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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes but people like me - middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better
than England's - don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the
poor of India endure.
"At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the
world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of
society. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a
result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on
the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination."
That, though, makes Adiga's novel sound like funless didacticism. Thankfully - for all its failings
(comparisons with the accomplished sentences of Sebastian Barry's shortlisted The Secret Scripture
could only be unfavourable) - The White Tiger is nothing like that. Instead, it has an engaging,
gobby, megalomaniac, boss-killer of a narrator who reflects on his extraordinary rise from village
teashop waiter to success as an entrepreneur in the alienated, post-industrial, call-centre hub of
Bangalore.
Balram Halwai narrates his story through letters he writes, but doesn't send, to the Chinese
premier, Wen Jiabao. Wen is poised to visit India to learn why it is so good at producing
entrepreneurs, so Balram presumes to tell him how to win power and influence people in the
modern India. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skullduggery, toxic traffic
jams, theft and murder. Whether communist China can import this business model is questionable.
In any event, Balram tells his reader that the yellow and the brown men will take over the world
from the white man, who has become (and this is where Balram's analysis gets shaky) effete through
toleration of homosexuality, too slim and physically weakened by overexposure to mobile phones.
Halwai has come from what Adiga calls the Darkness - the heart of rural India - and manages to
escape his family and poverty by becoming chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to
Delhi to bribe government officials. Why did he make Halwai a chauffeur? "Because of the whole
active-passive thing. The chauffeur is the servant but he is, at least while he's driving, in charge,
so the whole relationship is subverted." Disappointingly, Adiga only knows of the Hegelian master-
slave dialectic from reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. But that dialectic is the spine of his
novel: the servant kills his master to achieve his freedom.
The White Tiger teems with indignities masquerading as employee duties. Such, Adiga maintains,
is India - even as Delhi rises like a more eastern Dubai, call-centres suck young people from
villages and India experiences the pangs of urbanisation that racked the west two centuries ago.
"Friends who came to India would always say to me it was a surprise that there was so little crime
and that made me wonder why." Balram supplies an answer: servitude. "A handful of men in this
country have trained the remaining 99.9% - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to
exist in perpetual servitude." What Balram calls the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the
entire Indian economy; unlike China, he reflects, India doesn't need a dictatorship or secret police
to keep its people grimly achieving economic goals.
"If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and
I wouldn't notice them," says Adiga. "That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is
like." Adiga conceived the novel when he was travelling in India and writing for Time magazine.
"I spent a lot of time hanging around stations and talking to rickshaw pullers." What struck him
was the physical difference between the poor and the rich: "In India, it's the rich who have
problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often
work without their tops on so you can see their ribs. But also their intelligence impressed me.
What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are
witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers."

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