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The Two Faces of Modern India in the Novel The White Tiger by Aravinth Adiga

AravindAdiga's first novel, The White Tiger, paints a vivid and disturbing picture of life in the strikingly different cultures that comprise modern India. Indian population is more than 15 percent of the world's population, the country has grown to become an economic power, and yet vast numbers of its inhabitants have little to show for its prosperity. The conflict created by that reality propels this riveting tale.

Aravind Adiga's extraordinary and brilliant first novel takes the form of a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, from Balram Halwai, the Bangalore businessman who is the self-styled "White Tiger" of the title. Bangalore is the Silicon Valley of the subcontinent, and on the eve of a state visit by Jiabao, Indian entrepreneur Halwai wishes to impart something of the new India to the Chinese premier. BalramHalwai narrates his story through letters he writes, but doesn't send, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. He wrote these letters to educate the premier so that he wouldn't be fooled by any of the false pictures the politicians he meets might paint about life in India when he comes for his official state visit. Wen is poised to visit India to learn why it is so good at producing entrepreneurs, so Balram presumes to tell him the story of his, Balram's life how to win power and influence people in the modern India. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skulduggery, toxic traffic jams, theft and murder of the modern Indian society.

The novel's framing as a seven-part letter to the Chinese prime minister turns out to be an unexpectedly flexible instrument in Adiga's hands, accommodating everything from the helpful explanatory aside to digressions into political polemic. It is also just the thing he needs to tell the story of his narrator, BalramHalwi - from his origins in a part of India he calls "the Darkness" to his current position as a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore's "Electronic City". This novel gives a vivid picture of two feces of the modern India, nowadays, India's is standing in the line of developing county but some days back, America President Mr. Obama told in Mumbai on his visit to India that "India is not developing country but it has already developed" yet one third of India's population is under the poverty line so there is a vital contradiction between "Dark" and "Light" of the modern India.

The picture of India that Adiga paints in The White Tiger is a true depiction complexity of Indian society. The narrator becomes more conscious about haves and have nots as the narrative progresses. No doubt, Balram's narration seems to be heavy at the beginning, but it gives the credibility that "India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and India of Darkness" (14). It enables the author to go deep into "the binary nature of Indian culture" It is not India of spices, spirituality and saris but it is India of corruption and manipulation, therefore Balram tells the Chinese primer not to touch the Ganges, a sacred river, "No Mr. Jaibao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and different kinds of industrial acids" (15).

Balram's Granny who eventually agrees to invest in his driving license and Balram graduates to become a driver and a man. Soon he becomes a driver for Mr. Ashok and his gorgeous wife, Pinky. From here begins a new journey, from Darkness to Light, from Laxmangarh to Delhi. Halwai has come from what Adiga calls the Darkness - the heart of rural India - and manages to escape his family and poverty by becoming chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to Delhi to bribe government officials. Balram Halwai is presented as a modern Indian hero, in the midst of the economic prosperity of India in the recent past. His climbing the ladder of success is by murdering Mr. Ashok, his employer, and stealing his bag full of money – Rs.700,000 to travel from poor to rich.

The first lesson Balram has for us is the reality of rural life in India. In his small village everybody is beholden to one of four landlords. If you want to grow anything you have to pay money to one person. If you want to graze animals you have to pay money to another. If you want to use the roads to make money as a rickshaw driver, you pay 10% of everything you earn to a third. Finally, the fourth one owns the waters. If you want to fish or use the water to transport goods, you pay him. Balram is representative of the poor in India yearning for their ‘tomorrow'. His story is a parable of the new India with a distinctly macabre twist. He is not only an entrepreneur but also a roguish criminal remarkably capable of self-justification. The background against which he operates is one of corruption, inequality and poverty.

The satirically Adiga describes in this novel about the two diversity of modern India. The protagonist writes to the Chinese Premier who is reported to have made a plan to come to India to witness the progress in technology: "Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs—we entrepreneurs—have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now" (4).

