The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

[Sancho]

There has always been a fascination with India in the Western mind. The Subcontinent is mysterious to us, somehow more spiritual to us, a place we can go to find ourselves, a place we can become one with the universe. Even my ‘Lonely Planet’ guide book ensured me that once I’d traveled to India I would be changed forever.

But, of course, that’s all horsesh*t. It’s a myth, foisted on us mostly by other over-fed, dreamy-eyed, self-absorbed Westerners. It is also one of the ideas Aravind Adiga gets at fairly well in his novel, The White Tiger.

But that’s not what the novel’s about; it just happens to be one of its hilarious side currents. The White Tiger is a story told pragmatically by Balram Halwai, an Indian from the darkness. He tells his story over the course of a week by way of nightly e-mails to the Chinese Premier who is planning a visit to India in the near future to learn of Indian entrepreneurialism. Here’s Balram in his first e-mail:

“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, disciple, 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.”

So, Balram is a successful Bangalore businessman as he is telling his story to the Premier. And the story is about his journey from peasant son of a rickshaw-puller in the town of Laxmangarh to coal-breaker in a local tea shop to 'lifelong' driver/servant to a rich man in New Delhi to private businessman in Bangalore.

One of Gandhi’s projects was to rid India of the caste system but it has proved resilient in the minds of the people, making vertical mobility difficult there. Balram’s last name is Halwai which means ‘sweet maker’ in Hindi and thus, his caste. So why then was he born the son of a rickshaw-puller? He explains that there are no longer a myriad of castes in Indian society such as sweet-maker, cowherd, goldsmith, landlord, or feces-sweeper; now there are only two castes: fat-bellies and skinny-bellies. In fact, the book is loaded with comparisons – fat vs. skinny, rich vs. poor, darkness vs. light, upward vs. downward mobility, east vs. west, servant vs. master, Hindu vs. Muslim – it goes on and on.

I suppose the other inevitable comparison is between The White Tiger and Slumdog Millionaire. There certainly are similarities between the novel and the movie but the literary models are fundamentally different. Slumdog, it seems to me, is a quest movie, complete with a maiden in distress, a knight in shining armor, a number of fire-breathing dragons, and a holy grail. The White Tiger, on the other hand, is a Faustian novel. To become a successful entrepreneur, Balram must make a deal with the devil – he murders his master. I know, I know, you-all are crying ‘foul’ right now, but believe me: that wasn’t a spoiler. Balram admits to us (or rather to the Chinese Premier) that piece of information in his first e-mail.

At any rate, I thought The White Tiger was a very enjoyable book. Balram is a well developed and interesting character. He is even somewhat endearing – for a murderer – and his story is infectious. The book is contemporary and valid in a global-market sense and Aravind Adiga is a trustworthy source on these matters. He was formerly a financial correspondent for Time magazine. He is an Indian national but was educated in the west and has lived in many places around the world; he now resides in Mumbai (Bombay). His unique life experience makes Adiga uniquely qualified to write this book.

Anyhow, give it a read. I’ll bet you’ll like it. It’ll make you laugh and you might even learn a thing or two about the mass of humanity living in the darkness, oh yes and also some beautiful Muslim poetry. So there you go and as with my other book reviews for the Lit-Net, I’m going to chop this one off abruptly right here – the plane’s about to land so I have to power-down the laptop. By the way, this time it wasn’t a nice, comfy wide-body on transcontinental flight but rather a freakin’ RJ into Oklahoma City! But hey, the Stews tend to be a lot younger and a lot less jaded on these little jets.

[SleepyWitch]

hey Sancho, nice review. I ordered this book today and will start reading it once I receive it.

[Sancho]

Hiya SleepyWitch, and thank you for the shout-out. I hope you enjoy the book.

Will you be reading it in English or German? I am interested because Indian-English has a special rhythm and nuance that is different than American or British-English. It adds to the flavor of the book.

I love to talk to them on the phone when I’m making a plane reservation or getting help with my computer:

“Hello”
“Hello, is this Mister Sancho?”
“Yup”
“Hello Mister Sancho, I am - Duane. How are you today?”
“I’m good Duane. How are you?”
“I’m fine sir. How may I help you?”
(In spoken American-English we like to use ‘good’ as an adverb, you see)

Anyhow, Haben Sie Spaß und genießen Sie das Buch. (I hope I got that right. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut.)

