 If
there is a fiction which flashes with originality, and moreover a
different aspect of India, it is markedly none other than, The White
Tiger written by Aravind Adiga and which won the Man Booker Prize for
Fiction, 2008. He was awarded $50,000 for his fiction and he was the
fourth debut novelist and the second Indian to receive the Man Booker
Prize.
Adiga who was born in Chennai in 1974, acquired his education
primarily from Canara High School and St. Aloysius High School. He
graduated from, Columbia College, Columbia University, New York and
Magdalen College, Oxford.
Adiga started his career as a journalist in 2000 as a financial
journalist at the Financial Times. In 2003 he returned to India as a
correspondent for Time Magazine. After he became a freelancer, he wrote
The White Tiger in 2008 which won the Booker prize in the same year.
This novel illustrates the contrast between India rising as a modern
global economy and the character of the protagonist who came from
crushing rural poverty. This novel is in a form of a series of letters
in which the protagonist describes how he came up the ladder to present
himself as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. This along with his success
story reveals the Indian caste system and its political corruption.
In an author’s interview Adiga revealed that in The White Tiger he
was influenced by three black American writers of the Post- World war 2
era who are Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. He further
said that the first draft of the White Tiger was done in 2005 but he
laid it aside for 3 years and when he was back in India, he started
unfolding the story again.
By early January 2007, the book was in completed form. As a novelist
he is working on an another fiction the name of which he doesn’t want to
reveal, to his readers yet.
- Harshini
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