Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger: A Critique

KAUSHAL DESAI

Department of English,

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University,

Gujarat, India.

Abstract: The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga is appreciated by many Indian readers and

it is a very widely read text. It depicts a true picture of modern India and that is why

Arvind Adiga’s view plays a very vital role in Indian society and he shows the other facet

of the Indian Culture. His literary genius is represented in the form of Darkness, Light,

Corruption, Reality, and Authenticity of Class. One cannot deny that how Adiga has

described the character of a common man; Balram Halwai, who becomes the central

figure from the periphery with the development of novel. Especially, the concept of

Rooster coop has been discussed marvelously which shows the inner sight of the writer

regarding the Indian Society. Arvind Adiga represents a dark humor of modern life of

India through the narration of the story of Balram Halwai. In other words one can say that

it is a compelling, angry, and darkly humorous novel that provides ups and downs in the

life of Balram Halwai. It creates two different Indias: “an India of Light and an India of

Darkness.” It is the India of darkness which is focused by the novelist articulating the

voice of silent majority trying to dismantle the discrimination between the “Big Bellies

and the Small Bellies” and created a society based on the principles of inequality and

injustice. It also talks about the Indian family, cast system, globalization, and

individualism. Through this novel Arvind Adiga portrays a clear-cut idea of India in his

debut novel The White Tiger, which honored him Man Booker Prize 2008.

First of all, in the part on Indian literature one surely can discuss about The Idea of

Nation. In which, Tagore and Gandhi both were against the nation - state – Swaraj vs Suraj. For

Tagore, the concept of India was not territorial but ideational i.e. India for him was not a

geographical expression but an idea. His view of nationalism was more about spreading a

homogenized universalism than seeking political freedom for India. But Gandhi- ‘our struggle

for freedom is to bring peace in the world. In The White Tiger, Balram Halwai gives a fact of

21st India. So further more we come across with more realistic side of India that is very

enormously drawn every characteristic of it.

Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger critically evaluate an Indian society, hypocrisy, power

struggle, imagery, sarcasm. The entire plot of the novel pivots round the protagonist Balram

Halwai, a young man born and brought up in a remote village of Bihar, who narrates his story of

life in the form of a letter to a foreign dignitary, the Chinese Prime-Minister Wen Jiabao, who is

on his visit to Bangalore on an official assignment. In his talk Balram Halwai begins to tell the

Chinese Premier the story of his life. Balram share his own story of entrepreneurial success.

Balram’s lack of basic schooling is affects in his life that he has to struggle for his and family’s

stomach. Here, in this novel Balram describe landlords with the evil figure, who corrupt the

society and demolish it with their power.

Balram thinks that the poor man in our county is half-baked. In which he ask attention

from Mr. Jiabao to draw this aspect in clear way that,

After twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join

companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives. Entrepreneurs are

made from half-baked clay. (The White Tiger 11)

After that describing the realistic image of river Ganga, Balram depicts on the matter of

pride and that the river Ganga flows through his village. For which he tells to the foreign Prime-

Minister Wen Jiabao;

That black river am I talking of – which is river of Death, whose banks are full of rich,

dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking

and stunting it? Why, I am talking of Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of

illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere this

river flows, that area is the Darkness. (The White Tiger-15)

Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light,

and an 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.

(The White Tiger-14)

With describing the story we come across that Balram Halwai is the mouth piece of

Arvind Adiga. Balram criticizes on the subject of giving dowry in marriage, that Indian

marriages are full of gold bug. One can desire for more and in the marriage all that have to get a

loan so what’s the purpose? Is it means all about giving a girl with money matter? Well, that’s

good if it’s incoming, Balram says that;

We had the boy, and we screwed the girl's family hard. I remember exactly what

we got in dowry from the girl's side, and thinking about it even now makes my

mouth fill up with water: five thousand rupees cash, all crisp new unsoiled notes

fresh from the bank, plus a Hero bicycle, plus a thick gold necklace for Kishan.

