The White Tiger: A Novel

The White Tiger: A Review

THE WHITE TIGER by Aravind Adiga: A Book Review

The bookshop at Delhi Airport should rank as the worst among airport shops in the country, at least among the metros. So I asked the driver to stop at South Extension and found a nice place called Teksons. This is a nice old-fashioned shop with a good collection of books. I prefer these any day to the aseptic malls where you wheel a cart and buy books by the kilo. Somehow I find that sacrilegious. Carts are for groceries, not books. I was looking for the paperback version of Ken Follett’s World without End, but found The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga instead. A debut novel by a 34 year-old Indian, this is one humdinger of a book. I read it at a stretch and didn’t even notice the delayed and miserable journey. By the time we touched down at Mumbai five hours later, I was through. You can take my word for it; the last book by an Indian author that did this to me was Chetan Bhagat’s Five point someone and before that it had been Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans.

The White Tiger, of course is not in the same genre. For one, it is not autobiographical like most first novels, and two, it isn’t a nature book either as the title suggests. It does showcase some wild life – the two-legged variety in India’s badlands, but that’s beside the point. It’s the story of Munna, aka Balram Halwai aka White Tiger, born in a village near Dhanbad. The story begins in unique fashion with the narrator – Munna himself – sitting in a Bangalore office at midnight and relating his story as a part of a letter to the Chinese Premier, who’s on a visit to India. Told in first person singular, he relates his story as a flashback, with many pithy asides to the Premier about the true meaning of entrepreneurial spirit as practised here and pot shots at China as well. Nothing is sacred to the White Tiger.

The story – and what a story it is – races through three theatres of action, geographically & chronologically. Starting in the village where he is born to a poor Rickshaw puller, it moves outward when he scrambles to get a job at a teashop in the nearest urban centre of Dhanbad. From there it jumps to Delhi, where he gets a job as a driver to a wealthy landowner. (Throughout the author refers to Bihar strangely as “Darkness”, never bothering to explain why) Balram is a survivor and grabs what chances come his way, creating them at other times. He reminded me vaguely of Abel in Jeffrey Archer’s ‘Kane & Abel’. Bereft of a formal education, the boy educates himself from snatches of conversation he overhears during his job as a driver. Typically, people tend to ignore the fact that a liveried servant is a living, breathing human. They behave as if he is some kind of machine.

The prose is simple, readable and effective. The language is direct and familiar. The tone is cynical at times and ironic at others, but it keeps the reader hanging on. Each chapter ends like a TV serial – with a bang, leaving the reader scrambling to go further, tracing Balram’s tumultuous journey through life. The only quirk I found was where he describes the sexual act. Elsewhere unabashed, here the author suddenly turns coy and calls it ‘dipping the beak’. I really wonder what was the reason for this chickening out. Shyness? An attempt to pander to the moral brigade? All it does, to my mind, is introduces a flippant note that is unnecessary. For all her turgid and forgettable prose, Shobha De handles this better

Otherwise, the author makes no attempt to moralise like they do in Hindi movies. The whores are whores… not pious women who have been forced by cruel relatives to take this option. The protagonist’s actions are also not explained away by circumstances beyond his control, etc. He does what he has to do. The ending may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there it is. Take it or leave it. Conclusions, if any, are left to the reader and it never gets preachy at any point. Full marks for that. After a long time I have come across an Indian author who is not burdened by hoary traditions and culture that have been done to death decades ago.

Further, (this gives him the most points in my book) his description of India in its various images is without a trace of self-consciousness. He says it like it is. Adiga’s India is not the colonial land of snake charmers and fakirs. Nor is it the other end of the spectrum, purely software and glass towers like Friedman’s flat world. Instead it veers from one extreme to the other and is constantly in your face, warts and all. With authors like Bhagat & Adiga, not to mention Upamanyu Chatterjee and so many others who have surfaced in the last decade, I get the feeling that finally Indian writing in English is coming of age, getting an identity of its own – one that doesn’t need the backing of Bookers or Pulitzers to fly off the bookshelves.

All in all, an excellent read. Grab this book. At Rs 395.00 for a Hardcover edition from Harper Collins with a large typeface that is easy on myopic eyes (like mine), you couldn’t go wrong.