I Write, Therefore I am : Sid Harth

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2009-10-01 18:28:47 UTC

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Book: The White Tiger: A Novel

This rambunctious story of contemporary India shows how religion
doesn't create morality, and money doesn't solve every problem--but a
person can get what he wants out of life by eavesdropping on the right
conversations.

Introducing a major literary talent, "The White Tiger" offers a story
of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality,
told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable
narrator that this millennium has yet seen.
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher.
Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the
scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the
terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life
-- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired
as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians
(Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From
behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a
revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of "Murder
Weekly" ("Love -- Rape -- Revenge "), barter for girls, drink liquor
(Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian
society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax
breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play
their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas,
deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker
Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop
that no one else inside it can perceive.

Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches
and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient
and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds
of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with
a charisma asundeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that
religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem
-- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get
what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations.

Sold in sixteen countries around the world, "The White Tiger" recalls
"The Death of Vishnu" and "Bangkok 8" in ambition, scope, and
narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral,
irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is
an international publishing sensation -- and a startling, provocative
debut.
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Book Reviews of The White Tiger: A Novel

The White Tiger

Review by Abdul Latif Bhadravathi

Aravind Adiga has written a very incisive and at times controversial
book. The story revolves around TWO INDIAS we are witnessing; an
affluent India, and an India that is beset by common problems that
plague underdeveloped and developing countries. The glitz and shine we
see is confined to a very select areas and by seeing few flyovers,
neon lights and massive malls one cannot delusionary feel that India
has arrived and at par with western countries. we still have poverty,
disease, unemployment, homelessness and other social evils that
constitute majority India.

Critics have been at Adiga's throat saying he sold India to claim
Booker and their claim rings hollow. Whoe world is aware of what we
are and we dont need Adiga to reveal anything new.

In short Adiga has addressed real issues and given the fact that this
is his maiden effort, he has written admirably well.
Impressive

Review by DhirajKumar D.Dalvi

Truly impressive ....... i really enjoyed while reading The White
Tiger. Hats of to you Arvind Adiga...
Balram breaks out of his cage in Adiga's The White Tiger
Review by Dr. AJ Sebastian sdb

Review Article

Balram breaks out of his cage
in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Dr. A.J. Sebastian sdb
Reader & Head, Department of English
Nagaland University, Kohima
e-mail: ***@hotmail.com

Aravid Adiga bagged the Man Booker Prize 2008 for his debut novel The
White Tiger, set in the backdrop of the economic boom in India that
has ushered in a great chasm between the haves and have-nots. As Adiga
himself has said: "Well, this is the reality for a lot of Indian
people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just
hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. …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” (Jeffries).
Balram Halwai, who never had an identity of his own, uses any means
necessary to fulfill his dream of making money. He becomes a
megalomaniac who murders his boss and confesses his rising to be an
entrepreneur in the call centre hub of Bangalore. He calls his life’s
story ‘The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian.’ (TWT 10).
This paper attempts to trace the metaphor of the Rooster Coop in which
Balram is trapped and the way he breaks out to freedom being a ‘white
tiger.”
The novel is written in the epistolary form as a seven-part letter to
the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao “From the Desk of ‘The White Tiger’/ A
Thinking Man / And an entrepreneur / Living in the world’s centre of
technology and outsourcing/ Electronic City Phase 1 (just off Hosur
Main Road/ Bangalore/ India,”(TWT 3) in which Balram confesses his
guilt and his ambition – his emergence from the world of "Darkness" to
the world of “Light” of the cities which is a world of servants and
masters: from brutal poverty and deprivation to successful
entrepreneurship. His cynicism and deep rooted-immoral ways are
dangerous trends leading to anarchy in our society. The novel exposes
Indian democracy, injustice and entrepreneurship.
The novel is a social commentary and a study of injustice and power in
the form of a class struggle in India that depicts the anti-hero
Balram representing the downtrodden sections of the Indian society
juxtaposed against the rich. “The White Tiger protagonist exposes the
rot in the three pillars of modern India - democracy, enterprise and
justice – reducing them to the tired clichés of a faltering nation.…
that the West is holding The White Tiger as a mirror to us. It is
telling us that India is not shining and, despite its claims of a
booming economy, it is still “the near-heart of darkness”, which it
has been since time immemorial” (Saxena 9).
As Adiga says: “The novel is written in "voice"—in Balram's voice—and
not in mine. Some of the things that he's confused by or angry about
are changes in India that I approve of; … Some of the other things
he's unhappy about—like corruption—are easier for me to identify with.
When talking to many men whom I met in India, I found a sense of rage,
often suppressed for years and years, that would burst out when they
finally met someone they could talk to… Balram's anger is not an anger
that the reader should participate in entirely—it can seem at times
like the rage you might feel if you were in Balram's place—but at
other times you should feel troubled by it, certainly” (DiMartino).
The story unfolds the way Balram breaks out to his new found freedom
from a caged life of misery through crime and cunning. This is a
reflection of contemporary India, calling attention to social justice
in the wake of economic prosperity. It is a novel about the emerging
new India which is pivoted on the great divide between the haves and
have-nots with moral implications.
Deirdre Donahue labels The White Tiger an angry novel about injustice
and power “But Tiger isn't about race or caste in India. It's about
the vast economic inequality between the poor and the wealthy elite.
The narrator is an Indian entrepreneur detailing his rise to power.
His India is a merciless, corrupt Darwinian jungle where only the
ruthless survive”(Donahue).
Adiga depicts his protagonist as “…he's talking out into the night, in
his isolated room. He has to tell his story to someone, but he can't
ever do so because it's a terrible story. …today, it is the man from
China, which is India's alter-ego in so many ways. Indians today are
absolutely obsessed with the Chinese, and keep comparing themselves to
China out of a belief that the future of the world lies with India and
China.” (DiMartino).

Adiga’s first hand meeting the poor of India inspired him to create
his protagonist: “Many of the Indians I met while I traveled through
India blended into Balram; but the character is ultimately of my own
invention. I wanted to depict someone from India's underclass—which is
perhaps 400 million strong—and which has largely missed out on the
economic boom, and which remains invisible in most films and books
coming out of India… someone whose moral character seems to change by
the minute—trustworthy one minute, but untrustworthy the next—who
would embody the moral contradictions of life in today's India. I'm
glad you point out that he is a hustler—which he is!—one of the
frustrations of writing a book like this is that so many critics seem
to think that Balram's views are meant to be taken
objectively!” (DiMartino).
Summing up the Booker jury’s decision Michael Portillo commented: "The
novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and
holding the reader's sympathy for a thoroughgoing villain. The book
gains from dealing with pressing social issues and significant global
developments with astonishing humour." (Porttillo). The novel is a
witty parable of India's changing society, yet there is also much to
ponder (Rushby).
The novel is centred on the crime Balram commits and he goes on to
recounts how he became an entrepreneur coming into the ‘Light’ of
prosperity. Born in a tiny hell-hole called Laxmangarh in northern
India, his impoverished parents merely called him 'munna' -- 'boy' and
they raised him in the world of darkness of their extreme poverty.
While at school, Balram was spotted by the inspector of schools who
offered to get a scholarship for his education:
You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this
crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of
animals – the creature that comes along only once in a generation?’
I thought about it and said:
‘The white tiger.’
‘That’s what you are, in this jungle’ (TWT 35).
Balram considers himself "half-baked" as he was deprived of schooling
like most children of his age group in India. His parents preferred
him to work in a teashop, however one of the feudal lords took him to
Delhi, where he began to experience the world of light. He learned
driving and was employed as a chauffeur by Mr. Ashok at Dhanbad.

