Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab

English Project

The White Tiger

Submitted to: Submitted by:

Dr. Tanya Mander Komal Parnami
Assistant Professor of English Roll no: 18202
Rajiv Gandhi National I- Semester
University of Law, Punjab Section- C, Group- 10

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 Acknowledgement

I have put efforts in this project. However, it would not have been possible without the kind
support and help of many individuals and organizations. I would like to extend my sincere
thanks to all of them.

I am highly indebted to Dr. Tanya Mander for her guidance and constant supervision.

I would like to express my gratitude towards my parents and friends for their kind
cooperation and encouragement which helped me in the completion of this project. Carrying
out this creative and enthusiastic reading task was a combined endeavour of all the
aforementioned people and appreciative of all their efforts.

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 Supervisor’s Certificate

Date

This is to certify that the dissertation titled: English Project – ‘The White Tiger’ by Aravind
Adiga, submitted to Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab in partial fulfilment of
the project of the requirement of the B.A.LL.B.(Hons.) course is an original and bona fide
research work carried out by Ms. Komal Parnami under my supervision and guidance. No
part of this project has been submitted to any university for the award of any degree or
diploma, whatsoever.

Dr. Tanya Mander

Assistant Professor of English

Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law, Punjab

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 Table of Contents

Acknowledgement……………………………………………………………….
Supervisor’s Certificate………………………………………………………….
Introduction………………………………………………………………………
 About the author………………………………………………………....
 About the novel – historical background………………………………..
Plot and characters……………………………………………………………….
 Summary of the novel…………………………………………………....
Language and symbols, motifs and themes………………………………………
Exposition………………………………………………………………………...
 Interaction between the literature and law………………………............
Criticism…………………………………………………………………………..
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..

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 Introduction

Introduction of the author

Aravind Adiga is a Mumbai based writer. He was born on 23 October, 1974 to Dr. K
Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He grew up in Mangalore. His
family later emigrated to Australia. He studied english literature at Columbia University in
New York city. Adiga began his career as a financial journalist with the financial times. He
won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2008 for his debut novel ‘The White Tiger’.

About the novel

‘The white tiger’ was written in 2008. The story takes place in modern, post independence
India. The eponymous protagonist traces the socio economic inequalities prevalent since the
time India got independence. The novel is written in an epistolary form, written by an Indian
erstwhile servant to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao.
Balram Halwai was born and raised in what he calls the ‘darkness’ in a poor district of Bihar.
He sardonically describes the caste stigma, exploitation of the poor by the rich landlords.
Balram seductively illustrates the nexus of corruption in the political system of India. The
story takes place in economically flourishing India, but emphasises the stark income
inequalities. Balram considers himself an entrepreneur and according to him, his murdering
his own master was an act of entrepreneurship. He tries to justify his actions and observations
to the reader and is largely successful in doing so. The novel is a furious counterblast to the
‘India is shining’ rhetoric. There are places where the novel seems unrealistic and
catastrophized.
The character of Balram is both witty and psychopathic and the plot is entertaining and
engaging. The author deals with the sociology of the village of Laxmangarh and the
burgeoning city of Bangalore. Aravind Adiga tries to strike a fair balance between fable and
his observation of India.

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 Plot and Characters

Summary of the novel

The story begins with Balram Halwai narrating his journey of becoming an ‘entrepreneur’ to
the Chinese Premier through seven consecutive letters. Balram explains how he, the son of a
rickshaw puller, escaped the life of servitude and ascended from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’.
Balram was born in Laxmangarh village in Bihar. His destitute family lives at the mercy of
four exploitative landlords, referred to as the animals - the raven, the stork, the buffalo and
the white boar. Balram was a bright student while in school, despite all odds. Impressed by
his academic potential and wits a school inspector nicknamed him as the ‘white tiger’, after
the rarest and intelligent creature in a jungle. He was not even given a formal name by his
parents. He lost his mother at an early age and this incident traumatized him. His father
wanted him to continue his studies but his sly grandmother, Kusum got him removed from
school so that he can financially support the family. His father, a rickshaw puller, died from
tuberculosis. There were no doctors present in the government hospital, owing to rottenness
and corruption.
Balram along with his brother Kishan begins working in a tea shop in Dhanbad. He mentions
his caste, ‘halwai’, meaning sweet maker. He was determined to continue his education by
way of listening to peoples’ conversations. He was a disingenuous worker. He overheard a
customer speaking wistfully about the high earnings and easy life of a chauffer and this is
how he decided to learn driving. He begged Kusum, his granny to allow him to learn driving.
She agrees on the condition that Balram must send her money once he starts earning.
His training complete, Balram knocks on the doors of Dhanbad’s rich families, offering his
services. By a stroke of luck, he arrives at the mansion of the Stork (one of the landlords from
Laxmangarh). There was a driver required for Mr. Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam, who
had just returned from America. Balram flattered the Stork and secured a job as a chauffer,
though he was made to do many chores in the house. Balram expounds the caste system in
India from a historical perspective. Everyone was supposed to earn his living by performing
jobs as per the caste he was born in. After independence, this concept faded. Those who were
more ferocious subverted the weak. There now remained only two castes: “men with big
bellies and men with small bellies”.

