Book Review

The White Tiger

By Aravinda Adiga

Publisher: Atlantic Books London

Price: 6.99 UK P

ISBN: 978-1-84887-042-0

Page count: 321

Size: 4.5 x 7

Released: 2008

Intricate. Dazzling. Brilliant. The White Tiger has everything that makes a splendid novel: suspense, drama, satire, tension, clarity of thought, and simple language.

A conversational tone is maintained throughout the novel, which begins and ends in a unique way. Fascinating insights into today’s India make up part of a lengthy letter to the Prime Minister of China from Balram Halwaii, a sweet-maker-turned-driver-turned-murderer-turned-entrepreneur in Bangalore. It is about India and China’s emergence on the world economic scene. It is about ‘yellow’ and ‘brown’ men, posing a threat to the white-man domination of world affairs. The White Tiger is about India being paranoid of China!

Adiga’s India is “two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.” The India of Light reflects the economic progress the country and its growing middle class have made. This India entails ‘a little America’ in Delhi and Bangalore; the former being a place that has seen many malls and high-rise apartment buildings come into existence to cater to the country’s expanding middle class and foreign investors, and the latter being the country’s modern face: a silicon valley with mushrooming Indian firms that do outsourcing for American technology giants Microsoft, Dell and Intel.

The Darkness is about the plight of ‘have nots’ – Delhi’s homeless people and Bangalore’s slum dwellers - and their exploitation by the rich - the landed gentry, the entrepreneurs, the corrupt elite and the ruling class. The rich “make people talk and talk about things that they have no say in” through a farcical parliamentary democracy - a system in which elections are rigged, and votes are bought and sold. Socialists and pro-democracy forces are no different.

Adiga seems to be well ahead of many Indian writers about whom noted author Salman Rushdie once said: “The new Indian writers’ work is as polymorphous as the place, and readers who care about the vitality of literature will find at least some of these voices saying something they want to hear.” Though India continues to be polymorphous because of economic growth, this connotation does not fit Adiga, whose first novel won him worldwide fame. The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

This novel shows problem after problem infecting India like a dangerous disease.

Issues as delicate as the caste system, religious hatred, prostitution, and judicial corruption are discussed with uncompromising clarity. A masterful observer of society, Adiga shows us many ways a man – poor or rich – falls into corruption to satisfy his lust for money and power.

The central character of the novel is Balram Halwaii, the White Tiger, the ex-sweet maker, but it is not Balram’s story. It is India’s story. It is the story of a wild place, where the law of the jungle rules. Eat or be eaten up. It is the story of a place, where even an empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black is of great utility. Utility for a poor driver, because of its resale value, and as a tool to kill!

Reviewed by Intikhab Amir