While in Delhi Balram experiences the two kinds of India with those
who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides
he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel
tracks the way in which this ambition plays out (Walters).

The key metaphor in the novel is of the Rooster Coop. Balram is caged
like the chickens in the rooster coop. He, being a white tiger, has to
break out of the cage to freedom.

Go to Old Delhi ...and look at the way they keep chickens there in the
market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed
tightly into wire-mesh cages...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 (TWT 173-4).
Balram decides to become a big-bellied man, by resorting to corrupt
ways he has learnt through bribery, crime, disregarding all civilized
ways of life. His violent bid for freedom is shocking. Is he made just
another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist ?
(Turpin). Adiga “strikes a fine balance between the sociology of the
wretched place he has chosen as home and the twisted humanism of the
outcast” (Prasannarajan). Balram breaks away slowly from his family
which is contrary to the Indian tradition where loyalty to ones family
upholds moral principles. Through his criminal drive Balram becomes a
businessman and runs a car service for the call centres in Bangalore.

Balram’s commentary is replete with Irony, paradox, and anger that run
like a poison throughout every page (Andrew). “Above all, it’s a
vision of a society of people complicit in their own servitude: to
paraphrase Balram, they are roosters guarding the coop, aware they’re
for the chop, yet unwilling to escape. Ultimately, the tiger refuses
to stay caged. Balram’s violent bid for freedom is
shocking” (Turpin).
The protagonist confirms that the trustworthiness of servants is the
basis of the entire Indian economy. This is a paradox and a mystery of
India.
Because Indians are the world’s most honest people… No. It’s because
99.9 per cent of us are caught in the Rooster coop just like those
poor guys in the poultry market. The Rooster Coop doesn’t always work
with miniscule sums of money. Don’t test your chauffeur with a rupee
coin or two - he may well steal that much. But leave a million dollars
in front of a servant and he won’t touch a penny… Masters trust their
servants with diamonds in this country!...Why doesn’t that servant
take the suitcase full of diamonds? He is no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s
you and me. But he’s in the rooster Coop…Here in India we have no
dictatorship. No secret police. That’s because we have the coop. Never
before in human history have so few owed so much to to so many, Mr.
Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining
99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way –
to exist in perpetual servitude… can a man break out of the coop? …the
Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop….only
a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten,
and burned alive by masters – can break out of the coop. That would
take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature (TWT
175-7).
Balram shows his perverted psychopathic nature by deciding to break
out of the coop betraying his family and society. He has to suffer
humiliation in the hands of his masters with ever increasing menial
duties which climaxes in his being blackmailed when Ashoke’s wife
Pinky kills a man in drunken driving. He was forced to sign a
statement accepting full responsibility for the accident:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

I, Balram Hawai, son of Vikram Halwai, of Laxmangarh village in the
district of Gaya, do make the following statement of my own free will
and intention:
That I drove the car that hit an unidentified person, or persons, or
person and objects, on the night of January 23rd of this year. That I
then panicked and refused to fulfil my obligations to the injured
party or parties by taking them to the nearest hospital emergency
ward. That there were no other occupants of the car at the time of the
accident. That I was alone in the car, and alone responsible for all
that happened.
I swear by almighty God that I make this statement under no duress and
under instruction from no one (TWT 168).

He has to suppress his embittered feelings being confined to the
Rooster Coop. He cannot go contrary to his master’s bidding. He is
falsely implicated and forced to accept responsibility for a crime he
has not committed. A remorse filled Pinky madam leaves Mr. Ashok for
good in the middle of the night pushing a fat envelope with cash into
Balram’s hands. From then on, he has to play the wife-substitute for
Mr. Ashok. He has to oversee his master’s every need as he turns to
heavy drinking. Left to control his master, Balram begins to awaken
from his reverie in the Rooster Coop. Having been a witness to all of
Ashoke’s corrupt practices and gambling with money to buy politicians,
to kill and to loot, Balram decides to steal and kill. Adiga delves
deep into his subconscious like the stream of consciousness
novelists:

Go on, just look at the red bag, Balram – that’s not stealing, is it?
I shook my head.
And even you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing.
How so? I looked at the creature in the mirror.
See- Mr. Ashok is giving money to all these politicians in Delhi so
that they will excuse him from the tax he has to pay. And who owns
that tax, in the end? Who but the ordinary people of this country –
you! (244).

Balram knew his boss had collected a total of Rs.700,000/- stuffed
into the red bag. That was sufficient money for him to begin a new
life with a house of his own, a motorbike and a small shop. He hatched
the murder plan in quick succession:

I touched the magnetic stickers of the goddess Kali for luck, then
opened the glove compartment. There it was – the broken bottle, with
its claws of glass. ‘There’s something off with the wheel, sir. Just
give me a couple of minutes.’… There was soggy black mud everywhere.
Picking my way over mud and rainwater, I squatted near the left rear
wheel… ‘Sir, will you step out, there is a problem.’… The wheel, sir.
I’ll need your help. It’s stuck in the mud’ (281-2).

Adiga probes further into the mind of Balram like an expert
psychologist and finds him in perfect mental state, determined to
execute his plans with precision:

He was still wriggling – his body was moving as far from me as it
could. I’m losing him, I thought, and this forced me to do something I
knew I would hate myself for, even years later. I really didn’t want
to do this – I really didn’t want him to think, even in the two or
three minutes he had left to live, that I was that kind of a driver –
the one that resorts to blackmailing his master – but he had left me
no option:… I got down on my knees and hid behind the car… He got down
on his knees. I rose over him, holding the bottle held behind my back
with a bent arm… 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….The stunned body fell into the mud. A hissing sound came
out of its lips, like wind escaping from a tyre (284-5).

He was not fully satisfied with the crime. He feared his recovery and
the consequences would be fatal – police case and the terrible
destruction of his family. So turning the body around and stamping his
knees on its chest, he pierced the neck “and his lifeblood spurted
into my eyes. I was blind. I was a free man” (286).

He is free at last out of the Rooster Coop. But the run for his new-
found life begins for Balram. He is on the run to make his dream come
true. A peep into the level of poverty into which millions of his
fellow Indians are plunged is imperative for a proper assessment of
the criminal and the gravity of his crime.

Statistics show how poverty is on the rise in India: i) 4 in every 10
Indian children are malnourished according to a UN report. ii) India
Ranks a lowly 66 out of 88 countries in the Global Hunger Index 2008.
The report says India has more hungry people – more than 200 million –
than any other country in the world. iii) One third of the world’s
poor live in India, according to the latest poverty estimates from the
World Bank. Based on its new threshold of poverty - $ 1.25 a day – the
number of poor people has gone up from 421 million in 1981 to 456
million in 2005. iv) India ranks 128 out of 177 countries in the UN’s
Human Development Index…. Aravid Adiga’s story of a rickshawallah’s
move from the “darkness” of rural India to the “light” of urban
Gurgaon reminds us of the harsh facts behind the fiction (Raaj 9).

Adiga speaks out his mind why he wrote the novel: “… I want to
challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It
may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such
little power… I wanted something that would provoke and annoy people …
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… What is stopping a poor man from taking to the
crime that occurs in Venezuela or South Africa? 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. For them, getting angry at the rich is like
getting angry at the heat…But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a
class-based resentment for the first time…” (Sawhney).

