REALIST HIEROGLYPHICS

Author(s): Ulka Anjaria

Source: Modern Fiction Studies , Spring 2015, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 114-137
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26421776

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114 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel

f
realist hieroglyphics:

aravind adiga and the

new social novel

Ulka Anjaria

In what many consider to be a postrealist age, what are the new

modes emerging that reflect a continued investment in representing
contemporary life?1 This question has particular relevance for the
novel today, with the globalization of literary styles and the intensified
transnationalism of characters and settings. Moreover, the increasing
outdatedness of the postcolonial, with its continued investment in the
lasting effects of colonialism, has raised the question of what new
modalities will emerge in its wake.2 What in the United States has been
termed "the new sincerity" is a symptom of a broader global concern
with the limits of irony.3 In India as well, following the metafictional
political "rowdyism" of Salman Rushdie (Rushdie, "Outside" 99),4 we
have seen a range of novels over the course of the first decade of
the twenty-first century that return to realism as a means of expos-
ing contemporary political inequities. This double gesture—toward
realism on the one hand and a concern with structural injustice on
the other—constitutes what I call a new social realism, a mode that
dialectically transcends early twentieth-century progressive writing
and the self-conscious aesthetics of a Rushdean postmodernism in
order to draw attention to social inequities in India today.
This seeming return to realism is thus hardly a return but an
attempt to overcome the conceptual limits of postcoloniality—whose
"handcuff to history" renders elusive the contemporary moment of

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 61, number 1, Spring 2015. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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 Anjaria 115
globalization. This new mode revises the mimetic fallacy of earlier
5

movements in social realism yet maintains a commitment to rep-

resenting social injustices through a materialist lens. In doing so,
new social realism offers a third future to the novel beyond the "two
paths" Zadie Smith identifies as an "anxious," nostalgic realism on one
hand, and an endless "re-enactment" of inauthenticity and parody on
the other ("Two Paths"). This third path is indeterminate, while still
calling itself political, and thus is an expression of changing politi-
cal and literary landscapes under globalization whose futures are as
yet unknown. In India, the partial dissolution of political groupings
based on class and caste and the politicization of the middle class
have raised the question of what political movements will look like in
the decades to come: what kinds of coalitions will form, and who—
in a near future marked both by increased social mobility and new
divides—will represent whom.6 In this context, social realism is no
longer a politics of visibility, of rendering present silenced populations
and of narrating their gradual incorporation into an aspirationally
expanded public sphere, but a set of as-yet unanswerable questions
about the nature of representation itself.
This essay outlines the contours of this new social realism
through the works of journalist-novelist Aravind Adiga. Against the
grain of recent Indian writing, Adiga constructs a virulent critique
of contemporary social issues such as growing economic inequality,
casteism, greed, consumerism, middle-class hypocrisy, and govern-
ment corruption. However, Adiga's realism is not transparent or self-
evident but raises a set of open-ended questions about the nature
of interpretation, elaborating what I call a realist hieroglyphics—the
presentation of realism as a mode founded on indecipherability—as an
aesthetics central to the political novel. Questioning the hermeneutics
of Marx's "social hieroglyphic," which the critic "tr[ies] to decipher
. . . to get behind the secret of our own social products" (322),
Adiga suggests that it is only when literature reflects on its own un-
knowability that it can represent social and economic injustices and
the complex routes to their restitution. Far from unveiling a hidden
truth, Adiga asserts the veil as a reigning trope, calling into question
interpretable symbols as the conventional building blocks of social
realism and linear time as the assumed temporality of globalization's
critique. In doing so, he distances himself from social realism as it
is conventionally defined.7 Yet in contrast to India's recent modern-
ist and postmodernist writers, Adiga uses the veil and its associated
imagery to highlight and criticize the exclusions and moral failings
of India's recent economic success. I argue that it is in the complex
counterpoint between illegibility and transparency that we see the
birth of a new literary mode, in India and beyond.

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116 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel

"Hiding in Light"
Born in 1974 in Chennai and educated in Australia, the United
States, and England, Adiga began his writing career as a journalist
for the Financial Times and later worked for Time before he became
a fiction writer. In 2008 he achieved global fame when he became
the most recent in a list of Indian-born novelists to win the Booker
Prize for his first book, The White Tiger. He went on to publish sev-
eral short stories, many of which are collected in the 2009 volume
Between the Assassinations, and a new novel, Last Man in Tower,
published in 2011. The White Tiger is the most critically acclaimed
of the three, praised in particular for its gritty characterization of
a subaltern rebel and its investment in bringing to light the sordid
underbelly of India's recent economic boom.
The White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, a low-caste boy
who rises from an unschooled villager to an entrepreneur in India's
new globalized economy. Belram recounts his life story over the course
of eight letters addressed to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier. In
what is in many ways "an archetypal Bildungsroman" (Mendes 279),
Balram transforms himself from his humble beginnings working in
a village tea shop to his gradual social advancement, acquiring by
means of his natural intelligence a job as "number two driver" (58)
for a corrupt village leader and then being promoted and transferred
to Delhi. There, after facing abuse and humiliation from his employ-
ers and being exposed to the gross juxtapositions along which the
poor and the rich live in Indian cities, Balram's desire to rebel grows.
Finally, in an act of ironic entrepreneurship, Balram takes control
over his life by murdering his boss, stealing a large sum of money
intended for a government bribe, and escaping to Bangalore where
he opens a taxi service for late-night call center workers. By writing a
protagonist who is a wily subaltern rebel effecting his upward mobil-
ity through an unsavory violent act, and by rendering visible spaces
such as the squalid servants' quarters in the basements of shining
new apartment complexes, The White Tiger offers a sharp critique of
the discourse of India's economic success. As a "condition-of-India
novel" (Detmers 536), the book serves as a reminder that despite
the celebratory narratives by which so much of India is enthralled,
"[n]ever before in human history have so few owed so much to so
many" (White 149).8
The novel's political imperative has been confirmed by Adiga's
descriptions of how he came to Balram's story. He claims to have
learned, for instance, about people like Balram by "spen[ding] a lot
of time hanging around stations and talking to rickshaw pullers" (qtd.
in Jeffries). He actively "wanted to depict someone from India's un-

