PATRICIA ÁLVAREZ SÁNCHEZ

University of Málaga

Urban Landscapes in India:From Political Uncertainty in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

to Globalization in Adiga’s The White Tiger

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)

Srinagar (Kashmir)

In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes […] no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains... In those days travellers were notshot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Eng-lishmen's houseboats on the lake, the valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire…(Midnight’s Children 5)

Agra

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (1919) in Amritsar

Bombay/Mumbai

Karachi

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008)

Laxmangarth

Dhanbad

Delhi

We were like two separate cities—inside and outside the dark egg” (White Tiger 116)

Delhi

The rich live in “big housing colonies” (White Tiger 98) and the poor “live on the sides of the road in Delhi” (White Tiger 99).

Gurgaon (Delhi)

To escape the “Darkness”, the rural hinterland where he comes from, he undermines the values that he has been forced to follow all his life.

- First of all, he goes to the Dehli Zoo. In the observation of the tiger, he realizes he has been trapped in a cage all his life.

-In the second place, Balram starts to be illuminated by poetry: “You were looking for the keys for years, but the door was always open” (216) and "The moment you recognise what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave" (236).

- The final change comes when the city starts to speak to him in the language of the war: My heart was bitter that night. The city knew this—and under the dim orange glow cast everywhere by the weal streetlamps, she was bitter.Speak to me of civil war, I told Delhi.I will, she said (White Tiger 188)

Balram undergoes three changes

Bangalore (Silicon Valley)

Conclusion

Saleem’s family’s migration in Midnight’s Children mirrors the political and social uncertainty of the history of modern India:

- The Jallianwala Bagh massacre- The Quit India movement launched by Gandhi- The partition of India- The post-independence riots - The rise and success of Bollywood- The war with Pakistan - Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency 

Midnight’s Children

Conclusion

The White Tiger depicts the city of New Delhi as a centre where complex economic changeshave given way to the rise of new industries such as technology, trade and outsourcing for the USA.

The protagonist becomes an ambitious choreo-grapher of the urban inventorie in New Delhi and Ban-galore, cities with extraordinary energetic creativity and opportunities, of worldliness and ambition, the enactment of globalization.

The White Tiger

PATRICIA ÁLVAREZ SÁNCHEZ

Patriciaalvarezsanchez@gmail.com

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