Injustice and inequality has always been around us and we get used to
it. How long can it go on? Social discontent and violence has been on
the rise. What Adiga highlights is the ever widening gap between the
rich and the poor and the economic system that lets a small minority
to prosper at the expense of the majority. “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… the great divide.” (Raaj
9).

Commenting on a servant’s viewpoint in the novel, Adiga writes: “It is
his subjective views, which are pretty depressing. There are also two
crimes that he commits: he robs, and he kills, and by no means do I
expect a reader to sympathize with both the crimes. He’s not meant to
be a figure whose views you should accept entirely. There’s evidence
within the novel that the system is more flexible than Balram
suggests, and it is breaking down faster than he claims. And within
the story I hope that there’s evidence of servants cheating the
masters systematically...to suggest a person’s capacity for evil or
vice is to grant them respect—is to acknowledge their capacity for
volition and freedom of choice” (Sawhney).

When he plans meticulously how to snatch Ashok’s huge money bag, he
gets out of his Rooster Coop and takes a plunge into the
entrepreneur’s world. He never gives up the fight for survival like
the freak white tiger. While visiting the National zoo in Delhi he
tells Dharam: “Let animals live like animals; let humans live like
humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence” (TWT 276). When he
chanced to see the white tiger in the enclosure, he began his musings:
“…Not any kind of tiger. The creature that gets born only once every
generation in the jungle. I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars…
He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this – that was the only
way he could tolerate this cage….The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my
master’s eyes have met mine in the mirror of the car. All at once, the
tiger vanished… My knees began to shake; I felt light” (276-7).

This sequence is central to the Rooster Coop metaphor. It is like the
epiphanic experience of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man, where he makes his flight of fancy: “… a
hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he
had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of
childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his
workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring
impalpable imperishable being?… His heart trembled in an ecstasy of
fear and his soul was in flight” (Joyce 154).

It is the experience of being hypnotized by the tiger that energizes
the criminal in him to be blood thirsty and take law into his own
hands. The more he is educated, he becomes more corrupt, and the
reader’s sympathy for the psychopath never dwindles.

Such crimes are taking place in our cities. Recently it was reported
that workers at a car parts factory near Delhi murdered the chief
executive after they were laid off. “It rattled a lot of people,” says
Adiga. “That kind of incident used to be highly unlikely. Now it is
much more likely” (Times Online).

Neel Mukherjee in his review “Exposing the real India,” examines the
'economic miracle' in the background of “a very large majority lives
in abject, shocking poverty, that the gap between the rich and the
poor is a vast, unbridgeable, ever-growing chasm, and that social
redistribution policies are either unenforceable or have
failed?” (Mukherjee).
The Rooster Coop continues to exist like a never ending oppressive
system. “The rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep
other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or
entrepreneurs…The coop is guarded from the inside” (TWT 194). As
Andrew Holgate opines, “Rather than encouraging freedom and
"enterprise," everything in this system -- landlords, family,
education, politics -- seems designed specifically to suppress
them” (Holgate).
Balram escaping from the Coop, is a servant turned villain and a
murderer who becomes a self-proclaimed entrepreneur who calls himself
"I'm tomorrow" (TWT 6). He subscribes to a philosophy of future with
hope. As he awaits to board a train he gets on to a weight machine
which represents for him “final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop. The
sirens of the coop were ringing - its wheels turning – its red lights
flashing! A rooster was escaping from the coop! A hand was thrust out
– I was picked up by the neck and shoved back into the coop. I picked
the chit up and re-read it”(248). His subconscious kept haunting him
of his escape from the coop of his past oppression. Moving from train
to train he keep his track untraceable by the law enforcing agencies
who had advertised his pictures as a wanted man.
Life in Bangalore has to be that of a fugitive as “White Tiger keeps
no friends. It’s too dangerous” ( 302). But he has to keep in touch
with the world of the road and the pavement where he received his
education to freedom. Speaking of the socialist leaders in Bangalore
on whom people placed their hope of revolution.
Keep your ears open in Bangalore – in any city or town in India – and
you will hear stirrings, rumours, threats of insurrection. Men sit
under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and
point fingers to the heavens. One night, will they all join together –
will they destroy the Rooster coop? …Maybe once in a hundred years
there is a revolution that frees the poor (303).
Sitting in his comfortable office as an entrepreneur living in the
world’s centre of technology and outsourcing, Balram is confident that
he will not be caught by law enforcing agents as he has stepped out of
the coop of his past.
I think the Rooster coop needs people like me to break out of it. It
needs masters like Mr. Ashok – who, for all his numerous virtues, was
not much of a master – to be weeded out, and exceptional servants like
me to to replace them…I am one of those who cannot be caught in India…
I’ve made it! I’ve broken out of the coop!...I’ll never say I made a
mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say
it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just
for a minute, what it means not to be a servant (TWT 320-1).
In portraying the character of Balram, Adiga has excelled in
projecting a typical psychopath / sociopath, our society can churn
out. In “Behavioural Traits of Psychopaths”, Jennifer Copley points
out: “While most people’s actions are guided by a number of factors,
such as the desire to avoid hurting other people, the psychopath
selects a course of action based on only one factor—what can he get
out of it. This cold-blooded mode of reasoning enables the psychopath
to commit acts that most people’s consciences would not
allow” ( Copley). Psychopaths are also known as sociopaths who are
manipulative, deceitful, impulsive lacking self-restraint, and
inclined to take risks. They are “Callous, deceitful, reckless,
guiltless …. The psychopath understands the wishes and concerns of
others; he simply does not care…. The psychopath believes that rules
and morals are for other, weaker people who obey because they fear
punishment” (Adams) . . . All these traits are found in Balram who
goes about heroically planning his heinous crimes.

The novel exposes the ferociousness of the man who after bloodletting
through murder will turn out to be a man-eater himself. What
guarantees if he will not commit murders for reasons of rivalry in his
entrepreneurial world of cut throat competition. Revenge murder is no
solution to bring about social justice. Subscribing to his principle
of taking law into his own hands, will lead only to anarchy and
escalation of violence, as W.B. Yeats points out in “The Second
Coming,” in the background of Russian revolution as well as the Irish
troubles:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity (Yeats 1700).

Excessive economic inequalities and unwarranted delay in applying the
remedies for them are often the causes of such dissention. Besides,
quest for power and total disregard for human rights helps escalate
violence and strife among men. There is need for organizations that
promote peace among men. Remedial measures have to be taken by
Government and law makers to prevent rampant corruption and oppression
of the downtrodden. Let not the law of the jungle prevail as Adiga has
proven through his protagonist. Mere anarchy and chaos will prevail if
an evil is hatched to counter another evil.

