Aravind Adiga and diasporic writing

"At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society (Indian). That's what I'm trying to do - it is not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination. "

- Aravind Adiga

As the influence of diapora is growing in many spheres such as films, literature and economy, it is pertinent to examine the contribution of diasporic writers not only to their indigenous literature but also in a global context. Although most of the diaporic writers opted to write in English or in a foreign language other than their native tongue, a segment of the diasporic writers is bilinguals who still cherish not only the nostalgic memories of the land they left behind but also the language which is close to their hearts.

By examining Aravind Adiga, one may yield interesting features of growing Asian diapora and their myriads of influences on the motherland.

Early life

Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974 in Madras (now Chennai) to Dr. K Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga. His parents, Kannadigas hail from Mangalore. His paternal grandfather, K. Surnarayana Adiga was former Chairman of Karnataka Bank. He grew up in Mangalore and studied at Carana High School. At an early stage in life Aravind excelled in studies and became the first in rank in SSLC and PUC in the state.

Following his family's migration to Sydney, Australia, he studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School and studied English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University in New York. He also studied at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Literary career

Aravind Adiga commenced his career as a journalist at the Financial Times. After a short stint, Adiga was hired by TIMES and remained a correspondence for South Asia for three years. Then he became a freelance journalist. It was while freelancing that Adiga wrote his maiden novel The White Tiger which won the prestigious Man Booker award in 2008. He was just 33, when he won the £50,000 the prestigious award. Adiga currently lives in Mumbai in India. Adiga is the fourth Indian-born author to win the coveted award. Previously Indian authors such as Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai have won the Booker Prize. V. S. Naipaul, albeit not an Indian-born author but of Indian origin, has won the Booker Prize. The Indian hardcover edition of The White Tiger has sold over 200,000 copies. Adiga wrote his second book 'Between the Assassinations' in November 2008 and was released in India, in the US and in UK in mid 2009. The book contains 12 interlinked short stories. His corpus of writings includes The White Tiger, Between the Assassinations and short stories, 'The Sultan's Battery", "Smack", "Last Christmas in Bandra" and "The Elephant".

The White Tiger

Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, extensively deals with India's rise as a modern global economy. The lead character Balram Halva belongs to the lowest strata of population and comes from the impoverished rural background. Adiga narrates the story of Balram through letters he writes, which were never posted to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. Wen had planned to visit India to learn why and how the country was good at producing entrepreneurs. The focus of, Balram's unsent correspondence is to advise the Chinese Premier explaining how to win power and influence people in India. Balram's story consists of a series of incidents of bribery, corruption, toxic traffic jams, murder and theft which he commits at the end for his own freedom. Adiga with his gifted narrative prose use Balram's character to tell the reader that the yellow and the brown men will take over the world from the white man soon.

Halwai represents a class of India that Adiga calls the 'Darkness - the heart of rural India' - and manages to escape his family and poverty by working to be a chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to Delhi. Why did he make Halwai a chauffeur? Giving an interview to The Guardian Adiga explains: "Because of the whole active-passive thing. The chauffeur is the servant but he is, at least while he's driving, in charge, so the whole relationship is subverted."

Diasporic writings

The term 'diaspora', wass originally used to describe those who are away from one's homeland. However, the term is now applied as a metaphor for all expatriates, refugees, exiles and immigrants, whose lives, language and experiences have been altered by paradigms of bilingualism, dual cultural codes and geographical dislocation and displacement.

Diasporic writers are emotionally attached to their homeland, yet yearn to belong to their current domiciled country as a result of their new sense of place. They roam psychically between two worlds and as a result both their root or foundation culture and their host culture negate their belonging to either location. This condition of being "homelessness" is associated further with alienation, a desire to reclaim the past yet rebels against it, the desire to go back forestalled by the inability to move out from the current sense of place due to family and other linkages they have established over the years. Diasporic writers project their writings to represent this quandary through their work.

One of the important aspects of diasporic writers is that they write predominantly in English although there are bilinguals and multi-linguals among them. Either they had exposed themselves to English Education earlier in life or adopted English as a language of interaction or of work at the middle age of their lives.

