Page 156 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes 19.2 Summary

• “As Balram’s education expands, he grows more corrupt. Yet the reader’s sympathy for the
former teaboy never flags. In creating a character who is both witty and psychopathic, Mr
Adiga has produced a hero almost as memorable as Pip, proving himself the Charles Dickens
of the call-centre generation.”
• “Balram’s violent bid for freedom is shocking. What, we’re left to ask, does it make him —
just another thug in India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist ? It’s a sign of this
book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing to the final page
and beyond.”
• “With strong, sympathetic characters, a swell of political unrest and an entertaining plot, the
book rattles along at top speed under Balram’s chirpy navigation.”
• “Aravind Adiga’s first novel is couched as a cocksure confession from a deceitful, murderous
philosopher runt who has the brass neck to question his lowly place in the order of things.
His disrespect for his elders and betters is shocking — even Mahatma Gandhi gets the lash
of his scornful tongue. (…) Balram has the voice of what may, or may not, be a new India:
quick-witted, half-baked, self-mocking, and awesomely quick to seize an advantage. (…)
There is much to commend in this novel, a witty parable of India’s changing society, yet
there is also much to ponder. (…) My hunch is that this is fundamentally an outsider’s view
and a superficial one. There are so many other alternative Indians out there, uncontacted and
unheard. Aravind Adiga is an interesting talent and I hope he will immerse himself deeper
into that astonishing country, then go on to greater things.”
• “As a debut, it marks the arrival of a storyteller who strikes a fine balance between the
sociology of the wretched place he has chosen as home and the twisted humanism of the
outcast. With detached, scatological precision, he surveys the grey remoteness of an India
where the dispossessed and the privileged are not steeped in the stereotypes of struggle and
domination. The ruthlessness of power and survival assumes a million moral ambiguities in
this novel powered by an India where Bangalore is built on Bihar.”
• “Aravind Adiga’s riveting, razor-sharp debut novel explores with wit and insight the realities
of these two Indians, and reveals what happens when the inhabitants of one collude and then
collide with those of the other. (…) The pace, superbly controlled in the opening and middle
sections, begins to flag a bit towards the end. But this is a minor quibble: Adiga has been gutsy
in tackling a complex and urgent subject. His is a novel that has come not a moment too soon.”
• “It’s a thrilling ride through a rising global power (.....) Adiga’s plot is somewhat predictable
— the murder that is committed is the one that readers will expect throughout — but The
White Tiger suffers little for this fault. Caught up in Balram’s world — and his wonderful
turn of phrase — the pages turn themselves. Brimming with idiosyncrasy, sarcastic, cunning,
and often hilarious, Balram is reminiscent of the endless talkers that populate the novels of
the great Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal.”
• “We can’t hear Balram Halwai’s voice here, because the author seems to have no access to it.
The novel has its share of anger at the injustices of the new, globalised India, and it’s good
to hear this among the growing chorus of celebratory voices. But its central character comes
across as a cardboard cut-out. The paradox is that for many of this novel’s readers, this lack
of verisimilitude will not matter because for them India is and will remain an exotic place.
This book adds another brick to the patronising edifice it wants to tear down.”
• “The novel’s framing as a seven-part letter to the Chinese prime minister turns out to be an
unexpectedly flexible instrument in Adiga’s hands, accommodating everything from the

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