Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger

[Stewart]

If you are tired of Indian novels built on a blend of saffron and saris then Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) may just be the antidote required. It’s take on modern India is one more grounded in reality than romantic idealism, straddling the thin line between the historical hangovers of British rule and ingrained caste system with the thriving industry of entrepreneurship now prevalent in outsourced business, such as information technology and call centres.

One such entrepreneur is Balram Halwai, “Bangalore’s least known success story”, from a caste of sweet-makers, who wants to share the story of his personal struggle. Interestingly, he has decided to share it with Wen Jiabao, Premier of “the Freedom-Loving Nation of China” who, it is announced on the radio, is coming to Bangalore in the next week. Rather than the falsity of hanshakes and namastes between political leaders, Balram opts to show India warts and all through a series of lengthy letters.

Balram’s path to entrepreneurship, as he tells Wen Jiabao near the beginning, has begun by slitting his master’s throat. His master, incidentally, is one of the four landlords who run the area around Laxmangarh, known as the Animals. (”…the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on.”) As a driver in the service of the Stork and his sons, Balram picks up snippets of information he hears both at home and behind the wheel. And it’s the rise from teashop boy to modern Indian man (via murderer) that is recounted for the benefit of the Chinese Premier. (”…sir, you are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs.”)

What has allowed Balram the audicity to speak are the changes in India. Many years before, the country was like a zoo, where people of certain castes were confined to their cage.

And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947 - the day the British left - the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly. It didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up.

But, for all those that don’t rise up, there’s the millions left in the Darkness, of which Balram’s home of Laxmangarh is “a typical Indian village paradise”:

Electricity poles - defunct.
Water tap - broken.
Children - too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

Balram’s chances of escaping such poverty don’t look so good, his family having taken him out of school and putting him to work in a teashop.

Go to a teashop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop - men I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys’. But that is your fate if you do your job well - with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Ghandi would have done it, no doubt.

If doing your job well means enduring it for life, Balram proves himself to be, as a school inspector once noted, “the rarest of animals - the creature that comes along only once in a generation” - a white tiger. Rather than live a life at the bottom, Balram takes fate into his own hands and takes a different path to Ghandi’s, because only with dishonesty and insincerity can you plot to reach for higher grounds. (”…the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”)

What is good about Balram’s letters are his ignorance of the man and the country he is addressing (”Now, since I doubt that you have rickshaw-pullers in China - or in any other civilised nation on earth - you will have to see one for yourself.”), having picked up his knowledge from a book entitled Exciting Tales of the Exotic East. This is indicative of the nature of entrepreneurs, who are “made from half-baked clay”:

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks…sentences about politics read in a newspaper…bits of All India Radio news bulletins…all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

In the telling, The White Tiger is reminiscent of last year’s Booker nominated The Reluctant Fundamentalist, give that we are left to wonder at Wen Jiabao’s reaction to Balram’s letters, assuming he even gets them. And in it’s getting down and dirty with the downtrodden of India, and sparks of east meets west, there’s a dotted line to be drawn to Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, although the book that springs to mind most is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, purely for the parallel of a man, his master, and the oblivion between.

Its players, being drawn from the the top to bottom of Indian society, are tight in scope, allowing Adiga to get to grips well with them and how they interact with each other, whether it be the relationships between master and servant, between family members, or between the state and civilians. In all, The White Tiger provides an evocative and miserable landscape stripped of any exoticism one might expect, where everyone is greasing the palms of others, and anyone with the stomach for it can make their mark. And being easily digestible, your own stomach need not worry, for the novel is anything but half-baked.

[Mirabell]

the best realistic novel about India I know is Rohinton Mistry's awesome A Fine Balance.

Can't yet make up my mind about Chandra's Sacred Games, but I haven't finished it yet either.

How does White Tiger compare to these?

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

How does White Tiger compare to these?

I have no idea. I'd need to read them first. I've looked at Sacred Games a few times but since I don't tend toward thickies through choice, I've always just put it back on the shelf.

I think The White Tiger wears its points about contemporary India lightly on its sleeve and, while it has issues to raise, it's primarily an entertainment. And because the observations are coming via a character, you are never truly aware to what extent his own experiences colour the perceptions relayed.

[Mirabell]

By all means, read A Fine Balance. An amazing piece of fiction. Lucid, brutal, tender, insightful. Mistry's other novels are good, too, but compared to this one...

[Stewart]

The White Tiger has just been announced as the winner of the MAN Booker Prize 2008.

[saliotthomas]

I just finshed it and quite liked it.Not has a great read but has a decent passtime.I won't remenber much of it in few week but it was nice to read an Indian novel where the the guy did take revenge againts dominant cast.
After reading Mistry,A fine balance,indiscutably a better book,White tiger come has the rebelion of a lower cast,something very,very rare in India litarature.
There is so much acceptance,fatalism,in the cast systeme,so many books where entire famillies,villages are starves,beaten and abused with a polite tolerance for injustice that for once,to read of a guy taking the spet(at the cost of his clan slauter)to kill the master,I come as a relief.I could not believe he did it.It's like a catholique book talking freely about sex.
Just for that,and the novelty of it,the book was worth reading.
plus one for the murder

[kpjayan]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

the rebelion of a lower cast,something very,very rare in India litarature.

Actually, that is not the case. The Indian Fiction being discussed here are those who write in English. And they do not really represent the Indian Writing (with few exceptions). The writings in the regional languages like Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi are far superior to these new generation of writers in English.