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Balram had feelings of animosity towards his colleague, Ram Presad, who was considered
servant number one. Later it is revealed that Ram Presad was a muslim who pseudonymously
claimed to be a hindu to secure a job in the house of the bigot landlord. Balram observes that
Ashok was a very inquisitive and naïve man. Balram drove his master, Mr. Ashok to
Laxmangarh, where they both were born. His granny, Kusum forced him to get married and
this enraged Balram. He imagined how his kids’ life would be, in servitude, just like his own.
Balram talks about the election fever in India, how the votes of the people are bought, in the
villages. How people are threatened and how venal the entire election process is.
Balram learns that the Stork’s family fortune comes from illegally selling coal out of
government mines. They bribe ministers to turn a blind eye to their fraudulent business and
allow the family to avoid paying income tax. Unfortunately, the family recently had a
disagreement with the region’s ruling politician, referred to as the Great Socialist. The family
dispatches Ashok and Pinky to Delhi, where Ashok will distribute more bribes to make
amends. Kishan is very happy for Balram, for making it to Delhi, accompanying his master,
away from the darkness.
Balram’s sardonic description of Delhi as ‘the capital of our glorious nation’ is amusing.
Once in Delhi, Balram witnesses Pinky and Ashok’s marriage rapidly fall apart. Mukesh,
Ashok’s brother was a bothersome person who regularly instructed Balram to be a faithful,
obedient driver. Balram witnessed the income inequalities closely in Delhi. He espied the
lives people on the pavements, people in the malls and luxurious hotels of Delhi. Balram
admits having lustful feelings for his mistress, Pinky Madam. He comments on the plenitude
of vehicles on the roads of Delhi and Gurgaon where Ashok and Pinky live.
Pinky kills a young child in a drunken, hit-and-run accident. Balram was forced to take the
blame of the accident upon himself and this very fear of having to spend his life in prison for
someone else’s crime led him to vengeance. Later, the case was absolved. Pinky left Ashok
and returned to USA. In her absence, Ashok goes out to bars and clubs, hiring a prostitute one
night, and reconnecting with a former lover on another. Observing his master’s gradual
corruption and driving him through Delhi’s seedier districts, Balram becomes disillusioned
and resentful. Although Ashok is a relatively kind master, Balram realizes that whatever
generosity Ashok has shown him is only a fraction of what he can afford. Ashok has no real
interest in helping Balram achieve a better life, or in changing the status quo.
Balram plans to murder Ashok and escape with the bag of the money that he carries around
the city to bribe politicians. In addition to the risk of being caught, Balram must contend with
the logic of ‘the rooster coop’, to explain which he draws an analogy to chickens being stored
in cages. Roosters in a coop at the market watch one another slaughtered one by one, but are
unable or unwilling to rebel and break out of the coop. Balram believes that the traditional
Indian family unit keeps the Rooster Coop of social inequality alive. If a servant attempts to
escape or disobeys his employer, the superior’s family will punish the servant by murdering
or brutally torturing his family. In this way, familial loyalty and love be Similarly, India’s
poor people see one another crushed by the wealthy and powerful, defeated by the staggering
inequality of Indian society, come weaknesses in the context of rooster coop logic. In a
country where the rules are stacked so overwhelmingly against the poor, Balram comes to

