The White Tiger: A Tale of Two Indias

Topic :- The White Tiger: A Tale of Two Indias

Name :- Chauhan Sejal Arunbhai

Subject :- The New Literatures.

Paper :- 13

Roll No :- 26

M.A. PART-II SEM-IV

Year- 2013-15

Submitted to :- Dr.Dilip.Barad

Smt.S.B.Gardi

Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University.

The White Tiger: A Tale of  Two Indians

Aravind Adiga was born to Dr.K.Madhava Adiga and Usha Adiga on 23 October 1974, in  Chennai. He spents his childhood in Manglore by the Malabar coast, he studied at Canara High School and then at St. Aloysius High School where he completed his SSlc in 1990. After immigrating to Sydney, Australia with his family. He studied at James Ruse Agricultural High School. For further education he went to the States and studied English literature at Columbia University in New York where he studied with Simon Schama and graduated as Salutatorian in 1997. He also studied at Magdalen college, Oxford having secured a scholarship and had Hermione Lee as one of his tutors.

 Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize 2008 for his novel The White Tiger which is a darkly humorous novel about a man’s journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial success. Adiga is the fourth Indian born author to win this prize. Others are

Salman Rushdie

Arundhati Roy

Kiran Desai

Who won this prize. A fifth winner V.S.Naipaul is of Indian ancestry. It is Adiga’s first novel at such an early age,which deals with the present day India. Aravind Adiga depicting the life of a poor boy, attacks on the rotten political system that is a hurdle in the way of the country to achieve its goal. The Author has tried to tell a very real story. He is very humble and camera shy man.

He says:

“ I’m shy this is a bit of shock. I am very excited.

I feel fantastic and I never anticipated this. I am taken by surprise.”

The writer chooses an innocent boy who is away from the hustle and bustle life of the cities but at last gets lesson from the life and becomes manipulating. The protagonist of the novel Balram Halwai is the son of a rickshaw puller who comes to Delhi in search of better life becomes a taxi driver murders his master reaches Bangalore and becomes a rich man. Once he listens to news on All India Radio that Prime Minister of China is coming toIndia because

“ he wants to know the truth about Bangalore.Mr. Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their successs from their own lips.”

As Mr.Jiabao wanted to know the truth about Bangalore and Balram finds himself the right person to tell the truth, so he writes him seven letters telling him his story and these seven letters complete the plot of the novel. Literature mirrors society and Adiga has shown the real picture of poor India, which is really shocking.

This novel depicts that guilt is a terrible thing. It makes us suspicious and makes us see conspiracy everywhere. Here Balram Halwai, earlier an innocent man, becomes a murderer because of circumstances. Basically he was not a criminal, he wants to realease his tension and heavy load of his guilt of murdering his master. So he confesses his crime to Mr.Jiabao and tells him his story of rise from ‘ Swamp to Silicon Valley. In the journey towards this valley, he reveals to  Mr.Jiabao India’s political and economic system about the wide gap between rich and poor, India of Darness and India of  Light.

As we know that this novel is a tale of two Indians; Balram’s Journey from the darkness of village to the light of city life but what does he lose? And how he completes his journey is unforgettable. The man who is not criminal, whose blood is innocent, ultimately makes his heavy heart light by confessing his crime to Mr.Jiabao through letters. Like V.S.Naipaul who writes clearly in his book An Area of Darkness about India and receives harsh criticism Adiga also describes the harsh realities of India, but it becomes a matter of criticism for some readers. But is it not true? Why naked truth is not welcomed. Everyday we read in newspapers about the sufferings of the poor. Here in india we find extreme poverty and extreme richness. The protagonist Balra m Halwai says:

“ Please understand your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness.”

Here Adiga attacks politicians and says that Ganga is called the mother daughter of Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of chain of birth and rebirth but in reality it is polluted.

Politicians who are only holding meetings and doing nothing are responsible for this pollution Adiga writes:

“ No! Mr.Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy part of human bodies, buffalo carrion and seven different kinds of industrial acids.”

Here we clearly see that Adiga also attacks social systems, how a poor gets proper clothes only after death. He writes about the situation on the funeral procession of Balram’s mother on the bank of Ganga the holy city of Benaras:

“ My mother, body had been wrapped from head to toe in saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garland I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life.”

