Reviews on The Review

The White Tiger, the debut novel by Arvind Adiga was the 2008 Man Booker Prize Winner.

 

The novel takes the form of a series of letters written by the main protagonist, Balram Halwai, and addressed to the Chinese Premier on the eve of his official visit to India. These letters purport to reveal the ‘real’ India lurking beneath the gloss. Halwai is a product of Darkness, a veiled reference to one of the poorest states of India, Bihar that provides the majority of domestic servants in the country. He, like the generations before him is trapped in a cycle of poverty and exploitation at the hands of the inhabitants of ‘light’, i.e. the moneyed, land owning class. But Halwai is a canny survivor who ruthlessly exploits the corrupt system to climb out of the hell hole and take his place among the citizens of ‘light’.

 

But Halwai is far from being a sympathetic hero. Though he questions the socio-economic injustice of the society, he is quite willing to abandon his own morals and ethics in pursuit of the ‘bright lights’ of the city. He remains ultimately a cocky, brash one dimensional figure capable of neither self-doubt or redemption and one wishes that Adiga had added more depth to his interior emotional landscape.

 

The India that Adiga presents to the reader is a far cry from the mystical, doe-eyed literary constructions of Rushdie or Arundhati Roy or indeed the plethora of other contemporary Indian writers who are keen to feed the insatiable appetite of the Western reader for picturesque poverty or magical realism. Equally, the book does not dwell on the yearnings or neurosis of the literate Indian middle classes as celebrated in the novel s of Amit Chaudhuri or Vikram Seth. What Adiga does is to mention the unmentionable, namely the ugly grind and squalor of the Indian underclass- the servants, the drivers, the maidservants who form the back bone of the modern Indian juggernaut. Every Indian is familiar with this class of face less service providers and the book will certainly prove an uncomfortable reading for them.
 

The book needs to be commended for its brutal depiction of Indian society but this depiction also proves to be its main limitation. It ultimately comes across as a shrill polemical outburst against the capitalist rich. The subtleties and undercurrents present in a complex, ancient society are sadly absent from the novel.