There are some Indians who wonder if the award was given to The White
Tiger to mar the face of India in the international arena as she is
becoming a global economic power. Is the West exposing our poverty and
unrest to hurt our national pride? Such fears are baseless as Adiga
has brought out a fable with superb mingling of his observation.
Though several critics have raised eyebrows stating that Adiga has not
depicted the brave new India in a sufficiently glowing light, David
Godwin comes to his rescue saying, “It really isn’t the job of a
writer to be the ambassador for his country. A writer’s commitment is
to the truth as he sees it” (Roy 4). Manjula Padmanabhan, author and
playwright, is very critical of Adiga when she says that the book is
“a tedious, unfunny slog, …compelling, angry and darkly humourous… But
is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do? Is it enough to
paint an ugly picture and then suggest that the way out is to slit the
oppressor's throat and become an oppressor oneself?" (Padmanabhan).
Whatever be the critical appraisal, as Gurcharan Das would opine, “A
book should not be judged on the basis of whether it creates a
negative or positive picture of a country. It should be seen as a work
of art and judged on its literary merits” (Das).
However, The White Tiger should make every right thinking citizen to
read the signs of the times and be socially conscious of the rights
and duties of each one, irrespective of cast, creed or economic
status, to prevent create the types of Ashok and Balram in our
society.

-------
References
Adams, David B. “Sociopaths.” http://www.geocities.com/lycium7/psychopathy.html,
Downloaded on November 4, 2008.
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New delhi: HarperCollins Publishers,
2008.
(Abbreviated TWT).
Andrew, Holgate. “Review”. June 16, 2008. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-
review/note.asp?note=17701793. downloaded on November 1, 2008.
Copley, Jennifer Behavioural Traits of Psychopaths.” July 30, 2008.
com/article.cfm/behavioural_traits_of_psychopaths, downloaded on
November 4, 2008.
Das, Gurcharan. Sunday Times of India, October 19, 2008, p.9.
DiMartino, Nick. “Interview with Aravind Adiga” October 6, 2008.
(http://universitybookstore.blogspot.com/2008/10/nick-interviews-
aravind- adiga.html). Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Donahue, Deirdre. “Review.” USA Today April4, 2008. Downloaded on
19/10/08.
(http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2008-04-23-roundup-debut-
novels_N.htm) Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Holgate, Andrew. “Review.”
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=17701793.
Downloaded on 19/10/08.
Jeffries, Stuart “Roars of anger”, The Guardian. October 16, 2008.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize). Downloaded
on
19/10/08.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Delhi: Surjeet
Publications, 1991.
Mukherjee, Neel. “ Exposing the real India.” The Telegraph. April 4,
2008.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/27/boadi127.xml.
Downloaded on 01/11/2008.
Padmanabhan, Manjula. The Outlook India.14 October 2008.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20081014&fname=Books&sid=188888.
Downloaded on 01/11/2008.
Porttillo, Michael. Oct. 15, 08. http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/stories/1146
Saxena, Shobhan, “Fact not Fiction”, Sunday Times of India, October
19, 2008, p.9.
Prasannarajan, S. India Today. 17/4/2008. http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/index.php?
option=com_ content&issueid=50&task=view&id=7128&Itemid=1. Downloaded
on
01/11/2008.
Raaj, Neelam. “Any Tears for the Aam Aadmi?”Sunday Times of India,
October 19,
2008, p.9.
Roy, Amit. Aravind Adiga wins ‘God’ of Agents.” The Telegraph. October
29, 2008, p.4.
Rushby, Kevin. The Guardian. April 19, 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,
333611710-110738,00.html. Downloaded on 11/10/08.
Sawhney, Hirish. “ India: A View from Below.” September, 2008.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/express/india-a-view-from-below
Times Online . “News Review Interview, 19 October 2008.
(http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_ and_entertainment/
books/article4967568.ece. Downloaded on 21/10/08.
Turpin, Adrian. Financial Times. April 19, 2008.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/886f92c4-09c8-11dd-81bf - 0000779fd2ac.html.
Downloaded on 22/10/08.
Walters, Kerry. “Caught in the rooster coop”. May 27, 2008.
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1PV1V1ICZXUE9/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#
R1PV1V1ICZXUE9. Downloaded on 23/10/08.
Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” The Oxford Anthology of English
Literature Vol. II. Ed. Frank Kermode & John Hollander. Oxford. O.U.P,
1973.

Great novel

Review by Rohit VErma

pretty interesting book......but some times I found little shades of
Chetan bhagat narration in it.. overall a great book to read!!
White Tiger
Review by Shagun
Here it goes...

1. Overall good book, interesting packaging
2.I like the references made to the local hubs of New Delhi.
3. I especially agree to the Gurgaon structure and its nuances

Overall a good book for an average non indian resident or any one
who still thinks india is all about snake charmers. A good maiden
effort
but a little overhyped - but why not since the writer is a fellow
Indian
and we are proud of it...so bells and whistles...

Rating - Generous only because you got us the Bookers Prize 9/10 :)

The white tiger

Review by Saurabh Rohilla

the narrative style will suit for every kind of reader...i like
references to delhi places which seems corroborating the story
(line)..writing is like..."we make things simpler"...
Adiga - a real white tiger
Review by Gurneet Singh
This book is a very nice book if you want understand India from the
point of view of a poor person who makes it journey from darkness in
villages to the light in the city...
The style of narration is very nice which will suit every reader...
His views should really be appreciated as he speaks the bitter truth
about India in some places when he mentions the river ganga or
exploitation of the poor by the rich..
Over all an awesome book & a must read ...
the white tiger

Review by bhat R.

this is like one essay about indian caste system,politics,relegion,one
rupee,drinks,boobs,etc. adiga purposly write this for booker prize? I
dnt found any extra matter,but forigners by this, can understand what
this india? all will read this book and start think about india in
ugly way.adiga exposed the india as he saw,and because the prize same
exposed to the world.after reading this,anyone can tell dirty indian
people? to create suchthing purposly the prize was given?simple
language,narrative,anyone can read and understand.balaram like a
ditective ............
puerly white

Review by N.M.Anusha devi

The novel is excellent. It tells the reality that privails in
india.wonderful book to read and digest...
black spot on 'the white tiger'

Review by anala

The White Tiger is a good novel. Mr Adiga pointed out everything about
india i.e.he wrote about hindus,muslims, brahmins,
roads,films,animals,rivers,americans, japanees,poors ,rich peoples and
so on.But purposly?not written about cristians why?This shows what,one
can imagine,this is written according to direction of cristian?
Because in india everywhere converting hindu people into cristians .As
Balaram,the driver not pointed this. According to my view Mr. Aravind
is half baked cristian. Because he donated a huge amount out of BOOKER
PRIZE to one of the catholic institute!In India is it necessary to
kill any boss to become rich?whole novel becomes Mr. Adiga's view but
in Balaram's voice.He veiwed very minute particle and narrated clearly
Untitled

Review by Anonymous

The Oscar contender is eliciting protests as well as praise for its
portrayal of Mumbai s
Fantastic & Well written

Review by ANAND KAMAL

The WHITE TIGER, a face of Indian people, described so elegantly that
how a poor boy become an entrepreneur.

Well explanation of each and every aspect.. while reading you feel to
be in the character. HATS OFF to Arivand.
We all know this...!

