tangled and mediated relationship to the urban. By drawing upon the debates on uneven development and formal/real subsumption, this chapter argues that the spatial imagination that temporalizes unevenness to posit an essential difference between the rural and the urban fails to factor in how global capitalism fastens together different geographical spaces, creating global as well as local divisions of labor in which the immiserated rural often exists as the provider of cheap labor and “primitive accumulation.”
