Page 153 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 19: Aravind Adiga: The White Tiger—Critical Appreciation

account of a man who is returning home? He recognizes no landmark or person, he has no Notes
emotion, he has no relationship to the land or the people.

India, a land of people with empty bellies, deceitful ways and always their hairs
stretched out for Western goods of any kind.

Finally, he exposes the bad intention of the novelist as he observes: This is at the heart of the
book's bad faith. The first - person narration disguises a cynical anthropology. Because his words
are addressed to an outsider, the Chinese Premier, Halwai was at freedom to present little
anthropological mini-essays on all matters Indian. It is "India for Dummies" that proves quite
adept at finding the vilest impulse in nearly every human being it represents. I don't only mean
every member of a corrupt and venal ruling class, but also of the victim class itself, portrayed in
the novel's pages as desperate and brazenly cannibalistic.
Above all, Adiga forgets and perhaps deliberately overlooks the fact that the India he presents is
not the whole of India nor the real India. All the rich people, all the entrepreneurs, all the politicians
and, of course, all the rulers and ministers are cheats, dishonest, murderer and upstarts as painted
by Adiga. But there are some good persons, good soul and well - meaning rulers who have a good
deal of humanity to uphold faith, truth and honesty. Hence the review of the book by the Economist
describing as giving "glimpses of Real India" does not bring out the whole of India. It may be
Adiga's India, but it is certainly not everybody's India. The novel, as a whole, is not that great or
successful, as it had been held, because a reader with an alert and sensitive mind feels rather
disappointed and depressed for not finding what one usually expects from a work of art with all
the artistic values and mature and universal vision. Certainly it is not the whole of Indian nor the
real Indian. It is, at best, a work that holds up only one of the many aspects of India, i.e. its
poverty, darkness and the low slum picture of India. Commenting on the novel, a well known
Tamil literary critic, B. Jayamohan observes : A perfect example of literature becoming extended
journalism is The White Tiger. Reading it, I felt Aravind Adiga was the byline for a cover story in
some big news paper! It's perfectly told and edited, but it's one lifeless sketch that looked more
based on the usual news stock It's highly intelligible to the regular English reader, because he
anyway gets to read similar narration every day. Adiga thus faces no linguistic challenges of
depicting various kinds of people with different cultural and social conditions of this vast country.
He gladly glides through the repeatedly polished language of our popular media. So, it is natural
for a screenplay writer also to pick stories from the Indian media and then pay a short visit to, say,
the Mumbai slums. Result; a film like Slumdog Millionaire. It's always a safe theme because for
more than 300 years the West has been trained to believe this one kind or 'reality' about India. This
last issue opens up a whole debate on the subject on which many literary works can be discussed.
In fact, the whole crux of the matter pivots round what Amitav Bachan said in his comment
regarding selling poverty in the world market. The issue takes us to a series of works written on
the dark side of Indian. Take for example V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness published in 1964
that depicted India, a land of people with empty bellies, deceitful ways and always their hairs
stretched out for Western goods of any kind. Later this was followed by his book A Million
Mutinies Now, which depicts the same kind of squalid and filth that the author found all over the
country. In such work Naipaul paints an unpleasant and most unpalatable image of India that
appeared to please mostly the Western readers. Needless to say foreign writers have long held up
such dark mirror of India for their readers. For example Mahatma Gandhi dismissed Katherine
Mayo's book Mother India as a "drain inspector's report." But apart from foreigners, Indian writers
and artists from film industry continued to depict the destitute Indian life with all its slums and

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