NEW VOICES
India in unflattering light
ARASH VAFA FAZLI
|
Despite its stark vision and lack of subtlety, White Tiger makes an impact because of its brutal candour.
|
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, HarperCollins India, p.321.
The best thing about Aravind Adiga’s first novel The White Tiger is that it tells the story of modern India through the eyes of a driver. Those belonging to this profession have perhaps the most privileged perspective on the paradoxes of the contemporary situation. They work in the new India of prosperity but go back home to the India of slums and poverty. Theirs is the India that stands and waits in the parking lots of the new glittering shopping malls. In a hundred everyday gestures, they are reminded, by a class-based society controlled by the rich, that they are not to expect to be treated equal to their masters. In servitude to their masters lay their highest good. Balram the narrator of Adiga’s novel, captures all the irony of the driver’s predicament.
The novel is written in the form of seven letters by Balram to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao ahead of the latter’s visit to India. In these letters he recounts his life story to the Premier with the intention of giving him a glimpse into the true face of India. Balram is born into a poor, low caste, rural household. His father is a rickshaw puller. His childhood is full of the usual miseries that people of his class accept as their lot. He is pulled out of school to work in a tea shop to pay interest on loans taken to perform a marriage in the family. His father dies on the floor of a government hospital because there is no doctor to attend to him. He goes from living here in the “India of darkness” to becoming a driver for the village landlord. His job takes him to Delhi, the “India of light”. Here he becomes devoted to the landlord’s son, the U.S.-returned Ashok Sharma and his wife Pinky. The turning point in the novel comes when Pinky gets involved in a hit-and-run case while driving in a drunken state and Ashok and his family seek to implicate Balram for the crime. At this point the scales fall from Balram’s eyes and he realises that to survive he has to play by the laws of the jungle, where there are “only two destinies — eat or be eaten up.” The rest of the novel is how he decides to end his life of servitude by killing Ashok and decamping with his money. Much of the second half is taken up by his philosophical justifications for committing murder, somewhat like Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment with the difference that while Raskolnikov was tortured with guilt, Balram is a post-modern man who puts it all behind him and goes on to become an entrepreneur in Bangalore.
Caricatures
In portraying the dark side of Mother India, the 34-year-old novelist, who formerly worked as Time’s Asia correspondent, paints a picture of unrelieved blackness. There is little room for subtlety in his vision. An obvious casualty of such a stark perspective are the characters who emerge as being little more than caricatures. Balram himself ends up doing and saying so much for the author that eventually he is hardly believable as a character. The only exception is Ashok, who remains torn between his feudal instincts and the liberal values that he picks up from the West. His character beautifully represents the moral paralysis of a generation of liberal-minded Indians who believe in equality but not strongly enough to make them renounce the conveniences of their privileged status.
Technically, the novel begins with promise. The narrative caroms between the narrator’s present and the past that he is talking about. But half way through the book, Adiga sets aside technical finessing in his rush to bring the plot to its climax. Again, there is a lack of imagination in the use of language. At times, the metaphors are downright ugly. Like when he compares his disbelief on the way his life unfolded in Delhi to a child’s surprise on peering inside a car’s bonnet: “Remember, Mr Premier, the first time ... you opened the bonnet of a car and looked into its entrails... the coloured wires twisting from one part of the engine to the other, the black box full of yellow caps, enigmatic tubes hissing out steam and oil and grease... remember how mysterious and magical everything seemed? When I peer into the portion of my story that unfolds in New Delhi, I feel the same way.” Mysterious, magical, enigmatic?
Yet despite its faults, the novel makes an impact because of the brutal candour with which it holds up a mirror to an India that many of us would rather not see.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