Review by Vishal Deshmukh

The style of writing is good.Novel shows the dark side of indian cast
system,economic system and the particular attitude penitrated in
people belonging to particular community and the problem one face when
anted to do something different . The part in which 'Balram' speaks
with 'Dehli City' seems to have impact of the scene in the book 'The
Alchemist-By Paulo Coehelo' in which Santiago speaks with desert,wind
and the sun.
Writer narrated Dehli life as it is, corrupt politicians,accidents
caused by drunk rich people..and life of drivers of rich people..The
part is also intersting where 'Balram'
wants to sleep with a foreigner..n how the hotel manager and
prostitute cheat him...the feeling of 'Balram' that he can never live
a life like his master..
Over all the book is good to read...But we all know about it..there is
nothin different to knw about or it doesnt show anythng new...the same
picture we got in many movie..Life of drivers is well pictured in
madhur bahandarkar's 'Page-3' and 'Corporate'.
"ultimate performance by arvind"
Review by sunit verma
a real one after the midnights childdren.........must read.
"ultimate performance by arvind"

Review by sunit verma

a real one after the midnights childdren.........must read.
The White Tiger is based on life of Surya Dev Singh

Review by Aftab Ahmad

Arvind Adiga did not mentioned any where that the story is real and
based on Dhanbad most famous person and alleged coal mafia Surya Dev
Singh. Singh was a domestic help and later become hench man of a
wealthy politician BP Sinha. Later he over run him and took his empire
and proclaimed himself as a king of the coal capital of india. One who
are aware about the true story of Surya Dev Singh will not impressed
by the presentation of this novel although narration is very good.
Dhanbad is my home town and I am aware about the entire story. This
story is already narrated in the novels of Ilyas Ahmad Gaddi Novels
like Fire Area which is in Urdu language. A very good account on life
of Singh is written by Dhanbad's veteran journalist Brahma Dev Singh
Sharma in his Hindi book "Dhanbad Ateet Vartaman And Bhavishya".

www.aftab1.com
the white tiger

Review by manju

white tiger is very interesting book . it shows how the indians
peoples are . it includes so many contents to understandable. this can
change more peoples life
the real tiger

Review by thamizhpriya

the book white tiger contains indians culture.It shows how the
peoples are behaving in indian society. the white tiger is the most
relevent novel tin this world.
The Brown Parrot

Review by Pankaj Saksena

On 14th October 2008, the Booker Committee announced in London that
Aravind Adiga will get the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, "The
White Tiger". The writer, Aravind Adiga claims in an interview:

"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", he
said, adding that the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac &
Dickens in the 19th century helped England and France become better
societies.[1]

In a single breath, Adiga takes upon his young self, the huge
responsibility of highlighting all the "brutal injustices" of India,
while feeling proud enough to compare himself with Flaubert, Balzac
and Dickens.

One should be cautious while making self-comparisons with great
personalities. Dickens wrote about London & the English society as it
was, with no ideology to guide him. Almost all of his characters from
David Copperfield to Oliver Twist have an autobiographical ring.

Adiga, on the other hand, is thrice removed from the society and the
events he talks about in his book. Born in a metropolitan, Chennai,
educated in Australia, the UK, and the US, he has nothing in common
with his protagonist, Balram, who is a "low-caste" driver from Bihar.
But the un-authenticity of narration doesn"t bother Adiga. In fact, he
thinks it is quite a duty of a writer to go beyond his own experience;
to take a leap beyond reality; to plunge into pure fantasy. He
believes in writing by remote-sensing.

“I don"t think a novelist should just write about his own experience.
Yes, I am the son of a doctor. Yes, I had a rigorous formal education,
but for me the challenge as a novelist is to write about people who
aren"t anything like me.”[2]

Dickens" works are not a judgment on the English society. His
worldview evolves in his works. If we put them one over other,
chronologically, we can see the intellectual development of Dickens,
an observant mind becoming mature.

What we see in Adiga is not a natural evolution, but a sudden
ideological revelation. He is not trying to learn anything. He knows
it all. The ideas are pre-arranged. In the absence of cultural roots
he has an ideology to guide him. Secularism. Fantasy and remote-
sensing makes up for reality. Worn-out formula-writing makes up for
creativity. Adiga has hitched his wagon to a star. And in Indian
heavens, there is only one star. Secularism. It is the Ideology.

Flaubert, the other writer Adiga compares himself with, is as distant
from him as possible. Madame Bovary is a psychological drama of an
individual, and not a statement about the French society, while
Salambo is a purely artistic venture of recapturing a remote event of
history. If Adiga had read even a single work of Flaubert he wouldn"t
have compared him with any writer with a social agenda. It appears
that Adiga just threw some random names of writers while being
interviewed, without probably having read them.

Balzac is a different story. Again, Adiga has nothing in common with
Balzac in the style and the grasp of the subject matter. Balzac is
regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. So-
called progressive writers in India are fond of comparing themselves
with great realistic writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky,
Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac etc as they think that Indian society is in
an eternal need of a Bolshevik style revolution. Taking realism as the
most abject form of self-denigration, Indian writers harp on the
"social injustices" of India and feel themselves to be in the proud
company of great writers.

On the level of language too, Adiga falls far too short. The style of
narration doesn"t match with the projected aim of the book to point
out the "brutal injustices" of Indian society. His style takes him
nearer to the post-modern writing, while his aim is as ambitious as of
a Communist ideologue. For this purpose Adiga inserts some of the most
famous secular slogans in Balram"s speeches but his style of narration
being post-modern is personal and individualistic.

Adiga betrays his ignorance of rural Indian society - not that he
knows urban India - at many points in the novel. For instance, he
asserts that many water buffalos can be bought in seven thousand
rupees. Let him purchase just one![3]

So according to Adiga, the salient features of India are: Every
traditional Indian village has a blue-movie (pornographic) theatre.[4]
No one can enter Indian malls without wearing shoes. Shoes are
compulsory.[5] No low-caste man can ever enter an Indian mall. Even if
he enters stealthily, he is then caught, beaten and publicly
humiliated.[6] In India, if an owner runs over a man with his car, his
driver has to go to jail instead.[7] If a servant steals anything,
then his entire family, back home, is ritually lynched to death.
(their women being repeatedly raped.)[8] Every Indian book stall sells
"rape magazines".[9] There are separate markets for servants.[10] In
Indian brothels, they take extra money from servants, called as
"Working-class surcharge".[11] Sadhus, are actually homosexual
hookers, who get paid to be buggered by foreigners.[12] A common Hindu
is worse than an Islamic terrorist.[13] Indian caste system is worse,
or at least as bad as the secret police of a totalitarian state.[14]

The last claim is the central theme of the novel. The caste system of
India is called the "Rooster Coop". Adiga compares the caste system
with the secret police of a totalitarian state. This comparison is
preposterous. Communism accounted for more than twenty million deaths
in USSR, sixty-five million in China, one million in Vietnam, two
million in North Korea, two million in Cambodia, one million in
Eastern Europe, 1.7 million in Africa, one and a half million in
Afghanistan and millions of others.[15] And all this in less than
seventy years! Does Indian caste system in its history of more than
five thousand years, has anything even remotely comparable to equal
this record?

The only place where he innovates is, in hurting the Hindu religious
sentiment. Thus, the polytheism of Hindus is mocked as,

“How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses?”[16]

Balram is called as the "sidekick" of Krishna.[17] The hero goes on to
murder his employers, who are earlier called as Ram & Sita! Lord
Krishna is called as a "chauffeur".[18] About, Kali, the Hindu
goddess:

“I looked at the magnetic stickers of goddess Kali with her skulls and
her long red tongue - I stuck my tongue out at the old witch. I
yawned.”[19]

Hanuman is called as the slave god of Hindus, an imposition which
still makes the low-caste slaves of the upper-caste.

“Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the
god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining
example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love and
devotion.. These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr.
Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom
in India.”[20]

In 1994 Christian missionary, father Augustine Kanjamala of Pune wrote
an article in Deccan Chronicle titled, "Replies to Arun Shourie". In
the article he wrote, "Harijans worship deities of lower rank, while
caste Hindus worship deities of higher rank. For instance, Hanuman is
worshipped by Harijans and Rama is worshipped by upper caste in the
same village.... Hanuman was the servant of Rama; Harijans are
servants of higher caste Hindus. A close affinity between their
hierarchy of gods and the hierarchy of society."[21]

Later, indefatigable Arun Shourie had a face-to-face debate with
father Kanjamal at Hyderabad. Arun Shourie said, "This is insinuation,
it is deliberate distortion.... I can assure you that Hanuman Ji is as
dear to high caste Hindus, as to low caste Hindu. If after two hundred
years of Christianity in India... this is your understanding of India,
much needs to be done.... But there is a question... Does the servant
and master relationship, high caste and low caste relationship also
apply to other Hindu gods? If not, then, how does your thesis stand?
Nandi is ridden by the Shiva. Is it that the low caste people are
asked to worship Nandi? And high caste should not worship Nandi? What
you have written in your article is a foolish thing to write."[22]

So in 1994, Arun Shourie systematically showed during the face-to-face
debate that this insinuation "is a foolish thing to write". But in
2008, we had another fool repeating the same missionary propaganda, of
course recycled as literature this time.

Aravind Adiga is in the line of a new breed of writers like Arundhati
Roy and Kiran Desai who being Christian or having sympathy with
Christianity, share a hatred of Hinduism and Hindu society. It is not
a coincidence but a deliberate act of the Booker committee to award
all the three. They have ignored really good novels from Pakistan.
Why? Because by awarding Pakistani writers, like Mohammed Hanif and
Mohsin Hamid, the Left will gain nothing in the bargain. You may call
it the Booker Scandal. This is how the alliance of Marxists and the
missionaries works against the Hindu society.

Writing a novel in India is neither an intellectual nor a spontaneous
venture. It is organized on the lines of the formula set by the
demands of secularism, seeded during the period of Independence
struggle and developed and codified during the Nehruvian era.

The literary establishment in India expects from a writer: a complete
submission to the Ideology, cramming all its popular slogans and
clichés; choosing a story and then fit all the "facts" in it; invent
facts to patch up the gaping holes; and put in as many features of the
formula as possible.

A writer is expected to follow the secular formula, which is to show
how Hinduism is inferior to other religions; how superstitious and
stupid Hindus are; how evil caste-system is; how vile Brahmins,
Kshatriyas and Vaishyas are and how suppressed Shudras are. Show how
violent Hindu mythology is, while the very word of Islam means peace.
Show that just like Islam and Christianity, Hinduism is also an import
in India, having no original claim. Make Hindu history in India as
short as possible. At the same time, extend the Christian and Islamic
claims on Indian soil as long back in history as possible. [23] Throw
in some exotic stories of widow burning, caste discrimination,
infanticide etc. to pepper this secular curry.

Do not, in any case, criticize Islam! Try to extol its virtues, and if
not possible just keep mum about its atrocities. Show how they are
extremely discriminated in every field such as education and
employment. Also, do not criticize Christianity and their violent
conversion activities.

Shift the focus of readers from primary problems like the Islamic
destruction of India to secondary problems like corruption, poverty,
population, unemployment etc.

This is the formula which guides every new book and every new writer
in India. There is no new voice, no new question, nothing new under
the sky. All has been discovered. Every question has been asked, every
answer has been given by the Formula, and every problem has been
solved by it. What remains to be done is to repeat the secular slogans
again and again. For this no tigers are required. Parrots are more
than enough for the job.

This formula has a history, which is very well portrayed by Dr. Ravi
Shanker Kapoor in his book More Equal than Others: A Study of the
Indian Left, 2000. [24] The literary establishment of India is guided
by the leftist intellectuals. All over the world, the Communists have
always infiltrated the institutions in order to influence the public
opinion. Giving these institutions a neutral veneer, they sell
Communist propaganda without letting the masses know the truth behind
it. They also fool some intellectuals in furthering their propaganda.
So Bengal Friends of the Soviet Union (BFOTSU) was created by the
blessings of Rabindranath Tagore.[25]

Most importantly the leftists have infiltrated all the literary, arts
and fine arts institutions in India. Thus pro-communist All India
Progressive Writers" Association (AIPWA) was formed in which eminent
people like Mulk Raj Anand, Munshi Premchand, Sarojini Naidu, Kirshan
Chander, KA Abbas, Shivdan Singh Chauhan, Ramananda Chatterjee and Ram
Bilas Sharma participated.[26] In the field of theater too, the
influence of the leftists was predominant. The Indian People"s Theater
Association (IPTA) is still very influential in India and continues to
shape the world-view of the youth.[27]

Novels in India, just like the Bollywood movies are produced according
to the guidelines dictated by the establishment. If a new writer
follows the secular formula, then his books will be bought by all the
schools, colleges, universities and most importantly, all the
libraries across the country. For a year or two he will be interviewed
by the media, invited to speak on the "problems" of India and their
"solutions". The "intellectual circles" of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata
will throw some parties for them where these writers will fume and
fret about the evils of Indian society. Pretty secure career.

Dr. Ravi Shanker Kapoor elaborates in another of his book How India"s
Intellectuals Spread Lies, 2007 [28] that the motive of all this
effort is to drill guilt into the hearts and minds of the Hindu
majority. So all the ills of Indian society are blamed on Hindus.
Adiga too indulges in guilt-mongering against Hindus. The Leftists
have been largely successful in their endeavors. Hindus have been
defensive.

The guilt pervades further, permeating the public debate, infecting
the body-politic, dominating the minds and hearts of those who matter.
[29] In India, more than half a century of guilt-mongering and other
Leftist tricks have created a climate of opinion in which Marxist lies
pass of as gospel truth.[30]

This is what Nobel Laureate, V S Naipaul resents when he comments
about Indian writing. Commenting on Nirad Chaudhari"s intellectual
incompetence, Naipaul says:

“Sixty years after Independence that problem is still there. India has
no autonomous intellectual life.”[31]

His words ring quite true in the context of Indian writers in general
and Adiga in particular. There is no autonomous intellectual life in
India. The literary concepts are dictated by the secular
establishment.

“No national literature has been created like this at such a remove,
where the books are published by people outside, judged by people
outside, and read to a large extent by people outside.”[32]

Yes! No national literature has ever been created in a foreign
language. In spite of tall claims and revolutionary agenda, the
paradox of Indian English writing remains. The paradox of a literature
divorced from its native language. Indian writers rarely speak and
never read or write in any of the Indian languages.

Most of the Indian writers who have won awards like Booker, no longer
live in India or have no connections with the rural India which they
claim to write about. They are rootless and hence their works lack
authenticity. More the rootlessness, more the arrogance. Thus
Arundhati Roy writes about the sexual attraction between zygotic
brother and sister; Kiran Desai talks about non-existent "Garwhali
Terrorism", but not about the existent Islamic or Naxalite terrorism;
and Adiga is worried about the pornographic theatre in Indian
villages.

Comparing Indian literature with Russian, Naipaul comments:

“In the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and Gogol and
Herzen lived for some time outside their native Russia; but they wrote
in Russian for Russian readers and (for all of them except Herzen)
Russia was where they were published and had their readers. Russia was
where their ideas fermented.”