Adiga's The White Tiger in an epistolary style depicts men and women fighting impossible odds to survive: there is class war - the war between "the two castes: Men with Big Bellies and the Men with Small Bellies" (64).As for as destinies are concerned, Adiga's observation is that there are only two destinies- "eat or get eaten up". The text is a depiction of India's class/power struggle, an example of how the India of call centre meets the India of slum dweller. "Bangalore and Gurgaon are portrayed as hubs of active and places are flood lit literally with magnificent malls and captivating dance floors attracting the youth of society" (Hemalatha K.24)

Contemporary Indian society has been facing two Indias- the India of the rich and the India of the poor and portrays eloquently as to what happens when both Indias collide. "India is revealed as a rising global power and its injustices, the resultant murder and its aftermath, the rise to power and through crafty, cunning means seems to be the creative destruction that is driving globalism in India" (Hemalatha K 24). A very powerful observations is that, "My country is the kind where it pays to play both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time" (8-9).

The divide between the rich and the poor is poignantly expressed:

A rich man's body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My Father's spine was a knotted rope… the story of a poor man is written in his body, in a sharp pen. (27)

In a neatly packed analogy, the novel traces the dark, light and also expresses the pre-colonial, post-colonial India:

See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well kept, orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy. Goldsmiths here. Cowherds here. Landlords there. The man called a Halwai made sweets. The man called a cowherd tended cows. The untouchable cleaned feces. Landlords were kind to their serfs. Women covered their heads with a veil and turned their eyes to the ground when talking to strange men. And then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the fifteenth of August, 1947—the day the British left—the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law. Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all that counted now, the size of your belly… To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up. (63-4)

The capital city Delhi is exposed for its blatant rich poor divide. "Thousands of people live in the sides of the road in Delhi. They have come from the Darkness too" (119). But the rich people are living in big housing colonies and they are "so busy parting and drinking English liquor and taking their Pomeranian dogs for walks and shampoos" (120).

While Balram in Delhi who experiences the two kinds of India with those who are eaten and those who eat, prey and predators. "Balram decides he wants to be an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in which this ambition plays out (Walters). The key metaphor in the novel is of the Rooster Coop" (Sebastin 236). Balram is caged like the chickens in the rooster coop. He, being a White Tiger, has to break out of the cage to freedom.

Go to Old Delhi ...and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages...They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they're next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country (173-4).

Balram's master Ashok lived in a new apartment called Buckingham Towers A Block, which was one of the best in Delhi. Ashok spent a lot of time visiting malls, along with Pinky Madam, his wife and Mongoose. Balram's job was also to carry all the shopping bags as they came out of the malls. The mean and stingy behaviour of the rich is shown through the lost coin episode where Mongoose insults Balram for not having retrieved a rupee coin he lost while getting out of the car. He was so bothered about a rupee coin after bribing someone with a million rupees:

‘Get down on your knees. Look for it on the floor of the car.'

I got down on my knees. I sniffed in between the mats like a dog, all in search of that one rupee.

‘What do you mean, it's not there? Don't think you can steal from us just because you're in the city. I want that rupee.'

‘We've just paid half a million rupees in a bribe, Mukesh, and now we're screwing this man over for a single rupee. Let's go up and have a scotch.'

‘That's how you corrupt servants. It starts with one rupee. Don't bring your American ways here.'

Where that rupee coin went remains a mystery to me to this day, Mr. Premier. Finally, I took a rupee coin out of my shirt pocket, dropped it on the floor of the car, picked it up, and gave it to the Mongoose. (139)

Balram feels degraded as a human being, deprived of basic human rights to enter a shopping mall. A poor driver couldn't enter a mall as he belonged to the poor class. If he walked into the mall someone would say "Hey, That man is a paid driver! What‘s he doing in here? There were guards in grey uniforms on every floor - all of them seemed to be watching me. It was my first taste of the fugitive's life (152). Balram reminisces one of the newspaper reports on the malls, in the early days entitled ‘Is there No Space for the Poor in the Malls of new India?'(148). The security guards at these shopping malls identified the poor wearing sandals let in only those wearing shoes, while a poor man in sandals was driven out. This made a man in sandals explode ‘Am I not a human being too?' (148).

