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Explanation and Analysis:
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is a postcolonial novel that sharply satirizes modern India’s cultural, political, and socioeconomic upheavals. It follows Balram Halwai—a tea shop worker turned chauffeur—who vaults himself into the ranks of India’s elite after killing his master. In the process, Adiga’s novel takes stock of the many troubling tensions that underly the country. It dwells upon the lavishness, poverty, corruption, and cruelty of a country that has opened itself up to the 21st century’s restless and globalizing forces.
In capturing the warp and woof of a modernizing Indian society, The White Tiger closely identifies itself with a long-running tradition of Indian literature. Like the Ipe family’s tale in The God of Small Things, Balram Halwai’s story is ridden with interfamilial politics, national tensions, and simmering class (and caste) conflicts. He populates his tale with a cast of pitiful and uniquely unsavory characters. Its emphasis on animals—tigers, roosters, and lizards—bears a resemblance to more other recent works, too. Animal’s People, for instance, draws upon similar cues to document the devastating consequences of the 1984 Bhopal disaster. Balram’s story joins a roster of literary works that chronicles the experience of the Global South.
Other features situate Adiga’s work beyond the strictly defined Indian postcolonial genre as well. Addressed to “His Excellency Wen Jiabao,” the Chinese premier, Balram relates his story through a quasi-confessional, epistolary format—a style of novel-writing with origins in the 18th century. Adiga’s protagonist also layers his narrative with an inventory of psychological details. Raskolnikov’s modern equivalent does not turn himself in, but the unrepentant Balram shares with his Dostoyevskian counterpart plenty of tremors and anxieties. As he plans to murder Ashok, the verses from Iqbal’s poetry take the ring of prophecy, the city speaks to him, and buffalo skulls resemble the heads of his dead family. Balram colors his experience and storytelling with his inner states. Like works by Henry James or James Baldwin, Adiga’s novel is a rich psychological exploration. And unlike Crime and Punishment, it is not so much a story of post-murder guilt as of the frustrations and indignities that precede it.
