The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga | Book Review

The buzz surrounding Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker prize grabbing debut novel, The White Tiger, has been enormous and not without reason. The White Tiger is a fantastic story, narrated brilliantly by an amoral Indian servant who murders his master, makes off with a large sum of money and sets up a business that grows to become worth many more times the sum he “borrowed”. Local tradition demands that anyone telling a story must pray to a Higher Power, in Balram’s words “kiss arse”, and so he takes a moment to kiss the arses of the 36,000,004 gods Christians, Hindus and Muslims have between them before he begins his dark story.

At first Munna Balram , the protagonist, sounds like a servant who has discovered he can write and the first few pages don’t hook. He tells his story in seven nights via letters addressed to the Premier of China. He is brought up in “the darkness”, one of the two sides of India. It’s the side of India mired in poverty and far from the glitz of the big cities suffused with the wealth from the outsourced American companies. Here children dream to be bus conductors dressed in smart khaki uniforms with silver whistles; men struggle to feed large families with meager wages, and local politicians rig election after election, returning again and again with hollow promises and overtaxing the subservient masses.

Balram is christened White Tiger during a surprise school inspection, for his singular academic aptitude despite the decay and inefficiency of the local school system. He is forced to stop schooling by his brash, calculating grandmother but he never stops learning about life. Slowly but gradually he figures out why the impoverished masses never get out of the ‘Rooster coop’- the rat race, even as his disgust and discomfort with the life he lives now and the limited future ahead of him builds up.

He hires himself out as a driver to Ashok, a young man fresh from America and said to be ‘soft’ in the head because his American ways are ill-suited for the jungle he has returned to. Ashok is trusting and fickle; the weakest link in a family of shrewd and ruthless landlords and it’s his throat Balram slits on their way to bribe politicians. Balram in effect becomes that rare person in multitudes who break away from the mental shackles that bind the typical, unambitious, arse kissing, Indian servant to the same pathetic pattern of birth, poverty and death.

The White Tiger shows India throat deep in the corruption and moral decay that is pervasive in third world countries. Adiga brings the experience and skill that made him a seasoned correspondent for Time Magazine into his story telling. Balram is a voice for the masses stuck down in the impenetrable darkness of India's slums, making The White Tiger evoking and unforgettable. Adiga’s fresh voice and style make him one of the White Tigers of literature, that rare literary talent with a fresh voice and a stirring first novel.

[Image via FictionWritersReview]