Author: Aravind Adiga
Originally published: 2008
Review and plot summary
The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, the son of a village rickshawwalla, who through wiles and determination becomes the driver to the hated village landlord. The book takes the form of a series of letters from the narrator, now a self-described entrepreneur in the bustling hi-tech city of Bangalore, to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, describing “the real India” he will not see during his upcoming official visit. We learn early on that Balram has committed murder and robbery. But all of this is told with comical fun poked not only at the excesses of the rich, but also at the circumstances of poor people.It’s a rather more complicated story than Balram initially lets on. Before moving to Bangalore, he was a driver for the weak-willed son of a feudal landlord. One rainy day in Delhi, he crushed the skull of his employer and stole a bag containing a large amount of money, capital that financed his Bangalore taxi business. That business — ferrying technology workers to and from their jobs — depends, in turn, on keeping the police happy with the occasional bribe.
As a parable of the new India, then, Balram’s tale has a distinctly macabre twist. He is not (or not only) an entrepreneur but a roguish criminal with a remarkable capacity for self-justification. Likewise, the background against which he operates is not just a resurgent economy and nation but a landscape of corruption, inequality and poverty. In some of the book’s more convincing passages, Balram describes his family’s life in “the Darkness,” a region deep in the heartland marked by medieval hardship, where brutal landlords hold sway, children are pulled out of school into indentured servitude and elections are routinely bought and sold.
This grim world is far removed from the glossy images of Bollywood stars and technology entrepreneurs that have been displacing earlier (and equally clichéd) Indian stereotypes featuring yoga and spirituality. It is not a world that rich urban Indians like to see. Indeed, when Adiga’s book recently won the Man Booker Prize, some in India lambasted it as a Western conspiracy to deny the country’s economic progress. Yet Adiga isn’t impressed by such nationalistic fervor. In bare, unsentimental prose, he strips away the sheen of a self-congratulatory nation and reveals instead a country where the social compact is being stretched to the breaking point. There is much talk in this novel of revolution and insurrection: Balram even justifies his employer’s murder as an act of class warfare.
“The White Tiger” is a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity. It correctly identifies — and deflates — middle-class India’s collective euphoria. But Adiga, a former correspondent for Time magazine who lives in Mumbai, is less successful as a novelist. His detailed descriptions of various vile aspects of Indian life are relentless — and ultimately a little monotonous. Every moment, it seems, is bleak, pervaded by “the Darkness.” Every scene, every phrase, is a blunt instrument, wielded to remind Adiga’s readers of his country’s cruelty.
References
Singer, W. (n.a). Review of Arvind Adiga’s The Whote Tiger. KROnline.
Kapur, A. (2008). The secret of his success. New York times.