[SleepyWitch]

Hi Sancho, of course I'll read it in English! I love Indian accents
But it would be interesting to see how they render them in German. E.g. the other day I watched Slumdog Millionaire in English. Seeing as I never watched dubbed films, I have no idea how they do the Indian accents in German.
Dein Deutsch ist gut Ich habe alles verstanden.

[Sancho]

Ah-hah!
I keep forgetting that most people in the rest of the world speak several languages well.

Here’s a joke I got from one of my co-workers (a Colombian Woman)

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A: A Trilingual

Q: And what do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: A Bilingual

Q: And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?
A: An American

Betcha saw that one coming a mile away.

[SleepyWitch]

cool.
well, I'm an exception. I'm not a multilingual genius. My only modern foreign language is English because I did Latin and Classical Greek in school rather than a second and thrid modern language

[SleepyWitch]

finished. I liked "The White Tiger a Lot". It's a quick read.
but I have to admit I agree with this reviewer on amazon:

this book was exactly what I expected. Far from sensationally exposing the little-known 'dark underbelly' of modern India, it is exactly the same as all the other books exposing the little-known dark underbelly of modern India

I suppose it depends on how much you know about India, but its dark underbelly can hardly be described as "little-known" (as it says on the back cover of the book).
Having said that, I liked the factual tone of the book and the way Balram is presented as a "half-baked man". He's neither a dumb peasant nor is he your clichéd hot-headed, well-read, communist revolutionary.

here's another comment by a reviewer on amazon that I disagree with:

it is hard to believe that nearly everyone in India, rich or poor, is so lacking in empathy and compassion, is driven purely by greed and social status, living a kind of kill-or-be-killed solitary frontier existence.

why not? nearly everyone in Europe or the U.S. is like this, so why shouldn't Indians be driven greed and social status? Most of my Indian chat pals are like this and who wouldn't be if they lived in a developing/ newly industrializing country, seeing as even people in the glorious West/North are greedy and selfish?

[Sancho]

Hey-hey, Sleepy! I’m glad you liked the story.

I thought the author made good use of the “Half-Baked” metaphor as a running theme throughout the book. It carried a thread of continuity through the chapters/e-mails and opened the world of serfdom to me, the whole servant mentality, which is something we abhor in the US. I loved the bit about feigning subservience while peeing in the flowers.

I’m afraid it was a bit of rushed job when I reviewed this book. You see, it was only a short flight and now I see a glaring omission I made when I described the book as a series of comparisons. I failed to mention the most important comparison of all – the two traffic deaths. Both were children and I think the handling of the two accidents crystallizes the comparisons in the novel, the darkness to light. How does anyone ever deal with the causal death of a child?

I’m going to try to paste a couple photos to this post. They are from my last trip to Mumbai/Bombay – a year or so ago. I was in a cab, on a cross-town Bombay ride, and stuck in traffic. These two little sweethearts visited me, in heavy traffic, barefooted, on hot asphalt, just looking for a few Rupees. As you can see, we started joking and having fun. I’m glad I had my camera on a lanyard or they’d’ve gotten it away from me.

Yes, well, so anyway, is the big Army PX still in Fürth? I used to go there in the Eighties. There was an awesome gyro stand near there. For 3 DM (about 1 dollar back then) I could get a full meal. I spent some time at Ferris Barracks up in Erlangen.

[blazeofglory]

I have gone through this book and this has fascinated me for it is a story untold and is unlikely to be told, and indeed the writer has unveiled some secrets. I like his honesty to present things as they are.

[Etienne]

"But, of course, that’s all horsesh*t. It’s a myth, foisted on us mostly by other over-fed, dreamy-eyed, self-absorbed Westerners. It is also one of the ideas Aravind Adiga gets at fairly well in his novel, The White Tiger. "

From experience, I can say that it's not horsesh*t. Travelling to India is not travelling to another spiritual plane, but travelling to something like another planet. It's an overwhelming human experience. Can you imagine being constantly surrounded by thousands of people (and the fact that you are a white tourist makes you even more central in the experience) in what is the highest concentration of poverty on the planet. The country is an open dump, no garbage bins there, only the ground. Poverty, sickness, hunger. You are constantly harassed, you border on insanity a hundred times a day and you feel you are living in a Beckett book at the beginning. Go there a month or two, and swear to me that you've came back the same. I dare you. There's a cow blocking the traffic and trying to attack everyone that passes by, welcome to New York. Oh a kid comes with a stick, strikes it on the rear, there she goes running away like crazy in the street.

