Book Review

The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga’s extraordinary and brilliant debut novel, The White Tiger has taken the
literary world by storm by winning the Man Booker Prize of 2008. The White Tiger has a
simple plot, the story of a poor small town boy making something of him in the big cities but the
style is interestingly innovative. The author of the novel has made an entrepreneur from
Bangalore tell his own story to the Premier of China:
When you have heard the story of how I got to Bangalore and became one of its
most successful (though probably least known ) businessmen, you will know
everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured and
developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century, more specifically, of the
yellow and brown men.
The author uses the friction in the relationship between India and china as the setting to the
story, with the narrator introducing himself through a series of letters to Wan Jiabao, the
Chinese premier. The narrator aims to offer his own life as an ultimate guide.
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 black river is the Ganges, beloved of the sari – and – spices tourists of
India.
The protagonist, Balram Halwai aka “Munna” hails from a very small village in north India.
The son of a rural rickshaw-puller is from darkness. Balram is taken out from the school at an
early age so that he can work at a tea-shop and earn some money for the family. Frustrated from
the circumstances, Balram looks for opportunities to escape from the miserable life and improve
his lot. His big break comes when he secures a position of a chauffer to the son of the rich village
landlord and his master takes him to Delhi.
In Delhi, his rustic and naïve country beliefs are mocked at by the city servants. Amid the
cockroaches in the rotting basements, the 360,000,005 gods, the glass apartment blocks, the
traffic jams, Balram learns about modern India where
 The air is so bad that it takes ten years off a amn’s life unless he drives round
in an air-conditioned car… The cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads
of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open – a woman’s hand, dazzling
with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral
water bottle onto the road – and then the window goes up and the egg is sealed.
An incredibly intricate character, the narrator appears at different times worldly-wise, honest,
witty, psychopathic, subservient and arrogant. At times e rigidly adheres to the correct standards
of behavior, while also being dismissive of his amoral actions. As he discovers the city gradually
his experience increases but he becomes much disillusioned. He learns how his master bribes the
government ministers and his cynical voice jeers at Indian democracy. He becomes aware of the
vast difference between the “darkness” of his background and the brightness of the “rich” world.
Despite of the numerous challenges in the way of upward mobility, the narrator is able to escape
the abject poverty he was raised in. Tired of the life of servitude, he takes the violent action that
once taken secures his place among the “men with big bellies”
The India that is depicted in The White Tiger is a virulent criticism of the system which is
corrupt and unjust, where everything is for sale and people behave like animals. Adiga’s
portrayal of India is far distant from the “shinning India” rhetoric depicted during the elections
though hat particular slogan is never mentioned directly in the novel
The gloomingly humorous novel is full of barbed wit. Adiga’s message is not subtle but the
narrator’s appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social, political and economic
order are both provocative and realistic. The author does not pose a solution. He wants the
readers to think.