(The White Tiger 30)

And one can clearly say that he is a profound viewer of Indianness. Further more in the

novel he argued of caste system, as in India it’s a typical topic. That’s for what Balram throw

some his views and explanations. In which he says;

I should explain a thing or two about caste. Even Indians get confused about this word,

especially educated Indians in the cities. They'll make a mess of explaining it to you. But

it's simple, really. Let's start with me. See: Halwai, my name, means "sweet-maker."

That's my caste—my destiny. Everyone in the Darkness who hears that name knows all

about me at once. That's why Kishan and I kept getting jobs at sweetshops wherever we

went. The owner thought, Ah, they're Halwais, making sweets and tea is in their blood.

(The White Tiger 63)

But then he also argued that if we were Halwais, then why was my father not making

sweets but pulling a rickshaw? Why did I grow up breaking coals and wiping tables,

instead of eating gulab jamuns and sweet pastries when and where I chose to? Why was I

lean and dark and cunning, and not fat and creamy-skinned and smiling, like a boy raised

on sweets would be? See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest

nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place,

everyone happy. Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man called a

Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable cleaned

feces. Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and

turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men. (The White Tiger 63)

Society that is dependent on his position in India's caste system. The status is viewed

more permanently through India's caste system than a status in the U.S. where ideals of the

"American Dream" are a hope if not a reality. Balram is fascinated by the U.S. and appreciates

its secularism, capitalism, and democracy, but notes that India, too, has these ideologies in place.

The problem is that they have not reached all people as they should. Although the United States

also has a large poverty problem and people who are discriminated against for religious beliefs,

the scale is much smaller. The government has an easier time preventing religious attacks and

giving aid to the poor owing to a more strongly established infrastructure of government. Balram

see every minor to major facts very clearly and enormously. In every way he comes across with

this class and caste divergence.

Following that he gives several facts of poor-rich conflict. While discussing the argument

of today’s India and the way of living, the story exposes the poor-rich divide that surrounds India

in the backdrop of economic prosperity, in the wake of the IT revolution. As Michael Portillo

commented the novel; “shocked and entertained in equal measure” (Portillo, 2008). It is always

the matter that seen by all that poor is going become more poorer and rich people is going to

become richer.

Speaking on the servant-master relationship, Adiga says:

The servant-master system implies two things: One is that the servants are far poorer than

the rich—a servant has no possibility of ever catching up to the master. And secondly, he

has access to the master—the master’s money, the master’s physical person. Yet crime

rates in India are very low. Even though the middle class, who often have three or four

servants, are paranoid about crime, the reality is a master getting killed by his servant is

rare…. You need two things [for crime to occur] a divide and a conscious ideology of

resentment. We don’t have resentment in India. The poor just assume that the rich are a

fact of life…. But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a class based resentment for the

first time. (Sawhney, 2008).

Once Balram ironically said that, he is a pride voter of India who never visited voter booth.

Balram is representative of the poor in India yearning for their ‘tomorrow’. His story is a

parable of the new India with a distinctly macabre twist. He is not only an entrepreneur

but also a roguish criminal remarkably capable of self-justification. The background

against which he operates is one of corruption, inequality and poverty (Kapur, 2008).

Then we can enlightened here Marxist Ideology, have and have not. And Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak’s “can subaltern speak?” In this novel we find this aspect very clearly

with the character of Balram Halwai. How domination and power exert in subaltern discourses.

The subaltern theorization is directed to touch upon the core issues of cultural and economic

power and the representation of marginal that are at centre in the politic of discipline itself. The

notion of representation of postcolonial subaltern is based on argument that discursive focus can

be shifted from hegemonic to marginalize.

What is the type of undertaken action of subaltern character in the novel? How are the

social hierarchies characterized and how does the narrative interpolate them? If the subaltern’s

acts can be termed as “rebellious,” how do they serve those who perform them? The binary

structure of reality and representation has remained a source of contentious debate. For the

presence of these two parts, while logically allowing a differentiation between them, also

inevitably leads to hierarchization and evaluation, so that representation is often conceived of as

opposition between originality and derivativeness, authenticity and fakeness, which are attributed

to the parts of the binary (Chow, 39).