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 Anjaria 117
derclass —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" (qtd. in DiMartino). As such,
Adiga attributes clear political significance to his work: "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" (qtd. in Jeffries). He
thus takes an entirely different approach from that of a predecessor
such as Rushdie, who does not talk often of social injustice and who
has made it repeatedly clear: "I'm not very inclined towards social
realism" (qtd. in Chaudhuri 22).9 Unsurprisingly, Adiga's unabashed
desire "to write about people who aren't anything like me" (qtd. in
Jeffries) has ignited some controversy—for one, reawakening concerns
central to postcolonial theory, in which representation of another's
interests, even when well-meaning, is always a project of domina-
tion.10 Some have criticized The White Tiger for the ease with which
Adiga represents a world that is foreign to him, without the modernist
reflexivity that has come to be expected in such a project.11 Adiga,
however, has remained unapologetic about his use of realism—and
the overtly political intention that motivates it.
Yet belying the certainty Adiga expresses in his interviews and
nonfiction writings, The White Tiger is not transparent or self-evident
in its social critique. In this way it differs from the kind of political
writing seen in earlier Indian social realism—for instance, in Mulk
Raj Anand's 1935 novel Untouchable. Anand's novel is critical of the
grievous injustices of the caste system but contains its representation
of Bakha, its Untouchable protagonist, within what Bakhtin would
call an entirely "closed," epic world in which "everything is finished,
already over" (16), and thus in which the middle-class reader remains
safe from implication. Here, by contrast, Adiga presents temporal-
ity as radically open. His use of the epistolary form is telling in this
regard, drawing on a convention of the early English novel that Eliza-
beth Deeds Ermarth identifies in Pamela: "By using the epistolary
style, Richardson makes temporal disjunctiveness a condition of his
form, so that the reader experiences a temporal instability similar
to that which constantly plagues Pamela" (100). Letters allow Adiga
to similarly contest the "relatively simple time-frame" (Goh 333) of
the bildungsroman and to present events in formation, becoming-
in-time. As we learn early on, the impetus behind Balram's letter is
that the Premier is "visiting [India] this week" (White 2) and Balram
wants to tell him about the real India before he comes. This sense of
a pressing motivation underlies the whole first section of the novel,
in which Balram constantly breaks from his narration to underline the
presentness of his narrative: "That was at 11:37 p.m. Five minutes

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118 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
ago" (3); "It is a little before midnight now, Mr. Jiabao. A good time
for me to talk" (5); and "11:52 p.m.—and it really is time to start"
(7). Many of the chapters end on similar instantiations of present
time: "But that will have to wait for tomorrow, Your Excellency. It's
2:44 a.m." (78); "That is all for tonight, Mr. Premier. It's not yet three
a.m., but I've got to end here, sir" (145); and "Alas: I'll have to stop
this story for a while. It's only 1:32 in the morning, but we'll have to
break off here. Something has come up, sir—an emergency. I'll be
back, trust me" (166). Moments such as these exceed conventional
novelistic temporality, presenting a diegetic time that is unfolding
simultaneously in the time of reading the text.
This elaboration of presentness is crucial to how The White Tiger
works as political writing: even while representing for its middle-class
readers the story of one notable subaltern rebel, it simultaneously
presents the possibility of the contemporaneous unfolding of subaltern
insurrection at the very moment of being read—the possibility that
the reader's own servants are planning a rebellion in the very next
room. This irruption of the novel's diegetic time into the readerly
present adds, for those readers who recognize themselves in Ashok,
a level of potential terror that becomes inextricably tied to the un-
folding of Balram's story. The novel's power as political writing relies
precisely on the way it engineers a meeting of the novel's present
with the reader's, where the latter's uncanny feelings of terror and
shock are born.12
The novel's rewriting of social realism as exceeding the closed
time of linear history is apparent in its larger chronotope as well.
Although the novel is set within the contemporary discourse of India
and China as new global leaders, it presents this rearrangement of the
world system as a new order that has yet to be realized. Adiga himself
hints at this in the quotation cited above; his use of the term "likely"
to describe the India-China relationship recasts this chronotope as
one of potentiality rather than actualization. Balram also presents
this alliance as built on a fundamental paradox; as his first letter to
Wen Jiabao begins, "Sir. Neither you nor I speak English, but there
are some things that can be said only in English" (1). His words not
only satirize the India-China relation, all too eagerly embraced by
celebrants of economic growth, but also further place the alliance
at the very margins of legibility, where it is literally impossible to
articulate. Balram goes on to admit that he "read about [Chinese]
history in a book, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, that [he] found
on the pavement. . . . This book was mostly about pirates and gold
in Hong Kong, but it did have some useful background information
too" (3), here representing the India-China partnership as a further
fiction.13 In these unlikely and even impossible representations, the

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 Anjaria 119
novel presents the India-China alliance not as a new world order but
as an ambivalent idea, existing at the limits of language.
The assertion of indecipherability culminates in the novel's
reigning trope, the "white tiger" that is ostensibly its thematic center.
Critics and readers have taken the white tiger to represent Balram's
uniqueness, as "the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along
once in a generation" (White 30). This reading interprets the novel as
a bildungsroman, in which the central figure is marked by his distinc-
tion from others around him and realizes that distinction through his
social mobility (Buckley 17). Besides rarity, however, the tiger has
several other possible meanings: a caged beast (150) or, "given that
the tiger is a symbol of power and might, the title . . . also alludes
to India's rise as a tiger economy" (Mendes 276). There is also the
tiger's "exoticism" (Mendes 276) and the fact that, on a more gen-
eral level, it is an animal in a dehumanizing world (Suneetha 166).14
In addition, the novel is dotted with indeterminate animal imagery,
including the narrator's reflections that at Independence "the cages
had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each
other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law" (54). Thus, while on
one hand centering the white tiger as a key symbol, the novel offers
a variety of iterations of tigers and animals in general that cannot
be reduced to one coherent tropology.
This presentation of indecipherability is evident even in the
novel's thematic climax, when Balram encounters a white tiger in a
Delhi zoo:

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes

and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark
bamboo; it was like watching the slowed-down reels of an
old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line,
again and again—from one end of the bamboo bars to the
other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly
the same pace, like a thing under a spell.
He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this—that
was the only way he could tolerate this cage.
Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped
moving. It turned its face to my face. The tiger's eyes met
my eyes, like my master's eyes have met mine so often in
the mirror of the car.
All at once, the tiger vanished. (237)

Although ostensibly an encounter with the tiger, the passage rep-

resents the impossibility of representing the tiger; although Balram
is "watching" the tiger, what he sees is never translated into text.
Instead, what the reader gets is the fact of watching, snippets of

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120 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
stripes and fur, and the path of the tiger's walking. The moment when
the tiger is represented as a presence it is no longer a tiger but "the
thing behind bamboo bars"; the moment when the tiger becomes
the object of representation its particularity—which is supposed to be
its defining trait—is lost. It is, at best, a "face" and then "eyes," but
these synecdochal elements also elude representation, and at this
point Balram faints, signifying the final failure of the deciphering. Far
from clarifying the text's operative image, then, this passage renders
it elusive. Yet this is precisely the moment when Balram comes to
understand the extent of his disempowerment—the moment when
he decides to murder his boss, realizing, "I can't live the rest of my
life in a cage" (239). In this way, the novel posits the illegibility of
the image in the very moment in which that image signifies within a
narrative of social rebellion.
By obscuring the legibility of the symbol, the novel displaces the
earnest social critique evident in Adiga's interviews and upturns the
conventional idiom of social realism, which is a poetics of visibility,
of showing what is otherwise unseen, and of bringing unrepresented
experiences to light. This is what allows Adiga to state quite plainly,
"Balram is my invisible man, made visible" (qtd. in Jeffries).15 Yet what
we see in the novel is quite the opposite: Balram finds his freedom
because "[t]he police searched for me in darkness: but I hid myself
in light" (118). Here the text unsettles the traditional dichotomy
between accessibility and obscurity, suggesting that the true nature
of Balram's plight, the circumstances that produced his degradation
and his resistance, are potentially unknowable by the text that seeks
to represent them. Neither the oppression he faces nor the rebellion
he enacts can be described using either an existing political vocabu-
lary or a transparent realist mode. Thus at this crucial moment that
contains the promise of meaning, the insight is deferred. Adiga's
project to render a character like Balram visible for the middle class
thus remains shrouded in obscurity; yet, far from weakening Adiga's
political project, it gives it a new idiom, whose power lies not in the
certainty of the enterprise but in its tentative unknowability.

An Unreadable Interlude
Adiga pushes further this question of unknowability in his second
work, Between the Assassinations.16 This text is a collection of short
stories set in Kittur, on India's southwestern coast, which represents
one of the hundreds of small Indian towns out of which the skilled
and educated emigrate and only the despondent remain. Each of the
stories revolves around an incident of violence, trauma, or corruption:
a street-side bookseller who is attacked for selling a pirated copy of

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 Anjaria 121
The Satanic Verses, a disgruntled student who sets off a bomb in his
chemistry class, a girl who is forced to beg to support her father's
drug addiction, and so on. In this way, Adiga again draws attention to
a series of widespread injustices—including "the disparities between
the poor and the rich, communal disharmony, corruption, violence
and hypocrisy" (Nikam and Nikam 145)—and their impact on human
relationships. Yet unlike The White Tiger, these stories are marked
by a lack of all but the most futile resistance.17 By choosing the short
story form, Adiga underlines the fragmentation of the social world
he describes, in which individual struggles refuse incorporation into
a larger narrative. This results in what one reviewer calls a "slow-
paced, impressionistic collage of linked stories," with "the ambience
of outtakes or supporting sketches for a work in progress" (Urquhart).
Part of what is wrong with society—the object of this work's social
critique—is that corruption, casteism, poverty, and disillusionment
have pervaded the psyche of average Indians to such an extent that
their entire lives are lived in fragments; and the text internalizes this
reality into its very form.
In building the text on fragments, Adiga furthers the impulse
evinced in The White Tiger to redirect his readers away from the
glossy surface of India's economic success to the gross realities that
lie underneath; but here, more so than in the earlier novel, he calls
attention to the inaccessibility of these realities by representing them
as partial and unable to find form. Between the Assassinations is
divided by day, ranging from "Day One" to "Day Seven," with each
distinguished by a landmark in the fictional town and headed by a
short blurb in the style of a tourist guidebook, addressed in the second
person to a potential or imagined tourist.18 This framing complicates
the idea—implied in the book's title—that the stories cover the period
between the assassinations of Indian Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi
and Rajiv Gandhi, in 1984 and 1991, which would imply seven years
rather than seven days.19 Moreover, like the elaboration of the pres-
ent found in The White Tiger's epistolary structure, the tour book
invites a unique interpretation of realism—one built on the interac-
tive participation of the middle-class reader rather than her narrative
distance, suggesting that the work is incomplete prior to the reader's
participation in it.
Yet in none of the book's stories does the tourist site described
in the blurb signify within the narrative that follows it; rather, Adiga
keeps them discrete, describing a notable feature of Kittur and then
immediately relegating it to the background or setting of the story.
Thus there remains a persistent disconnect between the blurb (the
setting) and the story (the plot), representing the more fundamen-
tal irreconcilability between the middle-class tourist gaze and the

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122 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
social inequality it seeks to represent. Here, it is not only the reader
who is implicated in the perpetuation of inequality—as in The White
Tiger—but the author himself, whose attempts to access the lives
of Kittur's downtrodden can only be represented by means of this
repeated disconnect. Through its repetition, this disconnect becomes
the ironic structuring principle of the text, so that by the end, it has
become clear that Between the Assassinations is built entirely on the
impossibility of reconciling the brutal stories of the period between
these two historic assassinations and a present in which the reader
and writer, although interested in the lives of Kittur's inhabitants, can
proceed no further than superficial encounters with its landmarks.
Between the Assassinations thus allegorizes the contradiction
at the heart of social realism, beyond the critique of human deg-
radation evinced in the individual stories. Here, the well-meaning
attempt to represent the hardships of the marginalized encounters
an obstacle in the physical and built landscapes that are so easily
appropriated by the national narrative: "[t]he arches of the train
station" (3); "[t]he famous lighthouse" (43); the temples, mosques,
and churches; the archaeological sites; the "ancient banyan trees"
(84); the well-known schools whose "alumni have made it into the
Indian Institute of Technology . . . and other prestigious universities
in India and abroad" (52); and the top hospitals (140). All these are
sites of national and international interest: claims of Kittur's—and
India's—distinction. However, for the characters in the story, they
do not represent anything; they are merely the sites of everyday
violence. The writer wants to inscribe these sites with meaning; their
lived experience refuses that inscription.
The text's social critique, then, lies not only in what it describes,
but also in what it registers by way of absence: the pressing disjunc-
ture between the national narrative and the lives of the nation's poor
and dispossessed. Adiga represents these two discourses as unable to
achieve what Ermarth calls consensus—in the absence of which the
text's fictionality threatens to crumble. This helps explain Between
the Assassination's unstable generic status—it was published first by
Picador in 2008, and then by the Free Press in 2009, and in the first
edition there is no table of contents, suggesting that rather than a
book of short stories, it be read as a novel or novella. Some of the
chapter or story titles vary between the two editions as well, and
the second edition contains some entirely new chapters, including
"Day Four: Umbrella Road," a story that Adiga published in the New
Yorker in 2008 as "The Elephant." The result is effectively two differ-
ent works under the same title. Reflecting this instability, the work
appears nowhere on Adiga's official website; the category "Books"
only lists The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower (Adiga, "Books").

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 Anjaria 123
Between thus seems to be a product of its own eponymous liminality.
Neither quite a novel nor a collection of short stories and published
temporally between two more cohesive works, its social critique
seems to lie in a peculiar negativity that takes the hieroglyphic to
its conceptual limit—a negativity both of its representation and its
existence as a text. This is an elaboration on the aesthetics of indeci-
pherability begun in The White Tiger, although to such a degree that
it undermines the text itself—where indecipherability veers toward
unreadability—thus raising significant questions about the limits of
realism in the project of social critique.

Realist Hieroglyphics
In his most recent work, Last Man in Tower, Adiga continues his
experiment with the aesthetics of indeterminacy but returns to the
novel form to do so. Here, he revives his earlier narrative interest in
the elusive object of realist representation as the somewhat ironic
cornerstone for social critique. Unlike the first two works, this text
does not feature those on the underside of development but consti-
tutes a critique of the dark side of the thriving and upwardly mobile
middle class. Last Man begins as Dharmen Shah, a Mumbai builder,
announces his plans to buy and redevelop a crumbling middle-class
housing society at higher-than-market value but with the provision
that all the residents must agree to sell by a certain date in order for
the deal to go through. Most of the residents are thrilled, but three or
four vacillate, attached to the building for sentimental reasons. One
by one, the dissenters change their minds under pressure from the
builder until there is one last man standing, a retired schoolteacher
and widower, Yogesh Murthy, known as Masterji. His connection to
the building comes from having lived there with his daughter and his
wife Purnima before their untimely deaths. Their ghosts continue to
comfort him in his flat and his interactions with them constitute his
daily life in retirement: "A noise from the kitchen. The very noise
Purnima used to make when chopping onions. He tiptoed into the
kitchen to catch a ghost, if one was there" (42); "The old calendar
began to hit the wall faster, tap-tap-tap, and now he was sure that
Purnima was speaking to him. Tap-tap-tap" (77). In addition, as a
former teacher, the flat is where Masterji held tutoring sessions for
the building's children, which had earned him a level of respect among
his neighbors. Yet oblivious to these ties to the past, the society's
occupants turn against Masterji for his unwillingness to sell. They
go to increasingly desperate lengths to drive him away, sending him
threatening phone calls, hiring thugs to attack him, and smearing

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124 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
excrement on his door. He tries to find recourse in his friends and his
son's family, but they turn away from him as well. He calls a lawyer
who he hopes can plead his case before the higher moral authority
of the state, but the lawyer, like his neighbors and family, greets his
story with incredulity, unable to imagine why anyone would privilege
sentimentality over ready cash. Finally, the residents' greed and fan-
tasies of a better life lead them to undertake "The Simplest of Things"
(351): a violent act to ensure that the buyout will take place. At the
end, Masterji is no longer in the picture, and the other occupants
move on to better apartments with little regret for the past.
Like more traditional works of social realism, Last Man exposes
the hypocrisy of bourgeois respectability in the face of greed, and as
such is intended—once again—to stir the middle classes out of their
political apathy. Yet more acutely than his other works, this novel
registers an awareness of the outdatedness of the conventional tem-
porality and tropology of social realism and incorporates this aware-
ness into the text itself. At one point, Masterji describes his experience
with his neighbors by saying, "They treat me like they would treat an
untouchable in the old days . . . : even at the thought of his shadow
falling on them, his neighbours cringed and withdrew" (217). While
the comparison strives to connect Masterji's predicament with that
of the marginalized characters of India's past, it immediately follows
his observation that "in Bombay caste and religion had faded away,
and what had replaced them, as far as he could tell, was the idea of
being respectable and living among similar people" (217). The two
sentences maintain a tension—unresolved throughout the novel—be-
tween an older narrative of caste and today's much more vague "idea
of being respectable," a tension evident in The White Tiger as well.20
But here, the almost pleading tone of the earlier comment suggests
that whether the "replacement" is true or not, Masterji's attempt to
connect himself with "an untouchable in the old days" reveals a streak
of desire—a desire shared by the language of the novel itself—to find
a meaningful paradigm in which to articulate a social critique relevant
to today's myriad injustices, which the novel clearly registers but lacks
the language to define. Later, when Masterji tries to rally the justice
system in support of his cause, he imagines himself momentarily
linked to a laborer sitting next to him at a cheap restaurant: "Until
now he had only been conscious of fighting against someone: that
builder. Now he sensed he was fighting for someone" (301). Here,
for a moment, "the straining coolies" he encounters on the street
become "symbols" of this immanent solidarity, a thought which leads
him to "fe[el]—for the first time since his wife had died—that he was
not alone in the world" (302). This feeling appears once again when
Masterji imagines himself at one with "people, men of various races,

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 Anjaria 125
standing in white shirts, close together . . . the commuters on the
suburban train" (341)—and again, it gives him temporary respite
(342). Yet beyond the moment of their conception, these connections
fail to signify; not only are his attempts at fighting the builder and
his neighbors unsuccessful, but the solidarity also proves ephemeral
and fails to remake Masterji in the revolutionary cast he fleetingly
imagines for himself.
Last Man in Tower remains ambivalent about whether this loss
is to be mourned or celebrated; certainly, and despite Adiga's concern
for social injustice, the language of cross-caste or cross-class solidar-
ity does not become an object of nostalgia. Adiga transforms these
moments into a new literary aesthetic and in doing so replaces the
poetics of solidarity with those of an ambivalent utopianism. This is
visible, for instance, in the novel's two competing temporal structures:
the linear time along which the plot unfolds and the simultaneous
sense that time, like human connection, is profoundly unknowable.
In the former, we witness the progressive deterioration of neighborly
sociality from the moment the residents receive the buyout offer to
the final violent event—by which, as the builder says, "Every day I
can hear [the deadline] coming closer. Can you hear it too?" (146).
In this countdown structure, in which each chapter is marked by a
successive date closer to the deadline, the overdetermined futurist
temporality of redevelopment reigns in the possibility of multiple
meanings. This is the conventional temporality of social realism—
what Fredric Jameson invokes when he characterizes the "immense
international division of labor, which has certainly been anticipated
at certain moments of the past," as "now universal and irreversible"
("New" 375; emphasis added). But in all other ways, the novel re-
fuses to pin down the progressive logic of time, letting it retain what
Naveeda Khan calls, after Henri Bergson, "its capacity to surprise,
to fork in ways that diverge from those expected" (Muslim 6). Thus
even as the date that heads each chapter signifies the homogeneous
time of modernity, it also recalls the periodical, a form that by nam-
ing its date, ironically "spell[s] out its contingent claims to truth
. . . always point[ing] beyond itself—to other numbers of the same
periodical, to other words and texts which give it meaning, to other
periodicals, books or entertainments" (Beetham 26). This openness
is only underlined by the peculiar section titles, most of which are in
the present tense, and as such exceed the linear temporality of the
novel's plot through the suggestion of synchronicity: "Book One: How
the Offer Was Made," "Book Two: Mr Shah Explains His Proposal,"
"Book Three: Four or Five Seconds of Feeling Like a Millionaire,"
"Book Four: The Rains Begin," and so on. These titular articulations
of the present suggest that even while the plot is structured along a

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126 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
single-minded countdown, the present is experienced diversely—even,
as in "Book Three," as the slow-motion "four or five seconds." This
play on time amounts to a pointed rejection of the preterite, what
Roland Barthes calls the temporal vantage point of realism, which
"calls for a sequence of events, that is, for an intelligible Narrative,"
and which "presupposes a world which is constructed, elaborated,
self-sufficient, reduced to significant lines, and not one which has
been sent sprawling before us, for us to take or leave" (Writing 30).
For Barthes, "[t]hanks to [the preterite], reality is neither mysterious
nor absurd; it is clear, almost familiar, repeatedly gathered up and
contained in the hand of a creator" (31). But rather than replacing
the preterite with the "internal, subjective, personal time" (Randall
160) of modernism, or abandoning intelligibility altogether, Adiga's
novel uses the openness of time as a vantage point from which to
consider the very specific and in fact quite local question of how to
represent grievous social injustices whose natures are not known in
advance and that are unfolding at the very moment of being written.
This loss of the preterite initiates a new relationship between
realism and its referent, evident in the novel's title; in "Last Man in
Tower," we expect to have at least one but more likely two articles
to structure the phrase, turning it into the more typically novelistic:
"The Last Man in the Tower." In the absence of these articles arises
the question of intelligibility in realism. Indeed, the title's form seems
borrowed from a newspaper headline such as the one discussed in the
novel—"Last Man in Tower Fights Builder" (296)—but in its truncation,
it remains partial and predicateless. This gesture toward journalistic
style as one suited to describe that which is unfinished also creates
a new kind of subject: rather than a tragic or novelistic hero, whose
complex interiority the novel can illuminate, Masterji as "last man in
tower" is emptied of the traditional sense of character and presented
instead as partial, elusive, and like the subject of a news story, ul-
timately unknowable within the generic conventions in which he is
bound. He remains wedded to an outdated novelistic ideal in which
connections to the past are meaningful and in which ties to others
accrete and contribute to character and ultimately, to community.
By contrast, journalism—with its "atomized periodicity" (Salmon
53)—refuses this sense of character, and as such is the mode best
suited to representing the irreducible present of globalization. This
is journalism as "a kind of meta-commodity, one which participates
in, while commenting on, the production of time and the experience
of space through which other commodities circulate, as well as the
subjectivities that perceive these things" (Halpern 4). Yet journal-
ism tends to be a denigrated literary mode—evident in Tamil critic
B. Jayamohan's criticism of The White Tiger for being "[a] perfect

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 Anjaria 127
example of literature becoming extended journalism" (qtd. in M. Khan
93). Here, Adiga seems to respond to these criticisms by intervening
in precisely this perceived incompatibility between the two forms, in
the tradition of fellow journalist-novelists such as American writer
Stephen Crane for whom the "textual ambiguity" that characterized
journalism in the nineteenth century was productive of new modes
of realism—modes that were able to transcend the "fact-fiction"
dichotomy (Robertson 3). Adiga suggests that it is because of jour-
nalism's ability to register the continuous passage of time that the
novel's social critique becomes intelligible in the first place. Thus
even while exposing journalism's complicity in the social breakdown
the book describes, Adiga resurrects a realism right at its journalistic
limits as the primary mode in which such complicity can be described.
The novel presents the elusiveness of interpretation at the level
of trope as well. Thus "the straining coolies" who give Masterji that
sense of temporary solidarity quickly transform from "symbols"—the
more typical social realist figure—to "hieroglyphs of a future, a future
that was colossal," and in which there exists "another Bombay waiting
to be born" (302). The transformation from legible symbol to curious
hieroglyph not only rewrites the conventional figures of social realism
but also reorients the entire thematic of realism to something always
potentially indeterminate and moreover posits a vision of utopia in
that indeterminacy. Barthes experiments with this more associative
resonance of the hieroglyph in his discussion of Fourier (Sade 99),
but goes further in Image Music Text to suggest that precisely in its
ephemerality does the "hieroglyph" describe the "perfect instant"
of a work of art, its "pregnant moment," "in which can be read at a
single glance . . . the present, the past and the future; that is, the
historical meaning of the represented action" (Image 73). In a sense,
then, by offering the hieroglyph as a supplement to the symbol,
Adiga captures the ambivalent history of social realism itself while
also offering a new futurity as emerging from its very ambivalence.
The novel hypostatizes this elusive temporality in the various
images of unfinished building projects that appear throughout the
book, as metonymies for the always only partially built landscape of
Mumbai's postliberalization present. Much of this is registered through
the point of view of Dharmen Shah, the builder, for whom the un-
finished city is literally rich with opportunities for personal gain. Yet
because, as we learn early in the novel, Shah is dying from chronic
bronchitis, caused by repeated exposure to hazardous chemicals, the
unfinished landscape as a site of promise is simultaneously an index
of impending death. The idea that what underlies the city's expansion
also anticipates its death mobilizes a dialectic that takes the progress
of history outside of its conventional linear teleology so that death

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128 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
can unparadoxically be the logical outcome of renewal. But in locating
this dialectic in the unfinished spaces of the city's expansion—spaces
that, like the white tiger, are characterized by their blankness and
openness to interpretation, Adiga both raises a classic social critique
and calls into question its conventional tropology.
This openness of trope is confirmed when well into the novel
Shanmugham, the builder's elusive "left-hand man" (94), looks out
over Mahim Creek and sees "the hazy blue piers of the half-built
Worli SeaLink, standing in the distant water like a bridge from this
world to the next" (279). The rest of Shanmugham's drive, of which
this image is a part, is punctuated by views of "glossy black" water,
"glowing signs" of a nearby hospital, and "the square lights of the
slums puncturing the darkness" (279). In contrast to these signs of
the failures of India's postcolonial history, the unfinished Sea-Link
stands as a strange sort of promise. The reference is to the actual
Worli Sea-Link Bridge, an ambitious Mumbai project begun in 1999,
which despite government promises took over ten years to complete
so that one newspaper called it "hi-tech incompetence . . . a classic
example of how not to do city or project planning" ("Bandra-Worli
Sea Link").21 By identifying the bridge as "half-built," Adiga locates
the events of the novel within a recognizable 1999–2009 period; yet,
at the same time, he suggests that the unfinished bridge offers an
aesthetic of its own, wherein it is resignified from a sign of govern-
ment ineptitude to a promise of a new and better world. But this new
meaning lies precisely in the image's lack of form, as underscored
by the fact that it is seen from the perspective of Shanmugham, a
character whose background and nature remain unknown throughout
the novel. Neither the powerful developer nor a member of the easily
corrupted middle class, Shanmugham occupies a liminal, and indeed
elusive, place within the novel; his role in the process of rapacious
redevelopment that the novel critiques is one of the few questions
left unanswered by an otherwise overdetermined and even moralistic
plot. Thus when Shanmugham reads the incompleteness of the bridge
less as a sign of despair than of potential hope, it is a moment free
of overdetermination, on the extreme edge of the text, in its "hazy"
imaging of another world. Just as his subjectivity remains obscured
but promises a new—though never represented—world outside of
both Shah's and the residents' greed, the bridge-in-progress in its
own haze becomes an ambivalent and fundamentally uninterpretable
trope for the novel's social vision.
The aestheticization of the unfinished bridge marks a significant
departure in Indian social realism from earlier critiques in which half-
built infrastructure served as a symbol of governmental failure and
corruption. The central image of the 1981 Hindi social film, Main Azad

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 Anjaria 129
Hoon (directed by Tinnu Anand), is a permanently half-built (adhoori)
hospital, the funds for the completion of which had been siphoned
off by a corrupt builder-government nexus. Because the incomplete
building represents the government's failures, it strategically becomes
the symbol for the revolutionary protagonist's show of defiance, in
which by jumping off its roof he rebirths the idea of freedom (azaadi)
for the common man. In the 1983 film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (directed
by Kundun Shah), a building-in-progress is the site of illegal busi-
ness deals, and a collapsed overpass represents the stranglehold of
corruption and cronyism over government-sponsored development.
In Last Man, however, Adiga is content with neither the Nehruvian
development narrative that evaluates social health primarily through
fully formed infrastructure, nor the neoliberal critique of bureaucratic
inefficiency by which, as Shah at one point laments, "Nothing works,
nothing moves; it takes ten years to build a bridge" (55). Rather, the
novel's interpretation of the bridge is closer to what anthropologist
Naveeda Khan identifies, in her study of the underused Islamabad-
Lahore Motorway in present-day Pakistan, as representative of the
multiple and irreducible temporalities of development. For Khan, the
Motorway not only represents the failure of the state but also brings
with it an ambivalent futurity by which it does not "outstrip nor au-
gur [Pakistan's] modernity but rather . . . cut[s] a swath across it
by anticipating Pakistan's future in a mode previously unarticulated"
("Flaws" 88). This sense of futurity is partially captured by the de-
velopmental state, yet it exceeds the state's vision, resonating with
other aspirations that are not entirely statist; and in this excess lie
the possibilities of additional signification. Thus the partially func-
tional Motorway paradoxically becomes the site of alternative and
as-yet unknown futures. We see a similar revaluation of incomplete-
ness in some of the half-built spaces of Danny Boyle's 2008 film
Slumdog Millionaire—for instance in the incomplete high rise where
Jamal meets Salim after many years. As Jamal comes face to face
with his brother, who had earlier betrayed him, he angrily imagines
shoving Salim off the side of the building in revenge. The way Boyle
films the scene it is unclear (until the men have almost reached the
ground and the film cuts back to the initial encounter) whether the
shove was real or only in Jamal's imagination, and it is precisely
this ambivalence that characterizes Mumbai's half-built spaces for
Boyle: the building shell, which on one hand signifies uncontrolled
development and the underworld's control over India's future, is
also the site where Jamal can imagine a powerful agency over his
own life. At the end of The White Tiger, Balram describes Bangalore
as a half-built city where "[t]here is construction everywhere," but
he reads the "[p]iles of mud. . . . Piles of stones. Piles of bricks . . .

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130 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
smoke, smog, powder, cement dust" not as signs of a lack, but as a
further enigma, "a veil," which raises the question of what shape the
future will take: "When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like?"
(273). Like Khan and Boyle, Adiga resignifies the half-built project
as simultaneously what does not work about India's political system
as well as an ambivalent trope for other possible futures: a realist
hieroglyph, simultaneously eliciting and resisting interpretation. It is
around this epistemic vacillation that Adiga builds his social critique,
offering not only a new politics, but also a new envisioning of the
relationship between politics and representation—a new realism—out
of which such a politics might emerge.

The Future of the Social Novel

Deliberately rejecting the progressivist and overdetermined logic
of socialism, Adiga reorients the political novel away from a rhetoric
of certainty even as he retrieves social realism from the ashes of
postmodernism. His endeavor is profoundly paradoxical, emphasizing
indeterminacy, obscurity, and hieroglyphics even as he takes real-
ism to its limits—where fiction meets nonfiction—to the ostensibly
transparent registers of journalism, the tourist guidebook, and the
letter. His writing, in this sense, occupies a "dark zone" similar to
what Paul de Man observes in Baudelaire's prose poems, in which it
is counterintuitively "when a modern poetic form appears most ac-
cessible—indeed, prosaic" that it is most "resistant to apprehension"
(Halpern 6). Adiga rewrites realism as a perplexing mode, invested
more in sounding out the dialectic between communication and ob-
scurity than in conveying a transparent truth. It is a mode committed
to continual critique, reflecting a reality in which, in his own words,
"[t]he problem is omnipresent, its manifestations keep changing, and
literature and the arts have to keep responding" (qtd. in Detmers
544). Unlike in conventional social realism, Adiga refuses to presume
a finished reality for his literature to describe or a known future it
might contribute to establishing, even when, as in the extreme case of
Between the Assassinations, he verges on negating the entire project
of representation in doing so. Rather, he shows how the terms on
which the conventional social novel is built are themselves in progress,
and as such require new literary forms—forms that must constantly
be remade as they struggle to grasp the contemporary experience.
Adiga's works delineate a space of remarkable openness around
the meaning of political literature and the formal structures on which
such a literature might be founded, making him the object of criticism
from all sides of the political spectrum. Yet as I have suggested, the
contradiction between the realist impulse to represent social issues

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 Anjaria 131
and the potential unknowability of those issues is precisely what
defines new social realism, befitting the unknown content of new
political arrangements in the twenty-first century. It is within this
space of contradiction that a futurity to the global novel might be
forged. In this future, both realism and modernism are inadequate
for the tasks of representing the experience of the contemporary
and critiquing social inequalities—resulting in new and indeterminate
literary forms. The nature of these forms—their commonalities across
the globe, the new aesthetics they engender, and the modes they
employ—remains, fittingly, to be seen.

Notes
I would like to thank Julie Minich, Lucinda Ramberg, Geoffrey Sanborn,
and my two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier
versions of this essay.
1. Critics who discuss contemporary postrealism include Baudrillard
120, Gonzalez 111 and Jameson, Postmodernism 150. In the after-
word to my book Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel:
Colonial Difference and Literary Form, I complicate that designation
in the Indian case, suggesting that what appears to be a rejection
of realism might actually be a form of mourning or alienation from
the real. See 165.
2. The current status of the postcolonial is up for debate. Robert Young
defends certain central features of the field in his article "Postcolonial
Remains," his response to the special roundtable in a 2007 issue of
PMLA that was widely read as postcolonial theory's "obituary" (19).
Young is not the only defender of the continuing relevance of the
field, but others, like Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose article "Postcolonial
Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change" was published in the
same special issue of New Literary History as Young's, take a differ-
ent approach, arguing that postcolonial theory will have to transform
itself to be able to account for the two defining "phenomena" of the
contemporary world, phenomena that "none of us can quite escape
in our personal and collective lives at present: globalization and
global warming. All thinking about the present has to engage both"
("Postcolonial" 1). The shift from considering the epistemological
fallout of colonialism and its aftermath (Young 20) to globalization
and climate change will require, for Chakrabarty, that "postcolonial
thinking may need to be stretched" (1). One such "stretch" is think-
ing in terms of the species, a concept that postcolonial theory, bol-
stered by poststructuralism, had earlier "provincialized," to use one
of Chakrabarty's own terms from his 2000 book, in favor of "what
some scholars call 'anthropological difference'—differences of class,
sexuality, gender, history, and so on" ("Postcolonial" 2). The question

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132 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
of how such a shift might fundamentally alter postcolonial criticism
remains to be seen.
3. The "new sincerity" has been discussed by Adam Kelly, Liesbeth
Korthals Altes, and other scholars of post-2000s American fiction.
What Kelly sees as David Foster Wallace's "response to the contem-
porary prevalence of irony in American literature" (133) might be
evinced in the writings of many other contemporary writers, includ-
ing Indian novelist Aravind Adiga, whose works I focus on here. Like
Wallace's "return" to sincerity, Adiga's turn to social realism cannot
rely on the self-evident status of representation but "must always
break with representation" (Kelly 143).
4. Whether Rushdie is a "political" writer has been long debated and
the details of these debates go beyond the scope of this paper. Par-
nell summarizes some of the key issues, as does Fletcher 3–10, in
a discussion that touches on the larger question of the politics of
postmodernism, citing, for instance, the disagreement between Fred-
ric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon in this regard. See Parnell 5. Part
of the debate rests on the distinction between the "deconstructive"
and the "recuperative" (7)—in other words whether a text merely
dismantles powerful hierarchies and modes of thinking or suggests
alternative ones in their place. Rushdie tends toward the former,
for instance in his devastating satires of Zia ul-Haq (Shame), Indira
Gandhi (Midnight's Children), and Margaret Thatcher (The Satanic
Verses). Even in "Outside the Whale," one of his most overtly political
essays, the alternative Rushdie poses to Orwell's space of political
acquiescence is for writers to face "the unceasing storm, the continual
quarrel, the dialectic of history. Outside the whale there is a genuine
need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps
of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand
the world. Outside the whale we see that we are all irradiated by
history, we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it
can be as false to create a politics-free fictional universe as to create
one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep"
(100). This description of political writing takes up the challenge of
a Saidian postcolonial criticism in which there is no space untouched
by politics, but stops short of a progressivist or materialist politics.
As Bharucha confirms, here writing on Shame: "Ultimately, there is
a stronger emphasis in Rushdie's novel on the elemental than on the
political, the inexplicable rather than the rational. . . . All a writer
with Rushdie's political fervour can do is to blow this world up. It is
not a place worth living in" (169–70). Indeed, in Rushdie's fiction,
everything is political and there is no neutral ground; however, there
are also no peasants, workers, Muslims, or outcastes: everyone is
equally politicized.
5. This is of course a reference to Rushdie's characterization of Midnight's
Children protagonist Saleem Sinai, and by extension all of India, as
being "mysteriously handcuffed to history" (1), which Rushdie la-
ments as a symptom of postcolonial melancholy. I use the term here
to characterize the body of postcolonial theory that, in the 1980s and

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 Anjaria 133
1990s, worked to expose the implication of nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century British writing with colonial rule. See Said; Pratt;
Suleri; and Spivak, "Three". Although it has had a significant impact
in decolonizing knowledge in the Western academy, this strand of
postcolonial theory has been less adept at accounting for the rapid
changes that mark the experience of the contemporary in much of
the postcolonial world: of new transnational imaginaries, and of new
futurities, utopic or otherwise.
6. Caste and class continue to play a role in Indian politics, but as many
scholars have noted, the recent emergence in India of a massive
urban middle class has resulted in a shift in the political landscape.
Leela Fernandes explains: "While earlier state socialist ideologies
tended to depict workers or rural villagers as the archetypical ob-
jects of development, such ideologies now compete with mainstream
national political discourses that increasingly portray urban middle
class consumers as the representative citizens of liberalizing India"
(xv). Vinay Sitapati similarly shows, in his discussion of Anna Hazare's
2011 anticorruption movement, how "[m]iddle class judicial activism
extends beyond class interests" (41).
7. In India, social realism—known as "progressive writing"—flourished
from the 1920s through the 1950s. Progressive writer K. A. Abbas
defined the mode in the following way: "while realism implied depic-
tion of the truth of life, social realism was concerned with dynamic
interpretations of life with the purpose of changing that reality"
(145). Thus authors "committ[ed] themselves to a definite stand on
social, and even political, issues" (148). As I use it in the following
pages, social realism is distinguished from standard realism in that
it takes as its primary purpose the elucidation of social ills, in which
the literary work is intended at least in part to function as political
writing, to inspire people to action.
8. For Detmers, the "condition-of-India novel" concerns "the complex
subject matter of hegemony, class emancipation, revolt and revolu-
tion, crime and guilt" (536) and constitutes a play on "the 'condition-
of-England novel,'" a "subgenre of the Victorian social novel [that]
engages with landmark socio-political movements of its time, such as
industrialization, urbanization and class conflicts, furthermore elicit-
ing a deep concern with the precarious living conditions and status
of the underprivileged, who are seen as harmful to social stability"
(539).
9. One critic goes so far as to call The White Tiger a "socialist manifesto"
(Singh 100); although this is overstated, such a comment neverthe-
less highlights how persuasively Adiga presents his novel as a political
text to some readers. Those words could never be used to describe
a Rushdie novel, even at its most political.
10. For an established account of these concerns, see, for example,
Spivak, "Subaltern."

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134 Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel
11. For instance, Amitava Kumar criticizes the novel for its claims on
authenticity: "reportage is only an inoculation against the charge of
inauthenticity. It hides larger untruths. Authenticity does matter, but
only as it serves the novel's more traditional literary demands: that
the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world
meet."
12. One newspaper article explained some Indian readers' negative
reactions to The White Tiger by citing the novel's representation of
master-servant relations: "Having bought the book, affluent Indians
may shift uncomfortably in their seats. The daily inhumanity shown by
the rich towards their domestic staff in The White Tiger is something
of which many will realise they too are guilty" (Dhillon).
13. This passage is also discussed by Mendes. See 277.
14. Balram ends the novel by hoping that when the fury of construction
has abated, Bangalore might emerge as "a decent city, where humans
can live like humans and animals can live like animals" (273). Adiga
also uses animal imagery to critique dehumanizing social conditions
in his short story "The Elephant," mentioned briefly below.
15. Adiga's reference here is clearly Invisible Man, but it is slightly mis-
placed; Ellison's goal is not simply to render present his protagonist
made invisible through a long history of racism and marginalization,
but, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., to "signify" on the natural-
ism of black writers such as Richard Wright by means of a more on-
tologically precarious modernism, thus writing invisibility as a trope
not of political disempowerment but of "parody . . . repetition and
difference" (Gates 106).
16. Adiga has admitted that Between was written before The White Tiger,
but published only after the latter's success. See "Aravind Adiga: You
Ask the Questions."
17. The futility of resistance throughout Between the Assassinations is
epitomized in the chapter "Day Two: The Bunder," in which the pro-
tagonist Abbasi secretly soils a senior government officer's drink with
remnants of his own excrement (25). Although an act of revenge for
the officer's constant demand for bribes, this "resistance" is notable
because the officer never finds out. This is in contrast to Balram's
murder of his boss in The White Tiger.
18. For instance, the first story begins, "The arches of the train station
frame your first view of Kittur as you come in as a passenger on the
Madras Mail" (3).
19. Critics have, for the most part, had trouble explaining this contra-
diction in the text; one reviewer references the historical period
suggested by the title as "an important but little analyzed period of
modern South Asian history" but remains conspicuously silent as to
specifically how the work illuminates that period (Sharp). In another
review, fellow novelist Vikas Swarup admits that despite the book's
title, "the 14 stories bookended by these two milestones could easily
have been set in present-day India" (Swarup).

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 Anjaria 135
20. Toral Gajarawala offers an extended analysis of The White Tiger's
role in "crown[ing] the casteless figure of modernity" (131) precisely
through the slippage from Balram's lower-caste identity into his
lower-class identity.
21. Evincing the competitive undertone to many descriptions of India's
infrastructural failures—a tone Adiga satirizes in The White Tiger—this
editorial concludes: "We [Indians] do not have to be quite as good
as China, which has built seven sea links in the last six years. But
we can surely do better than the Bandra-Worli project."

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