Making of a writer

The following are extracts for an exclusive interview where Adiga explains his formative years which eventually make him a gifted writer.

"Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. Books were expensive in those days, and few of us could actually buy them. The thing to do was to join a circulating library that would lend them out at a nominal rate (novels, two rupees a fortnight; comics, 50 paise).

Like most of my friends in school, I was a member of multiple circulating libraries; and all of us, to begin with, borrowed and read the same things. Up to the age of 10, you borrowed comics (mainly illustrated versions of the great Indian epics); later came your first novels, a boys' detective series called "The Hardy Boys". Girls read an equivalent series called "Nancy Drew".

My other grandfather, a surgeon in Madras, belonged to the opposite school of thought, once refusing to attend an official dinner in honor of the president of India, Zail Singh, on the grounds that the president's English was inadequate.

Such debates were dead for my generation. What my grandparents called the King's English, I call Nehru's English. The prime minister's great speeches in English - the "tryst with destiny" oration delivered on India's independence in 1947, or "the light has gone out of our lives," to announce Gandhi's death to the nation the next year - were taught in school, quoted on radio, and their fragments were found, like DNA strands, in all newspapers and magazines.

Nehru could only have made these speeches in English, because had he spoken in Hindi, we - in the south of India, where Hindi is not spoken, and is often abhorred - would not have understood him. Every foundational document of India was known to me only in English: the Constitution, for instance, and even Gandhi's autobiography, written in his native Gujarati, but taught in school in an English translation.

How could we function without our only common language? Doing away with English seemed to me tantamount to doing away with India: We were the languages, before the language was ours.

Kannada, the south Indian language that is, in Indian terms, my "mother tongue" (which means, generally, that your father speaks it), has produced one of the world's great literatures. But of its poets and writers, only one - the novelist U. R. Ananthamurthy (regarded by some as India's greatest living novelist) - broke through to me, and only because one of his books had been adapted for the cinema. I rarely saw any of my middle-class classmates read a Kannada book out of the classroom, where we were forced to learn poems and prose extracts in the lifeless way, reinforced with violence, typical of provincial Indian education in the 1980s.

Lessons from diasporic writers

Diasporic writers could always provide new insights into their homeland. A good example of diasporic writer connected with Sri Lanka is Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. Although there are many categories of Diasporas such as Victim Diasporas, Labour Diasporas, Imperial Diasporas, Trade Diasporas, Homeland Diasporas and Cultural diasporas, what is important in the context of literature and cinema is Cultural Diasporas which maintains cultural and linguistic links with their motherland.

At rudimentary level, diasporic writings dominate themes such as loss of motherland, loss of heritage and language and issues relating to identity (dual citizenship and dual cultural codes and identities). In addition, diasporic writer's strong and captivating memories or memoirs associated with one's life experiences in motherland and cultural citizenship is also an important aspect to focus on.

Enriched by the constant interactions with people in a melting pot of globalized cultures and ethnicities, some school of thoughts argue that the life experiences of diasporic writers are tent to be richer and insightful than those of writers in a mono-lingual and mono-cultural constituency.

It is precisely for the factors such as cross cultural breeding and third eye views even on native life that the diasporic writing in native tongues will enrich the local literatures. However, what should be born in mind is that the experiences of diasporic writers even on native life such as those of Aravind Adiga, Michael Ondaatje Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai are as much as authentic as they could be of a native writer.

However, there may be issues of understanding and representation of homeland. One of the argument against diasporic writers is how representative or accurate their representation. Literature is not a collection and representation of factual data.

However, when one looks at diasporic writing, one comes across so many new concepts relating to creativity, hybridity, linguistic experimentations focusing upon race, ethnicity, belonging, otherness gender, subalternaiety and so on. That is the very reason why examination of diasporic writing is important.

(Note: The extracts of the interview of Adiga is based on an interview he gave on 'How English literature shaped me' in 2009 to the Independent, UK)