Aravind Adiga bagged the Man Booker Prize 2008 for his debut novel The White Tiger, set against the backdrop of the economic boomin India that has opened a great chasm between the haves and have-nots. Through the novel, Adiga claims to voice the sentiments of the millions of India’s poor and oppressed.
Balram Halwai, the protagonist of The White Tiger, having no identity of his own, employs foul means to realize his dream of becoming rich. Eventually, he becomes a megalomaniac who murders his boss and confesses the mystery surrounding his rise to entrepreneurship in the call centre hub of Bangalore. He labels his life’s story, ‘The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian’. Employing the metaphor of the Rooster Coop, Adiga examines how Balram is trapped in it and subsequently breaks out to freedom. He is a freak like a “White Tiger” that appears once in a lifetime.
The novel is written in the epistolary form as a seven-part letter to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, “From the Desk of ‘The White Tiger’/A Thinking Man /And an entrepreneur/Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing/Electronic City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road/Bangalore/India,”(TWT*, 3), in which Balram confesses his guilt and his ambition. It is the story of his progress from the world of "Darkness" to the world of “Light” of the cities, and from a world of servants to a world of masters. It is his emergence from brutal poverty and deprivation to successful entrepreneurship. His cynicism and deep-rooted immoral ways are dangerous trends leading to anarchy in society. The novel exposes Indian democracy, injustice and entrepreneurship.
The White Tiger is a powerful social commentary on injustice and power in the form of a class struggle in India. It portrays the anti-hero Balram, who represents the downtrodden sections of society, juxtaposed against the rich.
The story unfolds the way Balram breaks out to his new-found freedom from a caged life of misery, through crime and cunning. This is a reflection of contemporary India, calling attention to social justice in the wake of economic prosperity. It is a novel about the emerging new India, pivoted on the ever-rising divide between the haves and have-nots, unleashing a reign of terror.
Adiga has employed a narrative technique through which his protagonist reveals himself to the Chinese Premier, by letting out his bitterness and crime suppressed within him. He has to tell his story to someone, but he can't ever do so because it's a terrible story.
His first hand meeting the poor of India, inspired him to create his protagonist, who is a representative of the 400 million, who have not benefited from the economic boom in the past decades. Hence our sympathy is drawn to this anti-hero and villain.
The novel is centred on the crime Balram commits and he goes on to recount how he became an entrepreneur, coming into the ‘Light’ of prosperity. Born in a tiny hell-hole called Laxmangarh in northern India, his impoverished parents merely called him 'munna' –( 'boy') and they raised him in the world of darkness of their extreme poverty. While at school, Balram was spotted by the inspector of schools, who offered to get a scholarship for his education. It is he who calls him as a ‘White Tiger’, a creature that rarely appears in a lifetime.
Balram considers himself "half-baked" as he was deprived of schooling like most children of his age group in India. His parents preferred him to work in a teashop. However, one of the feudal lords took him to Delhi, where he began to experience the world of light. He learned driving and was employed as a chauffeur by Mr. Ashok at Dhanbad.
While in Delhi, Balram experiences the two kinds of India with those who are eaten, and those who eat. He longs to become like his master, a big-bellied man, rich with a lot of money. Adiga makes the protagonist spell out the way enterprising drivers make a little extra money by: i) siphoning petrol and selling, ii) repairing the car under a corrupt mechanic who gives inflated bills, iii) studying his master’s habits and capitalizing on his carelessness, and iv) taking the risk of using his master’s car as a freelance taxi. Balram thought of making a confession of all these misdeed, but instead of guilt he felt “Rage. The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me. To go back to the analogy I used when describing Indian politics to you earlier, I was growing a belly at last” (230).
His schooling in crime begins with the reading of Murder Weekly, as all drivers do to while away their time. “Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses—and that’s why the government of India publishes the magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it” (125). He 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 (TWT, 152).” Balram reminisces on 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?’ (TWT, 148). The security guards at these shopping malls identified the poor as those wearing sandals. They let in only those wearing shoes, while a poor man with his ID sandals was driven out. This made a man in sandals explode, “Am I not a human being too?’” (TWT, 148).
He knows full well that Ashok comes from a caste of cooks and yet now he has to serve the wretch who is moneyed. He decides to break out of this fate of the poor in India, as from a Rooster Coop. The key metaphor in the novel is of the Rooster Coop. 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.” (TWT, 173-4)
His commentary is replete with irony and paradox. He also draws attention to the way a master-servant relationship is established, based on a philosophy of trust, by which servants are caught in the Rooster Coop. It maintains the perpetual servitude of the poor, letting a minority possess all the wealth of the nation. As the protagonist says, “The Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop….only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and burned alive by masters – can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.” (TWT, 175-7)
Balram shows his perverted psychopathic nature by deciding to break out of the coop, betraying his family and society. He has to suffer humiliation at the hands of his masters, with ever increasing menial duties, which climaxes in his being blackmailed when Ashoke’s wife Pinky kills a man in drunken driving. He was forced to sign a statement accepting full responsibility for the accident.
He has to suppress his embittered feelings, being confined to the Rooster Coop. He cannot go contrary to his master’s bidding. A remorse filled Pinky madam leaves Mr Ashok for good in the middle of the night, pushing a fat envelope with cash into Balram’s hands. From then on, he has to play the wife-substitute for Mr. Ashok. He has to oversee his master’s every need as he turns to heavy drinking. Left to control his master, Balram begins to awaken from his reverie in the Rooster Coop. Having been a witness to all of Ashoke’s corrupt practices and gambling with money to buy politicians, to kill and to loot; Balram decides to do the same.