But perhaps you went there, one week or two, staying in hotels where you pay US, or what do I know, in a guided tour? Actually, someone I know, who is used to travel in Asia went there, but didn't manage to bear all that, hired a private driver and went on like this.

[blazeofglory]

Originally Posted by Sancho

Hiya SleepyWitch, and thank you for the shout-out. I hope you enjoy the book.

Will you be reading it in English or German? I am interested because Indian-English has a special rhythm and nuance that is different than American or British-English. It adds to the flavor of the book.

I love to talk to them on the phone when I’m making a plane reservation or getting help with my computer:

“Hello”
“Hello, is this Mister Sancho?”
“Yup”
“Hello Mister Sancho, I am - Duane. How are you today?”
“I’m good Duane. How are you?”
“I’m fine sir. How may I help you?”
(In spoken American-English we like to use ‘good’ as an adverb, you see)

Anyhow, Haben Sie Spaß und genießen Sie das Buch. (I hope I got that right. Mein Deutsch ist nicht gut.)

Today Indian English is a different dialect and it has autonomy that means English is used in India massively and people of all classes, echelons or social strata use it freely and easily. English is what advantaged them globally. Of course Indian English has problems and the problem is more manifest with westerners for while it is communicable, intelligible to one another inside India but outsiders find it pretty hard to comprehend Indian accent. Indians are better at writing, since they have to use English from their childhood and this is the official language in business houses. Arvind Adiga is an example of Indian writing in English. He had cultural heritage, being a reporter to New Yorker he has lots of advantages over the rest of others writing in English. What I like about him is his capacity to arrests the pulse of the moment. He could thru his book express what really modern India is going through. There is erosion and derision in Indian values. People value wealth more than anything in the world and all, particularly youths today want to make fast bucks by hook and by crook and the shortcut to amassing wealth is crime and that is why the main character in the novel committed crimes. In fact he was very hones to his writing, free of superciliousness and conceit and that angered his people in his home country. Of course we need books like this to disclose the plights of India, and the idea Indian is shining is flawed and the Urban India is shining no doubt but the real India with so many poor people, and so many farmers and peasants committing suicides is not shining; and it is a gloomy India writers and poets feel ashamed to relate to the outside world.

[Sancho]

Hiya Blaze,

I really enjoyed Adiga’s rendering of Indian English in the book. During the dialog, I thought I could actually hear those soft, lilting tones of their speech (and I could see their heads going back and forth). My wife works with an Indian cardiologist whose accent is so heavy that she needs to accompany him on patient visits to translate the English of Delhi into the English of rural-black or rural-white Georgia. Anyway, I think you’re correct, East-Indian English is considered a separate dialect from British or American English, but I also think that linguistic distinctions can be narrow or subjective and languages, dialects, creoles, pidgins, and patois all overlap somewhat.

At any rate, I agree with you, the English language has given India an advantage in the business world – for better or worse. And, for all its faults, the British colonial system did unite India with a common language and started an education system that quickly had Indians demanding their own independence. A lot of people forget that Gandhi went to law school in England in his younger years.

It remains to be seen if English will eventually become a global language or lingua-franca; it is certainly the preferred language of the business-world right now (as you pointed out). And along those lines, I was reading somewhere that business-English has become a dialect of its own. And a businessman from China, for example, would rather speak English to a businessman from Brazil than to a native English speaker. In business-English, it’s all business, no pesky colloquialisms or metaphors. Other contenders for a global language within the next hundred years or so are probably Mandarin, Arabic, or Spanish. Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Another topic: Much has been made of the crowding and poverty on the sub-continent, and there is certainly some truth in that, but there is also a lot of exaggeration – I think. The slums in Chennai or Mumbai don’t seem much different to me than the slums in Sao Paulo or Lima. And in India I never get the feeling that someone will slash my throat for pocket-change; for that I go to Lagos.

[neilgee]

An astonishing book, in another class to the 2009 Booker Prize winner. I'm glad it's not been forgotten.