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"The White Tiger" by Aravind Adiga



                                      


Balram Halwai, the narrator of Aravind Adiga’s first novel, “The White Tiger,” is a modern Indian hero. In a country inebriated by its newfound economic prowess, he is a successful entrepreneur, a self-made man who has risen on the back of India’s much-vaunted technology industry. In a nation proudly shedding a history of poverty and underdevelopment, he represents, as he himself says, “tomorrow.”

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.

Balram begins the journey into his past by describing his early life in the village of Laxmangarh, a small community pervaded by poverty. His family is dominated by a forceful grandmother, fed as the result of the income generated by a hard-working (but badly paid) father, and trapped in their way of life by India’s centuries-old caste system, which defines individuals by the jobs done by ancient ancestors. Very early on, however, Balram comes to realize and/or believe that the life for which he seems to be destined is not the life he wants and/or needs to live, and slowly, carefully, starts working his way towards greater wealth and success. He doesn’t really know how he’s going to get there: he only knows that he has to, and trusts that the way forward will ultimately be revealed to him.

The White Tiger” is a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity. It correctly identifies — and deflates — middle-class India’s collective euphoria. But Adiga, a former correspondent for Time magazine who lives in Mumbai, is less successful as a novelist. His detailed descriptions of various vile aspects of Indian life are relentless — and ultimately a little monotonous. Every moment, it seems, is bleak, pervaded by “the Darkness.” Every scene, every phrase, is a blunt instrument, wielded to remind Adiga’s readers of his country’s cruelty.

The characters can also seem superficial. Balram’s landlord boss and his wife are caricatures of the insensitive upper classes, cruel to and remote from their employees. Although Balram himself is somewhat more interesting, his credulousness and naïveté often ring false. When he goes to buy alcohol for his employer, he finds himself “dazzled by the sight of so much English liquor.” When he visits a shopping mall, he is “conscious of a perfume in the air, of golden light, of cool, air-conditioned air, of people in T-shirts and jeans. . . . I saw an elevator going up and down that seemed made of pure golden glass.”

The problem with such scenes isn’t simply that they’re overdone. In their surfeit of emblematic detail, they reduce the characters to symbols. There is an absence of human complexity in “The White Tiger,” not just in its characters but, more problematically, in its depiction of a nation that is in reality caught somewhere between Adiga’s vision and the shinier version he so clearly — and fittingly — derides. Lacking this more balanced perspective, the novel feels simplistic: an effective polemic, perhaps, but an incomplete portrait of a nation and a people grappling with the ambiguities of modernity.


 

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