The White Tiger and representation of contemporary India

In this week’s column, I would like to discuss, briefly, whether Aravind Adigar’s Booker Prize winning novel The White Tiger represents contemporary India. Although the booker prize committee has described the novel as ‘Post Post Colonial novel’, some of the Indian critics are of the view that the novel projects ‘a brutal distortion of the lives of poor rural Indians’. Aravinda Adigar’s unflattering representation of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland.

Adigar’s The White Tiger which won the coveted Man-Booker prize, is the fourth winner of the booker prize by an Indian author. Previously the booker prize was won by Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy for The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai for Inheritance of Loss.

The protagonist, Balram Halwai

The novel is woven around the protagonist Balram Halwai who is a son of a village rickshawwalla. Balram is also the narrator of the story who describes himself as an entrepreneur in the high tech city of Bangalore. The novel progresses in the form of series of letters by Balram to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, describing ‘the real India’ he will not see during his upcoming tour of India. In the novel, Adigar provides the protagonist the following words to describe ‘the real India’.

“I am talking of a place in India, at least the third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields, and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place called it the Darkness. Please understand Your Excellency that India is two countries in one: an India of Light and India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off. But the river brings darkness to India-the black river…why I am talking of Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of all of us, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere, this river flows, that area is the Darkness.

One fact about India is that you can take almost everything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down, then you will have the truth about that thing. Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds American tourist come each year to take photographs of naked Sadhus at Hardwar or Banaras, and our prime minister will describe that way and urge you to take a dip in it.

No!- Mr Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acides.”

“ Described by the Man-Booker committee as a humorous take on “a different aspect of India,” the novel sets itself up as a corrective to one prevailing image of India’s economic success. Clearly this politics was a Man-Booker consideration. As the committee says, “The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global developments with astonishing humour." In fact, 80% of the world’s software comes from India and so too do many of the world’s richest entrepreneurs. (I’m reminded here of Thomas Friedman’s portrayals in The World is Flat.) And yet there remain problems of economic and social inequality.

Socio-economic conditions in India

Roy T. Wortman, distinguished Professor of History at Kenyon College, USA has written about prevalent socio-economic conditions in India.

“Having lived in Bihar, I both recognize the landscapes he describes and resent the cheap caricature he makes of it. One needn’t idealize poverty to recognize the humanity in people from different regions, cultures, backgrounds, and classes. The fact that Adigar was born in Chennai, or lives in Mumbai, does not excuse the blank stereotyping of Biharis. (By the way, there was a recent political agitation in Mumbai to kick out Bihari migrant workers.) In the novel, we’re supposed to laugh at the cruelty of the main character’s grandmother or his own uncaring ambition. Even the critique of the wealthy landlords and corrupt politicians is convoluted—elections determined by a single man stamping ballots. As a student of India’s democracy, I especially balked at this dismissal of the seriousness with which Biharis in large number exercise their right to vote.”

What is obvious from Wortman’s points of view is that the fictional reality portrayed by Adigar in The White Tiger may not be true to the prevalent socio-economic conditions in the poorest state of India, Bihar.

Another important point that the critic presents is that the Adigar has subscribed to ‘description of village life’ found in so many stereotypes in colonial literature. As he points out the fact that consideration of the Booker Prize Selection Committee ‘the novel sets itself up as a corrective to one prevailing image of India’s economic success’ and ‘a humorous take on “a different aspect of India’ is clearly motivated by politics rather than literary criteria.

In comparison with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai for Inheritance of Loss, Aravinda Adigar’s The White Tiger has a weak diction and none of the characters has been realised to its logical conclusion. Adigar’s Booker Prize winning debut novel may subscribe as a story depicting stereotypes of the image of India’s poverty and injustices associated with it. When Adigar was interviewed for the UK Guardian, he confirms his views.

"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. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination."