The White Tiger by Arivind Adiga

The narrator, Balram, being exceptionally inquisitive and resourceful, is The White Tiger. It is a title bestowed on him by a rural schoolmaster early on, and like all names in India, it defines and shapes his destiny. Having broken the chains of caste and poverty, Balram has emerged from India’s rural “darkness”, and over the course of seven nights, tells his story in a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China.

India is the world compressed; its contradictions and contrasts, hypocrisy and brutality, corruption and greed, sit close to the surface, causing an outside observer to recoil, while most Indians themselves adapt and readapt to their condition.

Is it cynical to view the world – in this case Indian society – as corrupt, dysfunctional and intractable, the scoffing destroyer of idealism and good intentions – or is it simply a realistic, honest portrayal? And is it only India being portrayed here? Or is India simply the world compressed, where an interdependent “darkness” and “light” intermingle, casting shadows of moral complicity in every direction?

Avavind Adiga’s portrays two Indias; rural, dark-skinned poverty and subservience, on the one hand, and a wealthy ruling-class intent on maintaining itself through intimidation, violence and systemic corruption, on the other. India is nothing if not a world within a larger world, like Russian nesting dolls. Like so many great novels, The White Tigers characters inhabit the cusp between two grinding, stark realities.

In India your name defines your caste; it confers on its bearer a lifelong role, as a house servant, a teashop worker (as is the case with Balram, our narrator), a rickshaw driver (his father) or any number of other impoverished, subservient lifelong roles.

In form, The White Tiger appears as a series of audacious letters written over the course of seven nights by a young “entrepreneur”, Balram, to the Chinese Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, prior to Jiabao’s announced state visit to India.

I’m not giving anything away to say that, at the outset, Balram discloses he has murdered his employer, Mr. Askok, in Delhi and has stolen money that he then uses to establish a business far to the south in Bangalore. The letters, in effect his autobiography, tell his life story as he moves from tea server in rural India, to driver for Mr. Askok, the son of a rural mine owner, to their life in Delhi and Balram’s subsequent disillusionment, awakening, and crime; justified in his mind by unfolding events, and his employers’ willingness to pin on him blame for a hit-and-run accident committed by his employer’s drunken wife. Balram is the White Tiger. He listens, he learns. As Balram wanders among the market in the “darkness” of Delhi’s slums, he observes caged roosters, packed so tightly they “peck and shit on each other;” a metaphor for the poor of India who are themselves enforcer of the very caste system in which they are imprisoned. So corrosive is Indian society, that even his boss, Mr. Askok, who has been educated in America and arrives home with his Indian-American wife for “just a few months”, exuding superficial compassion for his servants, is eventually subjugated by his own corrupt family to a life in a sterile Delhi high-rise, to be driven (by Balram) from ATM to ATM, collecting cash with which to bribe officials to ensure of the survival of his family’s coal mining enterprise. It is dark comedy indeed.

Later in the story, Balram recites these lines of poetry: “I was looking for the keys for years, but the door was always open.” For those born in the darkness, passing through the door is not without its consequences. It required Balram to turn his back on his past and it’s inhabitants forever; to abandon his family with the certain knowledge that they will suffer -- likely killed -- by the feudal lords (local rural politicians), as a lesson to others who contemplate passing through the “open door” themselves.

As a series of letters, Balram purports to inform China’s Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, of how it is that India has become the center of entrepreneurial enterprise; lessons that can be applied to China. But it tells instead the story of two Indias and one dysfunctional, corrupt “democracy” driven by the pursuit of profits without investing in even the most basic infrastructure; of two peoples; masters and servants, enslaved in one emerging, high-tech, feudal system. He admires China for at least having “ring roads and sewers,” infrastructure sadly missing in India. What does Balram’s story foretell? Are India’s poor on the verge of walking through the open doors? Why does Balram decide to write Premier Wen Jiaboa? I haven’t quite worked out why the author chooses this literary technique – casting his protagonist as so presumptuous as to write the prime minister of China – but it is affective. Perhaps it conveys the sense that, in his own mind at least, he has emerged as a man without caste on equal terms even with Wen Jiaboa; that caste is just a frame of mind.

Like any really good literature, one could examine every facet of this book and analyze it for days on end. It has the power to inhabit your dreams for months.