India in The White Tiger

In this week’s column, I would like to examine India portrayed in The White Tiger in comparison with how India has been portrayed by a couple of novelists such as R.K Narayan and Vikram Seth. Compared with R.K Narayan and Vikram Seth, the India portrayed by Aravind Adiga in The White Tiger is the post colonial India with a rapid economic growth and sprawling metropolitans whose growth and sustenance are directly linked with knowledge-based industries such as IT and ITC.

Intersection of poverty and affluence is brought to light not only through the protagonist Balram Halwai but also through the comparisons and contrasts between the city of Bangalore and the poorest state of India, Bihar. The disparity of standards of life within the city of Bangalore has been vividly realised through some of the actions of Mr. Ashok vindicating the asymmetrical development and organic corruption in the establishment;

“The next day, I drove him and Mr. Ashok to some minister’s or bureaucrat’s house in New Delhi; they went out with the red bag. Afterwards, I took them to the hotel, where they had lunch-I gave the hotel staff instructions … I rammed the bottle down. The glass ate his bone. I rammed it three times into the crown of his skull, smashing through to his brains. It’s a good, strong bottle, Johnnie Walker Black-well worth its resale value. ”

Following the murder of his boss, Balram Halwai eventually becomes a millionaire and an ‘investor’ in the bustling city of Bangalore. What is hinted out is that members of the lower strata of society climb the social ladder by foul means and become ‘investors’ with ill-gotten money. In broader perspective, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger can be considered as apolitical novel which depicts, among other things, the overarching influence of transnational capitalism and globalisation at both micro and macro levels. The White Tiger affirms the collapse of the ‘Antiquated India’ and its allied strong family bonds ably articulated by R.K Narayan.

Though it is apolitical, it is not clear whether this new rich generation is patriotic as the generation of Indians depicted in R.K Narayana’s fiction. Apart from literary value, critics point out that Narayana’s works depict nationalistic phase in the evolution of post colonial India.

In a paper entitled “The Magic Idyll of Antiquated Indian-Patriarchal Nationalism in R. K. Narayan s Tiction” , Harveen Mann points out citing R.K Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) and The Painter of Signs (1976), that novels are ‘engaged statements on modern Indian nationalism particularly as it is underwritten by patriarchal religious and cultural beliefs that marginalise women’.

Considering the novels as a product of their own historical moments, Harveen Mann states ‘I regard the novels as products of their own historical moments of composition: Waiting for the Mahatma, for example, seems to me to emerge from the surviving Gandhianism and post- Independence optimism of the early- to mid-1950s, while The Painter of Signs emerges from the ideological disenchantment and inflexibility of Indira Gandhi's Emergency in the mid- 1970s. The novels thus represent the tensions between the differently articulated and focused nationalisms and feminisms of the two decades. But, insofar as they also reflect Narayan's own abiding sympathies — middle-class, Hindu upper-caste, androcentric, conservative — they end up rehearsing the dominant, gendered narrative of the Indian nation, particularly as it devolves upon the bodies and voices of the two leading female characters, Bharati in Waiting for the Mahatma and Daisy in The Painter of Signs respectively.

The stories of the two novels are easily summarised. Waiting for the Mahatma is set during the Quit India Movement of the 1940s. Sriram, the protagonist, is drawn into the movement through his attraction to Bharati, a devotee of Mohandas Gandhi. He leaves his home, the fictional community of Malgudi, to participate in the Gandhian nationalist struggle as a sign-painter, painting the slogan "Quit India" across the countryside.

But, following this period of non-violent resistance, and separated from Bharati when the courts arrest at Gandhi's urging, he falls in with Jagadish, a follower of the more radical and militaristic leader Subhas Chandra Bose.4 Seduced for a time by the subversive political undertakings of Bose's Indian National Army, Sriram derails trains and plants bombs until he is imprisoned for his "terrorist" activities. Upon his release from prison following India's Independence, he returns to Bharati and to Gandhi's non-violent fold.

Although Gandhi dies at the end of the novel, the narrative expectation is that the soon-to-be-married Sriram and Bharati and their thirty adopted children, orphans of the Partition riots, will carry on his work of reconciliation and healing in the nascent nation.

The Painter of Signs, published twenty-one years after Waiting for the Mahatma, moves the temporal axis to its contemporary historical moment, the mid-1970s India of Indira Gandhi's

repressive political Emergency. Now, Raman, another signpainter, pursues Daisy, a follower of Sanjay (not Mohandas) Gandhi who works to advance the latter's propagandistic and coercive national birth control movement. "We are two; let ours be two" is the slogan of this new, and less ideal (istic) India. And even though Daisy is given more narrative space in

The Painter of Signs than is Bharati in Waiting for the Mahatma, the novel ends with her expulsion from the scene. Unable to commit to traditionally sanctioned marriage, she chooses to pursue her career as a social worker, while Raman returns, somewhat embittered, to his pre-Daisy life in Malgudi.”

Mann argues though R.K Narayan has been earlier described as non political writer and he writes essentially for ‘delight in human oddity’ by writer such as V.S Naipaul, contemporary critics such as Homi Baba, Gita Rajan, and Sadhana Puranik ‘are increasingly given to reading Narayan not as quintessentially "Indian" but rather as an ambivalent, postcolonial writer, one who caught between western and Indian cultures, stands, like his protagonist Raman in The Painter of Signs, "between myth and modernity" (Bhabha, "Brahmin" 421), they do not focus on the issue of gender as it functions in Narayan's in-between, borderline “ . If R.K Narayan describes ‘idol’ of Indian ‘nationalism’, Aravind Adiga describes crumbling of those ‘idols’ into pieces through the protagonist of The White Tiger, Balram Halwai.