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The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by Nigel Collett
Balram Halwai is a complicated man; "Servant, Philosopher, Entrepreneur and Murderer", vahana of India's new god of entrepreneurism and eponymous hero of Aravind Adiga's new novel The White Tiger (for Balram is the white tiger of his imaginings, a creature that comes along only once in a generation in the jungle, "an intelligent, honest vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots" who inhabit "the Darkness", the foul oppressive mess that is rural India).
Balram has the wits to know that he must escape "the Rooster Coop" that imprisons the vast majority of India's poor, and this is the story of how he does so. It is a story told by himself to, of all people, China's premier, Wen Jiabao, the announcement of whose visit to Bangalore Balram notices in the newspaper, and to whom he sets out to explain, in a series of letters written at the desk from which he drives his call centre taxi empire in the dark of the night, what it is that accounts for the vaunted success of India's entrepreneurial classes. Night is an appropriate time for this telling, for his is a sinister tale of the struggle from the Darkness to the Light (the light being the modern parts of New Delhi and Bangalore), one which lays bare the fact that the desperate urge to escape from degradation which drives Balram and his kind corrupts any goodness that they might ever have possessed. It does so by making that escape dependent upon accepting and manipulating the methods which keep their trouser hems clear of the mud from which they have crawled, but only at the expense of the miring of their souls.
A process, of course, which can but make any white tiger cynical, and that makes Balram a very amusing eye on the very different Indian worlds which he traverses, from the benighted village of Laxmangarh, where he is born somewhere in the depths of what sounds like the state of Uttar Pradesh (though we are never really sure), and where he is plucked from the ruins of his schoolroom, where his drunken teacher snoozes away the days, to splash filthy water over the floors and customers' feet in the village's cockroach infested tea house. Then onwards and upwards he forges to become driver to Mr Ashok, the fat, useless but westernized younger son of his father's landlord, a man who lives in comparative luxury in New Delhi with air-conditioned house and servants, is husband of Pinky Madam, spoiled American-born girl-about-town, and whose only function in life is to carry bags stuffed with cash to the politicians being paid off by his father. Ashok, a rather better man than most of his family (which means only that he doesn't physically beat his servants, rape their sisters or murder their relatives if they step out of line), nevertheless despises his faithful retainer, Balram, as a man who is "half-baked". "The country is full of people like him," Ashok complains to Pinky Madam, in full hearing of his faithful driver, "and we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy to characters like these." Balram's story, "the Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian," as he wryly puts it, tells how this ever-pervasive contempt corrodes his soul and eventually turns him into a murderer who learns to play by his bosses' rules.
Adiga gives us a view of India from the bottom up. It is not a pretty panorama, but it is one he loves, and he lingers tenderly over the pungent smells of sewage, the personal detritus of slum dwelling life, the skins diseases and the rotting, betel-juice reddened teeth which disfigure the poor, the flutter of cockroach wings over their faces as they mutter in their sleep on the roadsides and concrete floors of their bosses' outhouses. The mud into which the rich grind the faces of Balram and his kind is putrid with their own bodily wastes, and, a bitter irony, they are kept in their place in it by their own ignorance and acquiescence, veritably policing themselves on behalf of their oppressors. In a nightmarish scene at night in Old Delhi, Balram stumbles upon the buffalo abattoir and sees the carts piled high with severed heads, shorn of all the flesh, skin and sinew that can be extracted from them, drawn by buffaloes that need no driver, so well trained are they in the mechanisms of the destruction of their fellows. This, says Balram, and this, thinks Aravind Adiga, is how the Rooster Coop of India is maintained.
So this is not a comfortable novel, nor a picture of the state of India which the country's tourist board would wish to see in its glossy literature. It is, though, a novel you should read if you want to understand how India works beneath the surface, being a fictional counterpart to Pankaj Mishra's documentary account, Temptations of the West. Unlike Mishra, though, Adiga is not a pessimist. He leaves enough humanity in Balram to make us want to follow him on his well-intentioned path to freedom and, with him, to laugh at life, no matter how it treats him. This is a very amusing book, a joy to read. Adiga has the same faculty of making his reader laugh in the most revolting circumstances as Maria Lewycka achieves in her Two Caravans; her scenes of mayhem in a chicken packing factory proving them kindred spirits in finding humour in the grossest of circumstances.
The White Tiger is Aravind Adiga's first novel. It is sharp, sassy and very funny. This reviewer for one hopes that we will soon see his second.