Although the author makes use of symbols, but each symbol has a shallow significance.

The little rectangle mirror inside the car is one such symbol that at moments strips both the

driver and the master completely because every now and then;

When master and driver find each other’s eyes in this mirror, it swings open like a door

into a changing room, and the two of them have suddenly caught each other naked? (The

White Tiger-199)

Similarly the title of the novel The White Tiger attempts to suggest a good deal of

symbolical values in the book. The White Tiger is associated with many experiences of the

Protagonist. First it was the school inspector who spotted Balram Halwai as the brightest boy in

the school for having answered all his questions and he called him the white tiger. All his close

friends and associates always addressed him as the white tiger, particularly at moments of great

crisis in life. When rejected in the selection of training for driving, he fell back in dejections, but

was lifted by his cousins Kishan, and Dilip who addressed him as ‘white tiger’ and finally when

he visited the Delhi zoo and fainted under the impact of the white tiger in the cage. The entire

significance of the novel revolves round the white tiger in a cage, for Balram Halwai, always

feels to have been chained bound in his country like a white tiger in a cage. Hence in his letter to

his granny, he writes ‘I can’t live the rest of my life in a cage, Granny. I’m so sorry.’ He falls

down fainted, and the term is used here as opposite of the paper tiger, metaphorically suggesting

an India human being who finds himself completely bound and chained like the white tiger;

everywhere they are like Balram, his village people, his driver friend and above all, even the

educated young Indians, who appear half baked men,’ human spiders in ‘half baked cities.’

In fact it is this concept of human beings bound in the cage that brings out the central

theme of the novel revealing the situation wherein the poor people of India are like rooster in a

basket. Nothing could be more bitter and ironical than the following remark:

Indians are the world’s most honest people, like the prime minister’s booklet will inform

you?

No. It’s because 66.6 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor

guys in the poultry market. (The White Tiger-199)

Furthermore Balram describe the concept of Rooster Coop Imagery. Roosters are

happy-healthy in their cage but they don’t know that danger is lurking behind them. And also

Adiga adopts the metaphor of the rooster coop to describe the relationship between crime,

caging, and rebellion. Indians are packed together in a cage, unable to breathe or move: The

greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster

Coop… Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh

cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other,

jostling just for breathing space. (147) The cage reeks with a terrible stench: a young butcher is

killing off the roosters. Yet the roosters do not try to escape: “The roosters in the coop smell the

blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they’re

next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done

with human beings in this country”. (147) Parodying Churchill, Balram sardonically remarks,

“never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many” (149). “A handful of

men… have trained the remaining 99.9 percent as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way

to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation

in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse” (149). Why do poor Indians

remain confined in their coop generation after generation? Balram points the finger at the all-

important family: “The Indian family is the reason we are tied to the coop…Only a man who is

prepared to see his family destroyed, hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters can break

out of the coop” (150). “No normal human being,” only “a freak, a pervert of nature,” will

jeopardize his family (150). In Bigger’s Chicago, blacks remain suppressed as a result of racial

oppression and religious passivity; in Balram’s India, it is the family that tightens the wires of

the rooster coop. Hence one can say the protagonist is a cold blooded and a good critic of Indian

society.

A close examination of the form of the novel also reveals a lack of consistency in his use

of the form of the novel. The novel begins in the epistolary form as the author writes letter to the

Chinese Prime Minister, but after a few chapters, he gives up this form and lapses into free

expression. In the same way, sometimes the author appears erratic as he imitates the style of the

picaresque novel, particularly like the novel Tom Jones, he makes the truth stand on its head, a

mode of expression that appears quite suitable to the central theme of the novel, but this mode

appears only at moments to disappear later without making any lasting effect on the mind of the

reader.