Nineteenth-century Russian writing created an idea of the Russian
character and the Russian soul. There is no equivalent creation, or
the beginning of one, in Indian writing. India remains hidden. Indian
writers, to speak generally, seem to know only about their own
families, and their places of work. It is the Indian way of living and
consequently the Indian way of seeing. The rest of the country is
taken for granted, and seen superficially, as it was even by the young
Nehru.[33]

So true and so fitting on a writer like Adiga. The establishment
prefers imitation which is safe over innovation which can be
dangerous, ideology over reality, slogans and clichés over facts and
truth. An ideological world-view makes up for the ignorance of
history. A concern for the "brutal injustices" of India, makes up for
the lack of creative writing. Of course the "brutal injustices"
exclude Islamic terrorism and missionary activities.

No writer is recognized by the secular establishment if he doesn"t
confirm fully to the Formula. The mechanism which keeps the writer on
track can be best described by Adiga"s own metaphor for the caste-
system, the "Rooster Coop". This Rooster Coop is maintained by the
Formula, manned by their faithful "intellectuals". The Coop is full of
parrots who endlessly repeat the secular slogans. Once in a while if a
parrot takes courage to break out of the coop and sing a different
tune, he is immediately silenced by the intellectual community, Indian
media and academia. His name is tarnished, his reputation destroyed,
his positions in the Coop, lost. He is made to feel the fault of his
heretic ways and finally he is brought back to the fold. Almost all of
those who contribute to this mechanism are themselves the captives of
the Coop.

But as Adiga would have it, the Coop has a mechanism of its own. The
parrots imprisoned by this Coop help the Coop to remain intact. If one
of their fellow parrot ever tries to do some unparroty acts, then his
legs are pulled back by his own mates. Thus no one is ever allowed to
leave this Rooster Coop of Secularism. The system goes on. The Coop
remains intact. There are ever new parrots in the Coop, but all of
them keep parroting the old tune. Adiga is no different.

Poverty and corruption are made a fetish in Indian writing, as if they
are not secondary problem having some primary cause, but the basic
instinct of the Indian civilization. If a writer tries to probe the
primary problems then he is immediately labeled as anti-poor, fascist
and Hindu fundamentalist. The Coop is so strong that no insider is
able to see the truth. Only an outsider like Naipaul is able to
perceive the reality and express it courageously. Recognizing India as
a wounded civilization he goes back to medieval times to search for
the primary problems of India:

“There is a new kind of coming and going in the world these days.
Arabia, lucky again, has spread beyond its deserts. And India is again
at the periphery of this new Arabian world, as much as it had been in
the eight century, when the new religion of Islam spread in all
directions and the Arabs - led, it is said, by a seventeen year-old
boy - overran the Indian kingdom of Sind. That was only an episode,
the historians say. But Sind is not a part of India today; India has
shrunk since that Arab incursion. No civilization was so little
equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily
raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.”[34]

Naipaul goes beyond the immediate and the superficial. He goes beyond
poverty, unemployment and other clichés and finds the root of the
present Indian misery in its Islamic defeat during the middle ages.

“Its [India"s] independence has meant more than the going away of the
British; that the India to which Independence came was a land of far
older defeat; that the purely Indian past died a long time ago.”[35]

He thinks it is necessary to go beyond these secondary causes:

“An inquiry about India, even an inquiry about the Emergency has
quickly to go beyond the political. It has to be an inquiry about
Indian attitudes: it has to be an inquiry about the civilization
itself, as it is.”[36]

But these are untouchable subjects in the Rooster Coop of India. With
every new addition in the Secular Indian tradition, the writers become
even more confident of their worn-out formula.

Not surprisingly, Naipaul has this to say about Indian writers:

“The education of the new Indian writers - and nowadays some of them
have even been to writing schools - also gets in the way. It seems to
them they have the most enormous choice when, in imitation of the
successful people who have gone before, they settle down to do their
own book. They are not bursting with a wish to say anything. Nothing
is going to force itself out in its own way; they are guided in the
main by imitation.. This is where India begins to get lost.”[37]

Imitation is the hallmark of Indian formula-writing. Adiga is an
imitation of his predecessors like Arundhati Roy, who were an
imitation of writers like Mulk Raj Anand & Nirad Chaudhary, who in
turn were an imitation of yet others. a tradition of imitation going
back to the times of Lord Macaulay. In fact, he inaugurated this
tradition in India in his famous note to Lord Bentinck, the then
Governor-General of India - Minute of Education on India in February
1835:

“We must at present do our best to form a class who maybe interpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern; the class of persons,
Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect.”[38]

This defines Adiga"s intellectual ancestry. In many ways, Adiga"s book
is not different from "Untouchable" of Mulk Raj Anand, as artificial,
as superficial, as far from reality, as incapable of asking questions,
as faithful in following the intellectually bankrupt tradition of
Secularism.

Looking at the ruins of the Hindu kingdom Vijaynagar, at the hands of
Muslims, Naipaul reflects over the origin of the current intellectual
bankruptcy of India:

“I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have
come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand
years. What happened in Vijaynagar happened, in varying degrees, in
other parts of the country. In the north, ruin lies on ruin: Moslem
ruin on Hindu ruin. In the history books, in the accounts of wars and
conquests and plunder, the intellectual depletion passes unnoticed.
India absorbs and outlasts its conquerors, Indians say. But at
Vijaynagar, among the pilgrims, I wondered whether intellectually for
a thousand years India hadn"t always retreated before its conquerors
and whether, in its periods of apparent revival, Indian hadn"t only
been making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller, always
vulnerable.”

“The crisis of India is not only political or economic. The larger
crisis is of a wounded old civilization that has at last become aware
of its inadequacies and is without the intellectual means to move
ahead.”[39]

The imitation has seeped into the sub-conscious of Indian psyche, and
Indians are no longer aware of it. Thus Adiga thinks of himself as
pioneer in bringing out the problems of India, but he is just
parroting the secular slogans:

“The middle classes think of themselves still as victims of colonial
rule. But there is no point anymore in someone like me thinking of
myself as a victim of a colonial oppressor.”[40]

Commenting on India"s inability to judge, Naipaul says:

“India has no means of judging. India is hard and materialist. What it
knows best about Indian writers and books are their advances and their
prizes. There is little discussion about the substance of a book or
its literary quality or the point of view of the writer. Much keeps on
being said in the Indian press about Indian writing as an aspect of
the larger modern Indian success, but literary criticism is still
hardly known as an art. The most important judgments of an Indian book
continue to be imported.”[41]

Nothing else can be more representative of the intellectual bankruptcy
of rootless Indian writers, than the fact that they do not even
realize it. India is full of parrots, green, red, white, black, brown.
but none of them are conscious that they are actually parrots. Some
even think that they are tigers. Even white tigers!

References

1] http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/oct/16adiga.htm October 16, 2008

2] Ibid.

3] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New
Delhi, p.236

4] Ibid. p.23

5] Ibid. p.148

6]Ibid. p.152

7] Ibid. p.309

8] Ibid. p.176-177

9] Ibid. p.149

10] Ibid. p.204

11] Ibid. p.232

12] Ibid. p.275

13] Ibid. p.293-294, 311

14] Ibid. p.175

15] Courtois, Stephane. The Black Book of Communism, Harvard
University Press, 1999, p.4

16] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New
Delhi, p.9

17] Ibid. p.14

18] Ibid. p.187

19] Ibid. p.156-157

20] Ibid. p.19

21] Arun Shourie and his Christian Critics, 1995, Voice of India, New
Delhi, p.45-46

22] Arun Shourie and his Christian Critics, 1995, Voice of India, New
Delhi, p.61-62

23] Adiga, Aravid. 2008. The White Tiger, Harper Collins India, New
Delhi, p.272. The theory used here is Aryan Invasion Theory, a tool
used by the British against Indians to keep them divided and to
justify their presence on the Indian soil, as the theory claims that
Aryans or the North Indians are also foreigners and came from Central
Asia to India around 1500 BC.