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believe that to create a better life and “break out of the Rooster Coop,” one must be willing
to sacrifice everything, including attachment to traditional morals and to one’s family.
Balram knows that if he kills Ashok, Ashok’s family will murder all his own relatives in
Laxmangarh in retaliation. Balram is also held back by the arrival in Delhi of his young
nephew Dharam, who Kusum sends from Dhanbad with the demand that Balram help raise
him.
Balram finally resolves to proceed with the murder, using a weapon he has fashioned out of a
broken liquor bottle. One day as he drives Ashok to deliver a particularly large bribe, Balram
pretends that there is a mechanical problem with the car. He pulls over, convinces Ashok to
kneel down and examine the wheel, then brings the broken bottle down on Ashok’s head.
After killing his master, he returns to Ashok’s apartment, collects Dharam, and escapes with
his young nephew to Bangalore.
Once Balram regains his nerves in Bangalore enough not to fear immediate capture, he
begins wandering the city and listening to conversations in cafes –just as he did in the
teashop in Dhanbad, to plan his next move. He soon learns that Bangalore’s business world
revolves around outsourcing, and that many large technology companies work on a nocturnal
schedule. Balram creates a taxi company called ‘White Tiger Technology Drivers’ to bring
call center girls home safely at night, and the venture is an enormous success. He bribes the
police in Bangalore when one of his employees commits an accident and knocks a boy on a
bicycle. He later goes to the deceased boy’s home and pays some amount as compensation,
not because ‘he has to’ but because ‘he wants to’.
By the time he sits down to tell his story, Balram is a wealthy man who keeps to himself, still
fearful that one day his crime will be discovered. However, he concludes his letter to Wen
Jiabao claiming that even if he is found out, he will never regret his crime: it was worth
committing simply because it enabled him to experience life as a free man rather than as a
servant. He has no regrets.

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 Characters

Balram Halwai

Balram Halwai, the story's narrator, tells about his rise from a village lad to a successful
entrepreneur. He has significant faith in his exceptionalism, thinking of himself as a "White
Tiger", not tied to conventional morality or social expectations. He is a psychopath, who
murders his own master and justifies his act as a response to the class oppression and wrongs
he has been subjected to. He chooses to live on his own terms and is not remorseful of his
acts. He calls himself a ‘half baked’ Indian who did not receive formal education but still
continued his education by eavesdropping people and absorbing ideas and knowledge. His
relationship with his master is complicated. He is confused whether he loves his master
behind a façade of loathing or he loathes his master behind a façade of love. Depravity
engulfed him after Mr. Ashok. He wanted to break free of his life of servitude and live like a
free man. His attitude was apathetic towards his family. His other aliases include Munna, the
White Tiger, and Ashok Sharma.

Ashok Sharma

Ashok is Balram's principal master and the landlord’s younger son. Exceedingly handsome,
Ashok is also generally kind and gentle to those around him. He finds it difficult to adjust to
life in India since he returned from America after a long time. Unlike the other members of
his family, he trusts Balram immensely, and the latter senses a strange, profound connection
between them. Ashok is childlike, with a short attention span, and generally dislikes his
family's business dealings. He is an inquisitive and eccentric fellow. His controversial
marriage finally ended in divorce and debauchery took over him. He was murdered by his
chauffer, Balram and had a very short life span.

Pinky Madam

Ashok’s beautiful, americanized wife, Pinky is a demanding, critical and cruel mistress to
Balram. She is unhappy in India and eager to return to the USA, which puts a strain on her
marriage to Ashok. After killing a young child in a hit- and-run accident, Pinky, because she

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is rich, is able to evade any legal complications. She was never accepted by Ashok’s family.
She was capricious and had a guilty conscience for having killed a child in the accident.

Kishan

Kishan is Balram’s elder brother who cares for him after their father dies. Though Kishan is
an influential, fatherly figure in Balram’s life, Balram laments his brother’s lack of
‘entrepreneurial spirit’, in other words, his inability to stand up to Kusum and make his own
decisions, as Balram does. Kishan has been wronged by Kusum to work him hard, take most
of his wages, and arrange his marriage early in life, before he can support a family.

Dharam

Balram’s young nephew, who Kusum sends to Delhi for Balram to mentor. Dharam arrives at
a crucial moment, complicating things just as Balram is devising his plan to murder Ashok
and escape with his master’s money. Balram eventually carries out the murder anyway and
flees to Bangalore with Dharam, continuing to care for the young boy after establishing
himself in Bangalore.

Ram Presad

The number chauffer in the mansion. Though he and Balram sleep in the same room, they
despise one another and compete in every aspect of their lives. When Balram first arrives,
Ram Persad drives Ashok and Pinky Madam around in the luxurious Honda City, while
Balram drives other members of the household in the humble Maruti Suzuki. Balram
ultimately brings about Ram Persad’s dismissal from the Stork’s household when he
discovers that Persad is a Muslim, who has hidden his faith from his prejudiced masters with
the help of Ram Bahadur, the nepali guard.

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 Language and symbols, motifs and
themes

White Tiger

White tiger is the most important motif in the novel. Balram’s wit and intelligence set him
apart from his peers from an early age. On one occasion, his academic prowess so impresses
a visiting school inspector that the official nicknames him as ‘White Tiger’, the most noble
and intelligent animal in the jungle. Throughout his life, Balram’s concept of himself as a
white tiger, meaning exceptional person, motivates him to advocate for himself and fight for
his own advancement. His conviction that he is somehow special also causes him to feel
exempt from traditional moral and legal standards, empowered to live life on his own terms.
The morning before he murders his master Mr. Ashok, Balram encounters a white tiger in the
Delhi zoo. After locking eyes with the animal and fainting on the spot, he decides to commit
the murder and dictates a letter to his grandmother Kusum apologizing in advance, and
explaining that he cannot live in a cage any longer. Balram’s identification with his namesake
emboldens him and convinces him that he is justified in moving forward with his plan.

Rooster Coop

The Rooster Coop symbolically describes the oppression of India’s poor. Roosters in a coop
in a market in Delhi watch one another slaughtered one by one, but are unable or unwilling to
rebel and break out of the coop. Similarly, India’s poor people see one another crushed by the
wealthy and powerful, defeated by the staggering inequality of Indian society, but are unable
to escape the same fate. Balram argues that the poor actively stop each other from escaping,
either wilfully by cutting each other down, or through a culture that makes them accept such
abuse and servitude. The Rooster Coop Balram describes is one that is guarded from the
inside. Balram believes that the traditional Indian family unit keeps the Rooster Coop of
social inequality alive. If a servant attempts to escape or disobeys his employer, the superior’s
family will punish the servant by murdering or brutally torturing his family. In this way,
familial loyalty and love become weaknesses in the context of rooster coop logic. In a
country where the rules are stacked so overwhelmingly against the poor, Balram comes to
believe that to create a better life and break out of the Rooster Coop, one must be willing to
sacrifice everything, including attachment to traditional morals and to one’s family.

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 Themes

Corruption

Balram’s narrative keeps referring to the nexus of corruption in the Indian political system.
The story has incidences of rampant corruption prevalent in public institutions such as
schools, hospitals, police. The election process is venal and people’s votes are bought in
certain areas, which is ironical in a democracy. In order to escape from the ‘darkness’ and
reach the ‘light’, Balram himself had to become a corrupt man, despite having faced the
detrimental consequences of corruption. His victory is thus bittersweet. Balram sardonically
comments that he has committed a murder so he may be called a murderer but to be called a
murderer by the police specifically, is a ‘fucking joke’ according to him. His master and his
family keep bribing the ministers in Delhi to keep running their illegal coal business in
Dhanbad. The author puts forward the point that preventing corruption is almost inevitable. It
cannot be made possible until a big revolution takes place.

Education

The story talks about how education, formal or informal shapes a human being. Balram was
nicknamed as ‘white tiger’ by a school inspector. Though over the course of the novel he
attempts to embody his name by cultivating a ruthless, cunning streak and competing in
Indian society, he originally earned the description for academic promise and integrity. After
being pulled out of school at an early age, Balram is left with only bits and pieces of a formal
education. This leads him to refer to himself as a ‘half-baked’ Indian. He sees his ‘half baked’
education not as a weakness, but rather as one of the preconditions for an entrepreneurial
spirit. He claims he is not an original thinker, but rather an original listener.

Family

Balram’s notion of family is quite contrary to the general notion. Balram describes family as
a destructive and burdensome part of Indian life, one that prevents its members from pursuing
individual advancement and liberty. Balram’s grandmother Kusum embodies this negative
image of family in the story. She short-sightedly pulls both Balram and his
brother Kishan out of school at a young age, and attempts to arrange both brothers’ marriages
early in life. Further, since a servant's disobedience is visited upon his family, servants
remain trapped by the whims of their masters.

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Globalization

Balram, after shifting to Bangalore realizes that India is at the crossroads of developments in
the fields of technology and outsourcing, as the nation adapts to address the needs of a global
economy. Balram recognizes and hopes to ride this wave of the future with his White Tiger
Technology Drivers business in Bangalore. But, globalisation threatens and disenfranchises
those adhering to a traditional way of life, such as his family in Laxmangarh. Hence, he must
change who he is in order to compete in this new world. Adiga thus vividly conjures the
tension between the old and new India, suggesting that succeeding in this world requires a
flurry of ethical and personal compromises.

Morality

 The White Tiger is a tale about morality, suggesting that morality can be viewed as either
rigid or flexible. Balram eventually embraces the latter option. In order to justify murdering
Ashok and risking his family's lives, Balram develops an alternate moral system. He reasons
that the money he steals from Ashok is rightfully his, since servants are exploited by the rich,
and he convinces himself of his exceptionalism as ‘the white tiger’ in order to rationalize his
decisions. He believes himself to be above the moral and legal limitations of society. Adiga
poses a question through Balram: do we blame a criminal for his decisions, or do we try to
understand those decisions as reactions to an overly oppressive and restrictive society?
Morality is subjective.

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 Exposition

Interaction between literature and law

The White Tiger is a literary work having strong affinity with law. The subaltern protagonist
delivers ‘justice’ to himself. Balram and his family had to suffer socio economic exploitation
at the hands of the richer and so called upper class. By writing the novel from the perspective
of a subaltern character, Aravind Adiga succours the oppressed classes in India. According
to Balram, no one is permitted to improve his miserable living conditions within an ethical
realm of dignity. The narrator believes that this is due to the passivity of Indians who
uncritically accept their caste-duties, as their only possible way of life. He is clearly unafraid
of stating his own will and self-determination by killing his master.
Balram throws light on the nexus of corruption in the political system, citing the bribing of
ministers by his masters. He states the irony of peoples’ votes being bought in a democracy.
He mocks the crooked police officers, who are supposed to prevent crimes, but rather abet the
wrongdoers. Strict implementation of laws and a robust anti corruption revolution is what can
change the situation.
When his mistress Pinky Madam commits culpable homicide, killing a child in a road
accident, Balram was forced to take the blame upon himself. He was distressed by the
thought of spending years in prison for a crime he never committed. Balram unfolds that the
lawyers and judges, who are supposed to be delivering justice can be corrupt too. The rich
can abscond and the poor, trapped in the ‘rooster coop’ can be imprisoned.
The story deals with Balram’s perspective of right and wrong. It also expound how everyone
has a different definition of justice. Morality is subjective. Towards the end Balram expresses
his fear of getting caught and punished but he is unrepentant.

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 Criticism
The White Tiger portrays Balram as a paranoid man who took the extreme step of murdering
his own master to break free of servitude. The novel exaggerates the prevalence of
corruption, poverty in India. For some Indians, The White Tiger is an appalling regression.
Just when they thought they had finally shed the old image of India as a land of poverty,
cows and snake charmers and started being respected as a hi-tech, prosperous nation, along
comes Adiga to rub their noses in the dirt again. The author’s writings seem cliched at some
places in the novel.
The ‘India is shining’ rhetoric was not a rhetoric anymore when the novel was first published
in 2008. Indeed, when Adiga’s book recently won the Man Booker prize for fiction, some in
India lambasted it as a Western conspiracy to deny the country’s economic progress. The
protagonist comes out as too blunt a character. Balram calls himself ‘half baked’ , who was
never able to complete his formal education. But, no one who is ‘half baked’ would actually
be capable of realizing it. As the novel progresses, Adiga grows more and more committed to
the character, and Balram becomes less of a protagonist and more of an antagonist.

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 Conclusion

The novel reasonably puts forward the contentious issues of class struggle and economic
inequalities India is dealing with and how these phenomena contribute to the radical steps
taken by the have-nots and the marginalised. The epistolary format of writing was a welcome
change. Balram Halwai, a ‘self taught’ entrepreneur emphasises the need for access to
education. The book is still relevant, after 10 years of its first publication. Though issues are
being addressed collectively by the government, the judiciary and the public, it would take
time for socio economic inequalities to be minimized. Although Adiga has claimed that he
was inspired that he was inspired in the writing of the novel by the examples of writers like
Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens, who ‘helped England and France become better societies’,
the novel presents a one sided approach to rural life and rehearses the fears of middle-class
metropolitan Indians. 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 in
2008. Adiga says his novel ‘attempt 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 humourless weaklings as they are usually.’

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 Bibliography

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3222136/Indians-fear-Aravind-
Adigas-The-White-Tiger-says-too-much-about-them.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/15/booker-prize-india
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Tiger
https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/On-Adigarsquos-The-
White-Tiger/article15402582.ece
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Kapur-t.html
https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-white-tiger/themes
Khor, Lena. “Can the Subaltern Right Wrongs?: Human Rights and Development in Aravind
Adiga's ‘The White Tiger.’” South Central Review, vol. 29, no. 1/2, 2012, pp. 41–67.,
www.jstor.org/stable/41679388.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/
303495817_An_Ecocritical_Reading_of_Aravind_Adiga's_The_White_Tiger

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