The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

As I mentioned a few days ago, Aravand Adiga has won the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. As luck would have it, I purchased the book when the Booker shortlist was announced, and finished it the very day it won the award.

The White Tiger explores the prospects of social mobility amidst the caste prejudices that continue to linger in modern India. As the story opens, the first person narrator introduces himself as a small business owner in the city of Bangalore. Bangalore is known (in)famously as the Silicon Valley of India (or "the world's center of Technology and Outsourcing" as the narrator calls it), so this immediately connects the non-Indian reader to the rapid rate of modernization in the Indian economy. As with all such economic upheavals, change is accompanied by social and political instability, and The White Tiger touches upon each.

I mentioned the story is written in first-person, but there is a curious framing device as well. The entire book is divided into a series of letters from "The White Tiger" to Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China, who has announced an upcoming visit to Bangalore to meet Indian entrepreneurs:

Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nations, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, 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.

The narrator, who soon identifies himself as Balram (a name given to him by a teacher, since his family just called him "boy"), considers himself the perfect example, and thus begins writing his letters to the Chinese Premier to educate him about Indian entrepreneurship. He begins by detailing his childhood spent as the son of a rickshaw-puller in the village of Laxmangarh, which he sarcastically describes as failing to meet any and all "standards set by the United Nations and other organizations whose treaties our prime minister has signed and whose forums he so regularly and pompously attends." The majority of the citizens in Laxmangarh live impoverished existences, and all of the valuable land and business is owned by just four landlords, known colorfully as the Buffalo, the Stork, the Wild Boar, and the Raven:

All four of the Animals lived in high-walled mansions just outside Laxmangarh--the landlords' quarters. They had their own temples inside the mansions, and their own wells and ponds, and did not need to come out into the village except to feed.

This dichotomy had already resulted in violence, with one of the landlords' infant sons kidnapped and killed by Naxals, Indian communist rebels. Public animosity between the politicians and the people, the haves and have nots will lead, later in the book, to the rise of "the Great Socialist" and the defeat of the ruling party.

These events are somewhat ancillary to the narrative, however, which follows Balram's rise to close proximity with this upper class. He convinces his family to invest in driving lessons, and through lucky coincidence gets hired as a chauffeur for Ashok, one of the Stork's sons. They are relatively generous masters, providing sufficient food and a covered room for Balram to sleep in, as well as "the thing that we who grow up in the Darkness value most of all. A uniform. A khaki uniform!"

"The Darkness" is Balram's term for the vast expanse of rural India where the masses suffer in povery and powerlessness, controlled by greedy landlords and corrupt politicians. Balram sees this suffering borne by the masses, and explains their acquiescence through the analogy of "the Coop":

The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop... the roosters in the coop smell the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. 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.

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent--as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way--to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse.

We learn early on that Balram has flown the Coop, so to speak; he is a wanted man, has taken a bag full of cash, and has slit Ashok's throat. With these revelations made up front, there is a fatalistic tone to the rest of the book, which follows Balram's work as the family driver, exploring the psychology of this role, constantly exposed to freedom and luxury but never able to taste it himself. Balram begins to idealize his master Ashok, comes to believe that there is genuine care for him as a servant, only to be devastated when it becomes clear that Ashok is little different from the rest of the upper class in his self-absorption. Along the way, Balram is frequently confronted with the stark contrast between the lifestyle enjoyed by his employers, and by those who slave away to create this world.

The problem is, there is little sense to why the Indian state continues to sustain this inequality. Adiga relies heavily on these analogies, the Light and the Darkness, or the chicken coop, which undoubtedly mask a greater complexity in this country of a billion people. Many of the characters Bulram encounters are mere caricatures, from the landlords to the police looking for bribes to the young revolutionary who instantly converts to greedy self-interest once he tastes power. Can all of India's ills be explained away by pointing at corrupt politicians? Even the overthrow of the ruling party simply changes the destination of the landlord's bribes. Is the only solution an individual one, whereby the White Tigers of the world muscle their way into "the Light" by any means necessary? This seems an unsuitably narrow view, but it is all the novel offers.