24] Kapoor, Ravi Shanker More Equal than Others: A Study of the Indian
Left, Vision Books, New Delhi, 2000

25] Ibid. p. 20

26] Ibid. p. 21

27] Ibid. p. 22

28] Kapoor, Ravi Shanker How India’s Intellectuals Spread Lies, Vision
Books, New Delhi, 2007

29] Ibid. p. 158

30] Ibid. p. 159

31] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 191

32] Ibid. p. 192

33] Ibid. p. 192-193

34] Naipaul V S, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin India, 1979,
p. 7

35] Ibid. p. 8

36] Ibid. p. 9

37] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 193

38] Macaulay, T B Minute of Education on India 2nd February 1835

39] Naipaul V S, India: A Wounded Civilization, Penguin India, 1979,
p. 17-18

40] http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/oct/16adiga.htm October 16, 2008

41] Naipaul V S, A Writer’s People, Picador India, 2007, p. 193-194
Banal Satire
Review by Tomichan Matheikal

The White Tiger does not deserve the Booker Prize. In fact, it is not
even a good work of literary fiction. It is banal satire trying to don
the garb of literature.
The only good thing about the novel is that the satire in it takes a
critical look at various facets of the social and political life in
India. The largest democracy in the world is a country without
adequate “drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public
transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or
punctuality” [4]. But it has entrepreneurs, thousands and thousands of
them, who are going to make it an economic superpower, though these
entrepreneurs “are made from half-baked clay” [11].
The novel brings to light the “Darkness” of the emerging superpower
called India. Its river of emancipation, the Ganga, is a morass of
“faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and
seven different kinds of industrial acids” [15]. Its teachers are
thieves who steal the uniforms and lunches of their malnourished
students. The electoral promises made by its political leaders are
likely to end with the laying of foundation stones. It is a country
whose complex caste system of the olden days has given way to a system
of just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies;
and “only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up” [64]. The elections
are rigged by powerful politicians in connivance with corrupt
officials and policemen. India is a country where the plaintiff will
become the accused if the real culprit is influential enough.
A good part of the novel is set in Delhi. The nation’s capital is
portrayed as “a crazy city” where colonies and houses are given
numbers that follow “no known system of logic.” All the roads in the
city have names, but no one seems to know those names. Moreover, the
people may mislead you if you ask for a particular road by its name.
“The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and
the people are bad. The police are totally rotten. If they see you
without a seat belt, you’ll have to bribe them a hundred rupees” [124]
(emphasis in original).
Though in many places the novel reads like a tourist guide meant for
foreigners or like superficial journalese, the author succeeds in
satirising many of the vices commonly found in India. Where he
succeeds the best, the characters end up as caricatures. That’s why I
consider the novel as satire.
Yet Aravind Adiga is not a satirist. He thinks he is writing a serious
novel. He really thinks (or at least that’s how it comes across) that
the only way to survive in this messy state of affairs is to develop a
Big Belly and start swallowing those with Small Bellies. The most
glaring fault of the novel is precisely that: the absence of any deep
vision or imagination. Genuine satire can end with exposing the vices
and follies without necessarily presenting an alternative vision,
because the ridicule raised by satire is its curative tool. But a
novel with any pretension to being a work of serious literature has a
duty at least to hint at something deep, something sublime in the part
of the humanity presented in it.
The White Tiger is crowded with vicious characters. There is not even
one character that makes any deep impression on the reader. America-
returned Ashok is the only character who reveals a touch of goodness.
But he turns out to be a mere “Lamb” among the vicious wolves in
India. Eventually he too is drawn into the vortex of evil by the
politicians and their henchmen in Delhi. Ashok’s goodness acquired
from America cannot survive in wicked and filthy India! Is Adiga more
colonial than the colonists?
The protagonist of the novel is a semi-literate rustic who moves from
his hut in the village to a posh house as a driver, and then to Delhi.
He ‘grows up’ from being a Man with a Small Belly to one with a big
one, by committing a grotesque crime which is described luridly in the
novel. The author seems to justify the means employed by the
protagonist!
The novel also presents a ‘thesis’ (that’s almost how it reads) on
what the author calls the Rooster Coop [173-6]. The poor are compared
to the chickens huddled together in a butcher’s coop. The only means
of escape from that coop is implicitly presented as ruthless
violence.
No doubt, Adiga is presenting a world in which traditional moral
codes, religious teachings, social ethics or plain goodness are non-
existent or have become irrelevant. It is a world of ruthless
competition, not just for survival but for luxurious life. But shorn
of the depth in vision and imagination required of a literary writer,
the novel remains mere pulp fiction. That’s why I am surprised that it
won the Booker Prize. That’s also why I won’t recommend this novel to
anyone.
[The page numbers in brackets refer to the Harper Collins hardbound
edition.]

humphh....
Review by MJ

white tiger ///////// ////??????
huh.....i found it a black buk....
i mean .. it actually is a dark story...
lol...dunoo hw it gt d award n al......
u cn read it fr d hype it gt cos f d award...
bt else pure waste f time n money .. :(

THE WHITE TIGER
Review by Abdullah Khan

THE TIGER FROM THE LAND OF DARKNESS :The way Aravind Adiga entertains
in this booker-clinching page-turner absolves him of ‘all the sins’
which are supposedly committed by him as perceived by some of literary
critics, in his debut novel. The white tiger aka Balram Halwai is not
a typical at the bottom of the pyramid character from the land of
darkness. He is a revolutionary in some sense because he refuses to
accept his position what the pseudo-democratic society bestows upon
him.On the way to liberation what he does is a crime. Is Balram’s
crime bigger than other players of the story? Everybody ,from
politicians to bureaucrats , from feudal lords to hoi-polloi,at some
point of time commits a crime against the people who are at the lowest
level of pecking order. It hardly makes difference that sometime crime
is committed out of circumstantial compulsions.

The description of darker side of India will not be by liked by the
people who still (with full conviction )believe in ‘Shining India’ and
for whom the parameter of progress is limited to the SENSEX or NIFTY.
But for a person who is surviving on the one and half course meals,
SENSEX even at 30000 has no meaning. Anybody coming from the land of
darkness knows that the grim realities potrayed by Aravind in his
novel is not a figment of his imagination but it really exists. In
fact, it exists in even more perverse form.Yes, at times he is a
culprit of generlisations but that is forgiv”able” because for a
writer of fiction you can’t use the strict parameter of a social-
historian. Overall feel of the book is almost near to the reality

Awesome and Heart Touching

Review by Aniruddha Arondekar, 12th Science Student, Ratnagiri,
Maharashtra
Magnificent and truly Heart Touching Story. Must Read by all students.

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Book: The White Tiger: A Novel
Author: Aravind Adiga
ISBN: 1416562591
ISBN-13: 9781416562597, 978-1416562597
Binding: Hardcover
Publishing Date: 2008/04/22
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Number of Pages: 276
Language: English

...and I am Sid Harth

bademiyansubhanallah

2009-10-01 18:30:16 UTC