The White Tiger: Foil 3 key examples

Balram and Ashok come from separate worlds—this contrast arguably occupies the novel’s central focus. Balram, son of a rickshaw puller, does not even know his own birthday. He leaves school to pay off his family’s debts, toils away in a tea shop, and improbably arrives at the Stork’s doorsteps. The “half-baked Indian” makes it only out of sheer luck and an aspiration for mobility. His master is everything that Balram is not: U.S.-resident, suave, perfumed, and privileged in ways Balram could only have dreamed of. In telling the story of the golden spoon, Balram recounts all the luxuries that sit at his “broad-shouldered” master’s disposal. He frames the familiar story of haves and have-nots in their most polar extremes.

Through the course of their relationship, however, The White Tiger identifies surprising parallels between the two. Neither master nor servant supports democracy. Ashok rails against India’s “[messed]-up system” for his volatile coal negotiations; Balram meanwhile blames democratic ideals for their failure to achieve equality. And despite the vast differences in class and status, both find themselves bound by cultural expectation and infighting. Ashok must ingratiate himself with ministers and minister assistants, tendering his favors from one political regime to the next. He accepts prostitutes and ponies up cash for the sake of protecting the family fortune. Ashok is equally tied up in familial obligations: following his divorce, the Mongoose compels him to remarry in order to maintain the Stork’s reputation. No matter his riches, Balram’s master is merely a pawn for his family and a laughingstock among political officials.

This cutthroat competition and cultural norms get neatly reflected in the servant’s world, where Balram does battle with Ram Persad and the Nepali to be number-one servant and haggles among others for English liquor each week. He gets humiliated by the other taxi drivers, sends home his extra income, and contends with Kusum’s plans for arranged marriage. Ashok’s struggles find near-perfect analogs in those of his servant. Master and servant are each trapped in rooster coops of their own.

These contrasts and similarities probe the uncomfortable limits of the master-servant relationship. When Ashok tries switching seats with Balram in the car one day, Balram observes that “our bodies passed each other.” They do so figuratively as well—later, Balram cares for Ashok, locks glances with him through the rearview mirror, and ultimately changes his name to his master’s. By the time of the story’s telling, Balram identifies himself as the “master” of his former master. Ashok and Balram cannot be any more unlike each other, but their identities—like their fates—sometimes tangle together in unexpected ways.

Much of Balram’s narration emphasizes the differences between the Mongoose and his brother. The Mongoose is overbearing, patronizing, and unforgivably cruel. He is an “old-school master” who forbids Balram from playing music, using the A/C, or driving alone. The Mongoose is so shamelessly tight-fisted that he orders Balram to search the car floors for a missing rupee on the drive back to Buckingham B one afternoon. Ashok—the Mongoose’s handsome, U.S.-based brother—could hardly be more different. Balram’s master defends his driving from the insults of his wife, raises his salary, and promises to fix his shoddy sleeping quarters. He ignores the Mongoose and Uma’s stereotypes about Balram’s character and forgives Balram for every wrong turn on the street. Ashok is as generous to Balram as his brother is pitiless. He insists upon Balram’s honesty, and partly to a fault.

Despite these contrasts, Balram ultimately holds both these brothers up as case studies of the upper-class’s moral failings. The Mongoose is willing to travel any length to humiliate his servants. Meanwhile, Ashok is so abstracted from the plight of the poor that he is oddly generous—as he wrecks himself with his divorce and coal negotiations, he barely listens to Balram. Ashok gets “soft in the head,” offering to fund Balram’s wedding at one point when the driver is in fact hoping for a more earnest conversation. What may have started from an impulse of generosity simply becomes a deeper symptom of carelessness. Reared up in snobbish privilege, both of the Stork’s sons fail to treat Balram with the attention he deserves.

“There was no difference between the two of them. They were both their father’s seed,” Balram observes during one trip as Ashok and the Mongoose parade their moral purity before him. Even more, both brothers try to frame him for Pinky Madam’s manslaughter. The Mongoose could not care less for “these villagers.” And however much Ashok raises Balram’s salary, he willingly betrays his servant when help is needed most. For all their differences, the two brothers understand their caretakers to be essentially disposable.

Broadly, Balram and Vijay share a similar rags-to-riches story. The local bus conductor comes from a pig-herding family—the “lowest of the low”—but manages to secure a khaki-decorated position and never stops his ascent thereafter. If Vijay served as a “childhood hero” for the rickshaw puller’s orphaned son, he only continues to rise. The moment Balram meets Vijay in Dhanbad, the bus conductor flashes gold rings; just before Ashok’s murder, Vijay steps into the car as the suit-wrapped politician. Balram—who has similarly risen to be the Stork’s primary taxi driver—goes from distantly admiring his longtime role model to directly serving him.  The hometown duo comes into ever-closer proximity with each other as they scale the social ladder.

Even as their fortunes complement one another, the novel points to crucial differences in the ways Ashok and Balram each come into power. Vijay comes into his wealth by sheer ingratiation, supposedly letting a politician “dip his beak into his backside” at one point. He panders to the Great Socialist and dons his red headband in support. Vijay effectively allies himself to figures of power; Balram murders them. By killing Ashok, the taxi driver frees himself from India’s stifling politics to an extent that Vijay does not.

Balram chooses to exercise his power differently, too. Though Balram has internalized some of Ashok’s quirks—practicing yoga, for instance—he leads with greater integrity than his counterpart. Like all upper-class society, he manipulates the police and public officials. But he also pays a visit to the dead biker’s family. Balram abuses the system but has not entirely lost his ties to the poor. “I can’t live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh,” he explains.

By contrast, Vijay offers a portrait of unthinking obeisance; he follows orders in the interests of self-advancement, and to the point where he willingly abuses his own people. In a gruesome episode, Balram recounts how Vijay beats down the protesting peasant voter and stamps him into the earth. Handed the reins of money and power, the pig-herding boy eagerly replicates the errors of the rich. He joins the machinery of social oppression once freed from it himself. Balram may be far from just, but he is not Vijay. By contrasting this pair of nouveau-riches, The White Tiger interrogates social ascendancy in all its different forms.