[Jayaprakash]

What kpjayan said, although by and large even fiction in our Indian languages touches more on the oppression of the so-called lower castes more often than it plays out scenarios of vengeance or come-uppance. Some of those on the privileged side of the fence try to call this a non-issue, but the evils of casteism are very much alive and well, while a small percentage of monied people from these castes soak up all the benefits intended for their still downtrodden brethren.

[saliotthomas]

My love for India ,where i lived 2 years and crossed twice on a motobike,led me to read all i could find as novels and some non fiction(no a lot a grant you).So my observation touch only a very small part of Indian literature,but i find there is a lot of fatalisme in it,trusting more patience than open rebelion.That is why white tiger came as a surprise.
Another thing about the book is that it's all based on a letter to the Chinese prime ministere and i still have to figure out that part.It really does not make any sense.

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by saliotthomas

Another thing about the book is that it's all based on a letter to the Chinese prime ministere and i still have to figure out that part.It really does not make any sense.

At the time, I thought I understood it. But them on reading an interview with Adiga on the Booker site, I was completely baffled:

What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?

This isn't an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It's a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider's gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.

He's talking out loud? If he's talking out loud, what's the deal with the From The Desk Of and To sections beginning each non-espistle?

[Eric]

It's Indian critics this time:

Indians fear Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' says too much about them - Telegraph

These Indian use words like "stereotype", "tedious", "unfunny". I think the core of the matter is that the man is a privileged outsider, writing about what it's like to be a poor person. Something doesn't square somehow.

[kpjayan]

Quote
The White Tiger is an appalling regression. Just when they thought they had finally shed the old image of India as a land of poverty, cows and snakecharmers and started being respected as a hi-tech, prosperous nation, along comes Adiga to, as it were, rub their noses in the dirt again
Unquote

There was similar 'complaints' about Satyajit Ray and other neo-realistic film makers as they are selling the image of poor India to the world.

The main issue I think is about the audience the writer has in mind. Most of the new writers emerging from India ( or Indian Origin) have the wider English Speaking readers in mind and not the native people. Hence, the outcome of their fiction is to satisfy this readers, not necessarily to write about the real India. However, this issue does not arise in the local language fiction ( like Bengali , Malayalam , Kannada et al) , and hence they are much closure to the reality.

[Jayaprakash]

One angle to such complaint is that writers like Adiga are somehow 'letting the side down' by exposing India's ugly side to the world. That, frankly, is nonsense. I think a writer's allowed to be a little more than a national propagandist. We read enough stories about the sordid sides of American, European, African and other Asian societies - surely we can accept that we have some diry linen that might bear airing as well?

Adiga seems to have seen a bit of the other side of Indian society in his travels as a journalist. These glimpses, he says in interviews, were what inspired him to tell their story. Certainly, if the middle classes were not allowed to write about those less well-off, much of literature, including Dickens' novels and most French realism would have to be written off.

[Eric]

Jayaprakash, I see your point about Dickens, but nowadays, if you have enough money to survive, you can spread things around the world by the internet to either blacken the image of your country, or praise it. You can't really be stopped. But whether anyone will read you is another matter.

I find it a little odd that the Indian writing community is quarreling about the image India has abroad, when virtually none of the books written by people perhaps closer to the reality of poverty and injustice, i.e. writers writing in their various vernaculars, ever reach the outside world so that we people in, for instance, Europe, can get a more balanced view of Indian fiction.

As for privilege, I don't mind a few privileged middle-class Indians writing books, but I'd like to hear from privileged people writing originally in the indigenous languages.

[bookcrazy]

Of all Indian fiction I have read, I think this is most honest as to the representation of the relationship between have and have-nots. The essence of it holds goo for any society and in particular to Indian scenario, it fits perfectly.

If the possibility of a driver having to take criminal charges for road accidents committed by his master sems a little too far fetched, come live in a small town or village of India. When Adiga says in the book that people not in India cannot even begin to understand the comfort of life that people in India with servants enjoy - well, he has hit the nail.

Of everything he talks of, Rooster Coop gives you loads to think about.

[Haribol Acharya]

This is a fantastic book and it thrilled me for it has depicted an India which has been misrepresented. The fact that India is shining is a flawed statement or an argument that is not backed by any concrete examples, for only the few shining in Urban metropolis does not reflect true India, and as a matter of fact India is still poor and nothing has been done and politics is a variant of crime.

He has rightly put that by a good means, or by means of honesty or fidelity no one can seize power and no one can get to the peak and the one and only thing that can get one to the top is a foul one.

[kpjayan]

Amitava kumar , here ( Hindu Literary Review dt 02 Nov 2008) on The White Tiger.

For a novel that is supposed to be a portrait of the ‘real’ India, The White Tiger comes across as curiously inauthentic. Is it a novel from one more outsider, presenting cynical anthropologies to an audience that is not Indian?

The Hindu : Literary Review : On Adiga’s The White Tiger

[nnyhav]

LRB · Sanjay Subrahmanyam: Diary paans it.

sorry couldn't help myself

[Jayaprakash]

Thoo!*






*Common Indian onomatopoeia, indicative of spitting derisively at something.

[writetoread]

The book is good. One would have to "be asleep" and unwoken not to see it spoke very clearly about that diverse and complicated country called India. Yes, it was not as deep or profound as some novels but it had alot of humour, and it spoke well about the madness of men's/women's minds when they get trapped. Munna, "boy", was complex in character and yet the writer did not veer away from making him complete.

I loved the book and could envision, smell and hear the India I visited in the 80's. The spirit of the people is not dispelled from all the darkness and mud but is alive and well through all that suffering.