KAMALA NIKETAN MONTESSORI

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ENGLISH PROJECT

The White Tiger

:-Aravind Adiga
DONE BY:- CLASS:-
ROHIT.M 12 F
INDEX

INTRODUCTION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THEME

SUMMARY

CRITICAL COMMENTS

CONCLUSION
INTRODUCTION
The White Tiger is a novel by
Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was published in
2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize the
same year. The novel provides a darkly humorous
perspective of India's class struggle in a
globalized world as told through a retrospective
narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy. In
detailing Balram's journey first to Delhi, where he
works as a chau eur to a rich landlord, and then
to Bangalore, the place to which he flees after
killing his master and stealing his money, the
novel examines issues of the Hindu religion,
caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India.
Ultimately, Balram transcends his sweet-maker caste and becomes a successful
entrepreneur, establishing his own taxi service. In a nation proudly shedding a
history of poverty and underdevelopment, he represents, as he himself says,
"tomorrow."
The novel has been well-received, making the New York Times bestseller list in
addition to winning the Man Booker Prize. Aravind Adiga, 33 at the time, was the
second youngest writer as well as the fourth debut writer to win the prize. Adiga
says in his novel "attempt[s] to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel
through India — the voice of the colossal underclass." According to Adiga, the
exigence for The White Tiger was to capture the unspoken voice of people from "the
Darkness" – the impoverished areas of rural India, and he "wanted to do so without
sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are
usually."
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974, in

Madras (now Chennai) to Dr. K. Madhava Adiga
and Usha Adiga from Mangalore. His paternal
grandpa was K. Suryanarayana Adiga, former
chairman of Karnataka Bank, while his maternal
great-grandfather was U. Rama Rao, a prominent
medical practitioner and Madras-based
Congress leader.

Adiga grew up in Mangalore and attended Canara

High School before enrolling at St. Aloysius
College in Mangalore, where he earned his SSLC
in 1990. Aravind attended James Ruse Agricultural High School after moving to
Sydney with his family. Later, in 1997, he graduated as salutatorian from Columbia
College at Columbia University in New York City, where he studied English
literature under Simon Schama. He also attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where
Hermione Lee was one of his instructors.
Aravind Adiga started out as a financial writer, interning at the
Financial Times. He covered the stock market and investing in articles published in
the Financial Times and Money. He interviewed US President Donald Trump as a
Times reporter. He also reviewed Oscar and Lucinda, a 1988 novel by former
Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, in The Second Circle, an online literary journal.

Adiga was then employed by Time magazine, where he worked as a South Asia
reporter for three years until turning independent.
During this time, he composed "The White Tiger." He now resides in Mumbai,
Maharashtra, India. The White Tiger, Adiga's first book, earned the Booker Prize in
2008 and was made into a Netflix original film, The White Tiger. After Salman
Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai, he is the fourth Indian-born novelist to
get the award. Another winner, V. S. Naipaul, is ethnically Indian but was born on
the Caribbean island of Trinidad. The story contrasts India's emergence as a
contemporary global economy with that of its protagonist, Balram, who comes
from grinding rural poverty. Adiga said that "critique by 19th-century authors like
Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens helped England and France become better societies."

THEME
"The White Tiger" was a book about a man's quest for freedom. Balram,

the protagonist in the novel, worked his way out of his low social caste (often
referred to as "the Darkness") and overcame the social obstacles that limited his
family in the past. Climbing up the social ladder, Balram sheds the weights and
limits of his past and overcomes the social obstacles that keep him from living life
to the fullest that he can. In the book, Balram talks about how he was in a rooster
coop and how he broke free from his coop. The novel is somewhat a memory of his
journey to finding his freedom in India's modern day capitalist society. Towards the
beginning of the novel, Balram cites a poem from the Muslim poet Iqbal where he
talks about slaves and says "They remain slaves because they can’t see what is
beautiful in this world." Balram sees himself embodying the poem and being the
one who sees the world and takes it as he rises through the ranks of society, and in
doing so finding his freedom.

SUMMARY
Balram Halwai narrates his life in a letter, written in seven consecutive nights and
addressed to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. In his letter, Balram explains how
he, the son of a puller, escaped a life of servitude to become a successful
businessman, describing himself as an entrepreneur.

