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Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University Unit 15: Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger—Plot

Unit 15: Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger—Plot Notes

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
15.1 The White Tiger—Analysis
15.2 Plot—The White Tiger
15.3 Summary
15.4 Key-Words
15.5 Review Questions
15.6 Further Readings

Objectives

After reading this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss plot of the novel The White Tiger.

Introduction
Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering
portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland.
He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country's dark side.
It's the morning after Adiga, 33, won the £50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The
White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more
importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga's homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait
of India's economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an
unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie's
Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight's Children (a book that Adiga recognises as
a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.
Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question. Or as affronted as a
man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media
hoopla can be. Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: "I don't
think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I
had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people
who aren't anything like me." On a shortlist that included several books written by people very
much like their central characters (Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire
suburbanites during the miners' strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring
her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.
But isn't there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others'
suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfill his literary ambitions? "Well, this is the
reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just
hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. In somewhere like Bihar there
will be no doctors in the hospital. In northern India politics is so corrupt that it makes a mockery
of democracy. This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day,

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 115