In an interview on June 10, 2009, Adiga explains to Brad Frenette:

The White Tiger grew out of a couple of vignettes or stories that I had set down from Between the Assassinations. The two played off each other as I was writing them. I always had an idea for two related books on India which would be set on either side of the great divide in modern Indian history, which was 1991 when India opened up its socialist economy to the world. That created what's called "The New India", the India of rapid economy growth and great disparities of wealth, which is the India of The White Tiger.

In case the disparity between rich and poor is great then one day the poor will all get together, break their shackles of pent up emotions and take revenge on the rich by resorting crime and corruption is the protagonist's prediction for the future: "keep your ears open in Bangalore- in any city or town in India-and u will hear stirrings, rumours, threats of insurrection. Men sit under lampposts at night and read. Men huddle together and discuss and point fingers to the heavens. One night, they will join together- will they destroy the Rooster Coop? (303).

The age old divide between the rich and poor takes a heavy toll on people who bear the brunt of poverty; leading impoverished live. The chasm between the haves and have-nots defies all logic and reason. The burgeoning nexus between the corrupt public servants and the pervert political class is devouring the lesser mortals. This rot is not just killing but soul destroying. In the largest democracy of the world, BPL families are at the receiving end, used as pawns to be exploited and eliminated. There seem to be just two classes- the oppressor and the oppressed; the victor and the victim that define our social fabric.

The novel draws comparison with the ‘Heart of the Darkness' in The God of Small Things. Also the very mention of two major castes in India – ‘men with small bellies' and ‘men with big bellies', brings to mind Roy's classification of ‘God of Small things and God of Big things'. The men with big bellies depend on the men with small bellies for their survival and yet they are brutally unaware of their plight, Balram reflects:

What blindness you people are capable of. Here you are, sitting in glass buildings and talking on the phone night after night to Americans who are thousands of miles away, but you don't have the faintest idea what's happening to the man who's driving your car! (257)

Balram conveys the contradiction of the dreams of the rich and the poor that "The dream of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they? See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor" (225).

Poverty trends in India have been debated by those claiming decline in poverty and those disproving it. "Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze in their thought provoking essay ‘Poverty and Inequality in India: A Re-examination' state that some claim that the 1990s have been a period of unprecedented improvement in living standards, while others argue that the period has been marked by widespread impoverishment (Deaton, 2005, p. 243). It is imperative that our Government has the political will to fight corruption at all levels and take appropriate measures to fight poverty of its teeming millions with increased investment in basic education, medical care and farming. The novel is an excellent social commentary on the poorrich divide in India. Balram represents the downtrodden sections of our society juxtaposed against the rich (Saxena, 2008, p. 9). Deirdre Donahuelabels The White Tiger an angry novel about injustice and power which creates merciless thugs among whom only the ruthless can survive (Donahue, 2008)" (Sebastin 243-4).

Aravind Adiga exposes the modern "average Indian as something raw and fresh, tangible and immediate. Like Slum Dog Millionaire, the movie, we can explore the resilient Indian psych pushing itself forward, braving all hazard in its relentless pursuit of its legitimate space in the world" (joseph 80).

However, The White Tiger should make every right thinking citizen to read the signs of the times and be socially conscious of the rights and duties of each one, irrespective of caste, creed or economic status, to prevent create the types of Ashok and Balram in our society.

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References

Adiga, Aravind. (2008). The White Tiger. Noida: Harper Collins Publishers.

Brad Frenette, "The Afterward; Postings from the Literary World," Q &A (Toronto, Green Theatre), June 10, 2009.

Hemalatha K.. "Chetan Bhagat and Aravind Adiga: new voices of New India" The Vedic Path 83.3 and 4 (Jul-Dec 2009): 21-33.

Joseph M. Molly. "The Great Indian Rooster Coop – a Postcolonial Entry into Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger". Littcrit 35. 1-2-67-68 (Jun and Dec 2009): 76-80.

Sebastian A.J. "Poor-Rich Divide in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger".Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences (2009) Vol 1, No 2: 229-245.

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