Balram was born in a rural village in Gaya district, where he lived with his
grandmother, parents, brother and extended family. He is a smart child but is
forced to leave school in order to help pay for his cousin's dowry and begins to
work in a teashop with his brother in Dhanbad. While working there he begins to
learn about India's government and economy from the customers' conversations.
Balram describes himself as a bad servant but a good listener and decides to
become a driver.
After learning how to drive, Balram finds a job driving Ashok, the son of one of
Laxmangarh's landlords. He takes over the job of the main driver, from a small car
to a heavy-luxury described Honda City.[6] He stops sending money back to his
family and disrespects his grandmother during a trip back to his village. Balram
moves to New Delhi with Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam. Throughout their time
in Delhi, Balram is exposed to extensive corruption, especially in the government.
In Delhi, the contrast between the poor and the wealthy is made even more evident
by their proximity to one another.
One night Pinky Madam takes the wheel from Balram, while drunk, hits something
in the road and drives away; we are left to assume that she has killed a child.
Ashok's family puts pressure on Balram to confess that he had been driving alone.
Ashok becomes increasingly involved in bribing government o cials for the benefit
of the family coal business. Balram then decides that killing Ashok will be the only
way to escape India's Rooster Coop – Balram's metaphor for describing the
oppression of India's poor, just as roosters in a coop at the market watch
themselves get slaughtered one by one, but are unable or unwilling to break out of
the cage.[7] Similarly, Balram too is portrayed as being trapped in the metaphorical
Rooster Coop: his family controls what he does and society dictates how he acts.
After killing Ashok by bludgeoning him with a bottle and stealing the large bribe
Ashok was carrying with him, Balram moves to Bangalore, where he bribes the
police in order to help start his own taxi business.
Just like Ashok, Balram pays o a family whose son one of his taxi drivers hit and
killed. Balram explains that his own family was almost certainly killed by Ashok's
relatives as retribution for his murder. At the end of the novel, Balram rationalizes
his actions and considers that his freedom is worth the lives of his family and of
Ashok. And thus ends the letter to Jiabao, letting the reader think of the dark
humor of the tale, as well as the idea of life as a trap introduced by the writer.

CRITICAL COMMENTS
Aravind Adiga’s e White Tiger

has won the Man-Booker prize. It is the fourth

winner by an Indian writer, including

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie, e

God of Small ings, by Arundhati Roy, and

Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. As an

historian of India, who frequently teaches

fiction, I picked it up to read on my flight to

New Delhi last week. Quickly I found that e

White Tiger displays such a mean-spirited voice and a brutal distortion of the lives

of poor rural Indians that it makes its celebration puzzling.

e White Tiger is the story of Balram Halwai, the son of a village rickshawwalla,
who through wiles and determination becomes the driver to the hated village
landlord. The book takes the form of a series of letters from the narrator, now a
self-described entrepreneur in the bustling hi-tech city of Bangalore, to the
Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, describing “the real India” he will not see during his
upcoming o cial visit. We learn early on that Balram has committed murder and
robbery. But all of this is told with comical fun poked not only at the excesses of the
rich, but also at the circumstances of poor people.

Described by the Man-Booker committee as a humorous take on “a di erent aspect

of India,” the novel sets itself up as a corrective to one prevailing image of India’s
economic success. Clearly this politics was a Man-Booker consideration. As the
committee says, “The book gains from dealing with pressing social issues and
significant global developments with astonishing humour.” In fact, 80% of the
world’s software comes from India and so too do many of the world’s richest
entrepreneurs. (I’m reminded here of Thomas Friedman’s portrayals in e World
is Flat.) And yet there remain problems of economic and social inequality.

e White Tiger chooses Bihar, the poor state in eastern India—always maligned by
reporters who rarely visit there to report on it—as emblematic of poverty and
savagery. The fact that none of the characters are fully realized or sympathetic may
be the sign of satire, but if so, it also suggests (and many reviewers seem to agree)
that they stand for the real depravity of Biharis. Adiga’s labeling this place as
“Darkness” in contrast to Civilization (Bangalore) can’t possibly escape a
comparison to Joseph Conrad. And sure enough Adiga’s description of village life
follows from so many stereotypes found in colonial literature.

Having lived in Bihar, I both recognize the landscapes he describes and resent the
cheap caricature he makes of it. One needn’t idealize poverty to recognize the
humanity in people from di erent regions, cultures, backgrounds, and classes. The
fact that Adiga was born in Chennai, or lives in Mumbai, does not excuse the blank
stereotyping of Biharis. (By the way, there was a recent political agitation in
Mumbai to kick out Bihari migrant workers.) In the novel, we’re supposed to laugh
at the cruelty of the main character’s grandmother or his own uncaring ambition.
Even the critique of the wealthy landlords and corrupt politicians is
convoluted—elections determined by a single man stamping ballots. As a student of
India’s democracy, I especially balked at this dismissal of the seriousness with
which Biharis in large number exercise their right to vote.

Both in India and abroad e White Tiger has received mixed reviews. Akash Kapur
in the New York Times writes about “an absence of human complexity” in the novel.
And Manjula Padmanabhan in Outlook India, points to its “schoolboyish sneering.”
But others at e Independent and e New Yorker are cheerfully “seduced.”

CONCLUSION
The White Tiger” is a penetrating piece of social commentary, attuned to the

inequalities that persist despite India’s new prosperity. It correctly identifies — and

deflates — middle-class India’s collective euphoria. But Adiga, a former

correspondent for Time magazine who lives in Mumbai, is less successful as a

novelist. His detailed descriptions of various vile aspects of Indian life are relentless

— and ultimately a little monotonous. Every moment, it seems, is bleak, pervaded

by “the Darkness.” Every scene, every phrase, is a blunt instrument, wielded to

remind Adiga’s readers of his country’s cruelty.