Darkness and the ‘new’ India in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

( I wrote this review for The Word, the paper at the Asian College of Journalism.)

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, who addresses a series of letters to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. The novel is in the form of a dramatic monologue, in the tradition of Albert Camus’ The Fall and more recently, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Over seven nights, Balram narrates the story of his life. Born in a village in northern India, son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. Nursing a dream of escape, his big chance comes when he is hired as a chauffeur by a village landlord. The narrative follows Balram’s journey to Delhi, where after murdering his employer, he finally becomes a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore.

The dust jacket describes The White Tiger as the tale of two Indias. It is exactly where its problem lies, by reducing the multiple, complex layers of Indian life into a simplistic, binary opposition. Early in the novel, Balram says, “Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.”

In its overtly Manichean perspective, its characters and situations are shorn of complexity, and reduced to archetypes. Balram’s narrative, at times, recedes into a patronising lament towards people of the social class he himself belongs to. Balram remarks, “The children ran along with me outside, little dirty brats born to one aunt or the other whose names I did not want to know, whose hair I did not want to touch.” So, in the Darkness, the poor are filthy and dirty – and yet it is impossible to imagine Balram sharing this view. What is happening is the constant overlap between the narrator Balram’s view of the world and Adiga’s own perceptions of that class. The resulting superficial tone, with its lack of nuance, serves to highlight the author’s distance from the subject and who cannot fully inhabit the world of his protagonist.

Further on, in the Darkness, the elections are always rigged. Balram remarks, “It’s the way it always is,” my father told me last night. “I’ve seen twelve elections – five general, five state, two local – and someone else has voted for me twelve times. I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves – isn’t that something?” This abrupt dismissal of electoral democracy naively interprets the machinations of electoral politics in northern India, where for the last two decades subaltern communities have actively sought empowerment through the ballot. The depiction of the politician known as The Great Socialist and the politicians bribed in Delhi are reduced to clichés, with their sexual amorality and lust for wealth.

The primary reason why The White Tiger is engaging is because of the energy of its prose and its swift, crackling wit. The conversation directed at the Chinese Premier works to great effect, though the connection may appear forced. The oppressive social structure of the village with its feudal hegemony is adeptly dealt with. The lack of basic amenities in the rural hinterland – the heart-rending death of Balram’s father by tuberculosis due to the absence of trained professionals is an indictment of the moral corruption that has come to dominate those who have a duty towards the under-privileged.

The tone is slick and fast-paced, and it charts new territory in its depiction of the aloofness of the rich towards the poor and the dangers this poses to social cohesion. Gurgaon, with its absurdly named high-rise apartment blocks, such as Buckingham Buildings and Windsor Estate and ever-growing number of malls is vividly described as a brutal, concrete jungle whose salient feature is the crude exhibitionism of wealth. The emergence of this new social ethos, whose roots lie in vulgar materialism, wreaks psychological conflict on the people who are excluded from the riches of the globalised economy.

By refusing to subscribe to a clichéd, exotic version of India, The White Tiger is the victim of another one – the new India. The rhetoric of the new India has acquired the status of a mythology in Western media reportage. The Booker Prize has always swayed in the direction of the prevailing, dominant perception of the Indian subcontinent. The disappointing part about The White Tiger is that instead of focusing on the uneasy co-existence within the contradictions of Indian urban life, it adds to that lazy classification – new India, as separate from the old.

The petit-bourgeois classes, stirred by visions of material utopia and alienated from their present condition by their contact with consumer culture, whose psyche was brilliantly examined in Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, form a glaring absence. The entrepreneur Balram, who now runs a taxi service in Bangalore from the stolen money of his employer, with his naiveté and delusions of grandeur, is one more example where a close examination has been abandoned in favour of an exaggerated, theatrical posture to press hard upon the reader the ‘new’ landscape of globalised India.

The White Tiger ventures into areas of darkness, but is lost in its abyss of easy generalisations and cliches. It aims to act as a mirror to the transformative changes that have taken place, but is unable to convincingly answer the questions it sets out for itself.