He knew that his boss had collected a total of Rs. 700,000/- and stuffed it into the red bag. That was sufficient money for him to begin a new life with a house of his own, a motorbike and a small shop. He hatches the murder plan, which he executes in quick succession. Adiga probes further into the mind of Balram like an expert psychologist and finds him in a perfect mental state, determined to execute his plans with precision.
He was not fully satisfied with the crime. He feared his recovery and the consequences would be fatal – police case and the terrible destruction of his family. So turning the body around and stamping his knees on its chest, he pierced the neck “and his lifeblood spurted into my eyes. I was blind. I was a free man” (TWT, 286).
He is free at last from the Rooster Coop. But the run for his new-found life begins for Balram. He is on the run to make his dream come true. A peep into the level of poverty into which millions of his fellow Indians are plunged is imperative for a proper assessment of the criminal and the gravity of his crime.
Injustice and inequality has always been around us and we get used to it. How long can it go on? Social discontent and violence has been on the rise. What Adiga highlights is the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and the economic system that lets a small minority to prosper at the expense of the majority.
It is the experience of being hypnotized by the tiger that energizes the criminal in him to be blood thirsty and take law into his own hands. The more he is educated, the more he is corrupted, and the reader’s sympathy for the psychopath never dwindles.
Such crimes are taking place in our cities. Recently, it was reported that workers at a car parts factory near Delhi murdered the chief executive after they were laid off.
The Rooster Coop continues to exist like a never-ending oppressive system. “The Rooster Coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs… The coop is guarded from the inside”. (TWT, 194)
Balram escaping from the Coop, is a servant turned villain and a murderer who becomes a self-proclaimed entrepreneur, who calls himself "I'm tomorrow" (TWT, 6). He subscribes to a philosophy of future with hope. As he awaits to board a train he gets on to a weight machine, which represents for him “final alarm bell of the Rooster Coop. The sirens of the coop were ringing - its wheels turning – its red lights flashing! A rooster was escaping from the coop! A hand was thrust out – I was picked up by the neck and shoved back into the coop. I picked the chit up and re-read it”(248). His subconscious kept haunting him for his escape from the coop of past oppression. Moving from train to train he keeps his track untraceable by the law enforcing agencies, who had advertised his pictures as a wanted criminal.
Life in Bangalore has to be that of a fugitive as “White Tiger keeps no friends. It’s too dangerous” (TWT, 302). But he has to keep in touch with the world of the road and the pavement, where he received his education to freedom. He makes ironic reference to socialist leaders in the city, in whom people place their hope for a resurgent revolution.
Sitting in his comfortable office as an entrepreneur living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing, Balram is confident that he will not be caught by law enforcing agents as he has stepped out of the coop of his past. “I’ve made it! I’ve broken out of the coop!...I’ll never say I made a mistake that night in Delhi when I slit my master’s throat. I’ll say it was all worth while to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant .”(TWT, 320-1)
Balram sounds very pragmatic. His philosophy of individualism comes close to Mr Ashoke’s Machiavellianism. Balram’s individualism stresses independence and self-reliance, disregarding any morality; while Ashok’s Machiavellianism describes his tendency to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain. Balram prompts his drivers to imitate him if they wish to succeed in life, becoming White Tigers in turn. He dreams of establishing a school for poor children in Bangalore, where he could train them in the facts of life – a school full of “White Tigers.”
He knows how to escape from being caught for law breaking through corrupt means. He justifies having masters like Ashok to enable White Tigers like him to break out of the Coop. By-and-by, he is educated in the mean ways of the rich. which he himself imbibes in the course of time. Balram, a victim of the rich-poor divide, reverses the role and becomes ‘master like servant’. When he is alone, he takes pleasure in masochisms. In portraying the character of Balram, Adiga has excelled in projecting the typical psychopath/sociopath that our society can churn out. He is playing the games those people play, who cannot reach out to be like their masters. He had seen Mr Ashok enjoying life with girls, frequenting malls and hotels. Out of sheer spite of the rich he serves, he expresses his frustration in mean acts like those mentioned. His going to the red-light area in search of a prostitute is to satisfy his suppressed revenge as well.
The novel exposes the ferociousness of the man, who after bloodletting through murder, will turn out to be a man-eater himself. What guarantee is there that he will not commit murders for reasons of rivalry in the entrepreneurial world of cut-throat competition? Revenge-murder is no solution to bring about social justice. Subscribing to his principle of taking law into one’s own hands, will only lead to anarchy and escalation in violence.
Excessive economic inequalities and unwarranted delays in applying the remedies for them are often the causes of such dissention. Besides, quest for power and total disregard for human rights helps escalate violence and strife among men. There is need for organizations that promote peace among men. Remedial measures have to be taken by the government and law-makers to prevent rampant corruption and oppression of the downtrodden. Let not the law of the jungle prevail, as Adiga has proven through his protagonist. Mere anarchy and chaos will prevail if an evil is hatched to counter another evil.
There are some Indians who wonder if the award was given to The White Tiger to mar the face of India in the international arena as she is becoming a global economic power. Is the West exposing our poverty and unrest to hurt our national pride? Such fears are baseless as Adiga has brought out a fable with superb mingling of his observation. Hence it should be judged purely as a work of art.
However, the novel should make every right thinking citizen read the signs of the times and be socially conscious of the rights and duties of each one, irrespective of cast, creed or economic status, to prevent create the types of Ashok and Balram in our society.
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*(abbreviation of The White Tiger, followed by the page no. in this edition).
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