--
Nigel Collett is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.
by Aravind Adiga
Reviewed by Nigel Collett
Balram Halwai is a complicated man; "Servant, Philosopher, Entrepreneur and Murderer", vahana of India's new god of entrepreneurism and eponymous hero of Aravind Adiga's new novel The White Tiger (for Balram is the white tiger of his imaginings, a creature that comes along only once in a generation in the jungle, "an intelligent, honest vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots" who inhabit "the Darkness", the foul oppressive mess that is rural India).
Balram has the wits to know that he must escape "the Rooster Coop" that imprisons the vast majority of India's poor, and this is the story of how he does so. It is a story told by himself to, of all people, China's premier, Wen Jiabao, the announcement of whose visit to Bangalore Balram notices in the newspaper, and to whom he sets out to explain, in a series of letters written at the desk from which he drives his call centre taxi empire in the dark of the night, what it is that accounts for the vaunted success of India's entrepreneurial classes. Night is an appropriate time for this telling, for his is a sinister tale of the struggle from the Darkness to the Light (the light being the modern parts of New Delhi and Bangalore), one which lays bare the fact that the desperate urge to escape from degradation which drives Balram and his kind corrupts any goodness that they might ever have possessed. It does so by making that escape dependent upon accepting and manipulating the methods which keep their trouser hems clear of the mud from which they have crawled, but only at the expense of the miring of their souls.
A process, of course, which can but make any white tiger cynical, and that makes Balram a very amusing eye on the very different Indian worlds which he traverses, from the benighted village of Laxmangarh, where he is born somewhere in the depths of what sounds like the state of Uttar Pradesh (though we are never really sure), and where he is plucked from the ruins of his schoolroom, where his drunken teacher snoozes away the days, to splash filthy water over the floors and customers' feet in the village's cockroach infested tea house. Then onwards and upwards he forges to become driver to Mr Ashok, the fat, useless but westernized younger son of his father's landlord, a man who lives in comparative luxury in New Delhi with air-conditioned house and servants, is husband of Pinky Madam, spoiled American-born girl-about-town, and whose only function in life is to carry bags stuffed with cash to the politicians being paid off by his father. Ashok, a rather better man than most of his family (which means only that he doesn't physically beat his servants, rape their sisters or murder their relatives if they step out of line), nevertheless despises his faithful retainer, Balram, as a man who is "half-baked". "The country is full of people like him," Ashok complains to Pinky Madam, in full hearing of his faithful driver, "and we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy to characters like these." Balram's story, "the Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian," as he wryly puts it, tells how this ever-pervasive contempt corrodes his soul and eventually turns him into a murderer who learns to play by his bosses' rules.
Adiga gives us a view of India from the bottom up. It is not a pretty panorama, but it is one he loves, and he lingers tenderly over the pungent smells of sewage, the personal detritus of slum dwelling life, the skins diseases and the rotting, betel-juice reddened teeth which disfigure the poor, the flutter of cockroach wings over their faces as they mutter in their sleep on the roadsides and concrete floors of their bosses' outhouses. The mud into which the rich grind the faces of Balram and his kind is putrid with their own bodily wastes, and, a bitter irony, they are kept in their place in it by their own ignorance and acquiescence, veritably policing themselves on behalf of their oppressors. In a nightmarish scene at night in Old Delhi, Balram stumbles upon the buffalo abattoir and sees the carts piled high with severed heads, shorn of all the flesh, skin and sinew that can be extracted from them, drawn by buffaloes that need no driver, so well trained are they in the mechanisms of the destruction of their fellows. This, says Balram, and this, thinks Aravind Adiga, is how the Rooster Coop of India is maintained.
So this is not a comfortable novel, nor a picture of the state of India which the country's tourist board would wish to see in its glossy literature. It is, though, a novel you should read if you want to understand how India works beneath the surface, being a fictional counterpart to Pankaj Mishra's documentary account, Temptations of the West. Unlike Mishra, though, Adiga is not a pessimist. He leaves enough humanity in Balram to make us want to follow him on his well-intentioned path to freedom and, with him, to laugh at life, no matter how it treats him. This is a very amusing book, a joy to read. Adiga has the same faculty of making his reader laugh in the most revolting circumstances as Maria Lewycka achieves in her Two Caravans; her scenes of mayhem in a chicken packing factory proving them kindred spirits in finding humour in the grossest of circumstances.
The White Tiger is Aravind Adiga's first novel. It is sharp, sassy and very funny. This reviewer for one hopes that we will soon see his second.
--
Nigel Collett is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer.
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