It seems the author has little sense of the art of characterization; for there are very few

characters in the novel, and even these have little flesh or blood. Commenting on his art of

characterization, Amitav Kumar rightly observes:

I found Adiga’s villains utterly cartoonist, like the characters in a bad Bollywood

melodrama. However, it was his presentation of ordinary people that I found not trite but also

offensive. (The Hindu, Literary Review, Nov 2, 08, p.1)

After that we observe background part in this novel and that the present day concern of

literary studies is to examine texts for their revelation of the economic and social realities

especially as they produce ideology and represent power or subversion. Aravind Adiga’s The

White Tiger is one such text that seems to be grounded in the specific conditions in which it is

produced and received. It comes across as an embodied thought of the poetics and politics of

Cultural Studies and this paper makes an attempt to highlight its ideological framework by which

existing institutions and structures of power are reproduced, restricted and transformed. Since it

shares most of the features of the school of Cultural studies, it can easily be analysed as a form of

cultural resistance to homogenising capitalism as the emphasis throughout is on the

particularities of the proletariat suppressed under the dominant high culture. But what strikes one

as odd is that the proletariat is not spared by the writer. In fact, this particular class has been

undermined in the text to such an extent that the writer ends up presenting a pejorative view of

this class that he claims to defend. He thus not only fails to redefine the social order but also ends

up as a spokesperson of the conventional Eurocentric perspective of the East. This paper,

therefore, seeks to unravel these diametrically opposed strands criss-crossing the fabric of The

White Tiger as Adiga while silencing certain voices ends up allowing the narcissism of Western

culture raise its garrulous head.

We see here is what successful journey of common man how Balram becomes the centre

from periphery. It’s also the part of Cultural dimension. Also we have example of the movie

Slumdag Millionaire which, like the White Tiger tells a moving story about the poor. Like many

of the earlier stories, it depicts the dark and naked picture of India, of course, in altogether a

different setting and necessary love and genuine feelings for the motherland and that too by

pleasing the western eyes. The well-known novelist and screen play writer T.N. Murari in his

article ‘The Love to see us Poor’. (The New Indian Express, January 25, 2009) makes pertinent

comment on the success of White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. Their international success

reassures the world which views us through the grim prism of our poverty, that India has not

changed much. India Shining,’ ‘Incredible India,’ ‘India Inc,’ unsettles the western nations. They

need the poor as long as they’re at a safe distance, stuck in India. Our poverty gives them a sense

of superiority and they feel threatened with whatever little success we have had. We still have

the poor, the vast slum, farmer suicides, to reassure them that the India they know and bold at

arm’s length, is still with them. Recently a friend in London forwarded me an email from two of

her friends travelling in India. They had been in Delhi and did not even notice our lutyen’s Delhi,

the glittering shopping malls, the Meres cruising the roads, but wrote at length about the dirt, the

poor and the crippled. I do have other friends abroad who have no wish to visit India our image

of poverty frightens them. India still elicits the opposite extremes of emotion – love and hate.

History has not been kind to us. Two centuries of British colonialism did impoverish India in the

1600s, India produced 22.5 percent of the world’s GDP and Britain a mere 1.8 per cent. By 1870,

we were reduced to a poor third world country while Britain produces 9.1 per cent of the world

GDP. Today, we’re the Horaitus Alger of nations.

Hence with concluding my views on this novel, one can say that one person can be

servant, philosopher, Entrepreneur, and Murderer. While the describing the journey, Adiga gives

an explanation with examples that is also the true fact is going towards. The desire of the life, do

making him/her with every possibilities. And that’s how Adiga fantastically writes in his novel

with the perception of today’s Indian and how it’s become a root of the people in this situational

nation.

References

Adiga, Arvind. "The White Tiger." Adiga, Arvind. The White Tiger. New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers,

2008. 321.

V.S. Naipaul, 1964. An Area of Darkness. London. Andre Deutsch.

2008. Articles from The Hindu Delhi, Literary Review, Nov 2.

GradeSaver. 1999 <http://www.gradesaver.com/the-white-tiger/study-guide/>.

Khan, M.Q. "The White Tiger: A Critique." Journal of Literature, Culture and Media Studies Vol.-I Number

2 q Winter q July-December 2009 (2009): 8.