Balram Halwai comes from a village Laxmangarh where in a local school the visiting inspector gives Balram the name ‘ The White Tiger’, ‘the rarest of the rare’, the only boy in the class who is intelligent in the crowd of huge idiots. His father a rickshaw puller takes him out of the school to do some job and arranges the money to pay the loan which was arranged for the lavish dowry of his cousin sister.So the good news becomes the bad news. Balram Halwai starts working in tea shop, smashing coals and wiping tables. With drown from school, he does hard labour to earn the money and while working in tea shop he gets practical education of life. Adiga writes:

“ I gave myself a better education at the tea shop than I could have got at any school.”

Here we see that Balram had a dream to become a driver and he could fulfill his dream only by getting employment. He earned money, learned driving and got the job as a second driver in the family of landlord. The protagonist had only one dream to drive Honda City but senior driver Ram Prasad was the driver of Honda City, so he got Maruti Zen Ashok, the elder son of the landlord, returns back to India after completing his education from America with a Christian girl Pinky Mam. Ashok and Pinky decided to live in Delhi. In the meantime the landLord came to know that actually their senior driver Ram Prasad who was living there as a Hindu actually was a Muslim. Ram Prasad was exposed he ran away to Dhanbad and in this way Balram got the opportunity  to drive Honda City of his master Ashok.

Ashok hired a big Bungalow in the posh area of Gurgaon. He did his job by manipulating things, bribing leaders, policemen and politicians. Balram also starts manipulation while doing job as car driver to Mr.Ashok and Pinky. He was as faithful to his master and mistress as servant god Hanuman for Ram and Sita. He watches the working of Ashok and learns a lot of practical things to survive in today’s world. He comes to know every loop-hole of the corruption. When Balram narrates his sorrowful story to Mr.Jiabao, readers come to know about his tale:

The rest of today’s narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool  into a citified fellow full of debauchery depravity, and wickedners. All these changes happened in me because they happened first in Mr.Ashok. He returned from America an innocent man, but life in Delhi corrupted him and once the master of the Honda city becomes corrupted how can the driver stay innocent?

Delhi corrupted Ashok because he learnt the tricks how to take work from political leaders, ministers, brokers,police and judges. Once Pinky Madam smashes a child while she is heavily drunk,but Balram is compelled to take the blame of this accident on himself. But there is a nexus with police and judges and the case is solved. So nothing happens to anyone. Thus the novel exposes the corruption in this country which is deeply rooted in the politics. Pinky Mam becomes tired of this system and returns back to New York without informing Ashok.

Now Balram becomes puzzle, wanders here and there,goes to Paharganj, not far from the Imperial Hotel. He sees the life of the people lying on the floor of the station, dogs were sniffing at the garbage and then he thinks about his destination without the job of the driver. He describes to Mr.Premier about Delhi:

Delhi is the  capital of not one but two countries two Indians. The Light and the Darkness both flow in to Delhi. Gurgaon, where Mr.Ashok lived, in the end of the city, and their place, Old Delhi, in the other end. Full of things that the modern world forgot all about rickshaws, old stone buildings, and Muslims.

Slums becomes the topic of discussion during election months and rest of the months are only for the rich and the politicians. All these are facts and the young writer Arvind Adiga dares to depict the real situation of dark India. This dark side needs light.

His novel is fact not fiction. Attacking on the false commitment of politicians during election and daily problem of poor the author writes:

“ The election shows that the poor will not be ignored. The Darkness will not be silent. There is no water in our taps and what do you people in Delhi give us? You give us mobile phones. Can a man drink phone when he is thirsty? Women walk for miles every morning to find a bucket of clean water.”

Aravind Adiga says that he has written the real story of the poor. He is a writer of Aam Aadmi:

“ At a time when India is going through great changes and with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west , it important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustice of society the great divide.”

India is developing but Bharat needs better education and facilities regarding the roles and rights. There is problem of population which needs revolution. Poor India doesn’t care for the better education of their children. Adiga writes:

“ I don’t think so, sir. You know how those people in the Darkness are: they have eight,nine,ten children. Sometimes they don’t know the names of their own children”

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger highlights the ever widening gap between rich and poor, rural and urban and the brutal reality of an economic system that allows a small minority to prosper at the expense of the silent majority.

There are two sides of anything the dark side and the bright side. Adiga has tried to tell the story of the dark side of India. Fact is stronger than fiction. Every now and then, we read stories in newspapers which we find difficult to believe but most of then are true. The fact is that our world is full of wonders and mysteries. Fiction is the result of facts. Literature mirrors society and this real picture of India is shown to us by Aravind Adiga. He writes:

India is dealing with great duality today. There are men with big bellies and men with small bellies. It’s a metaphor to capture the duality of human existence in India today. The world needed to see the other side of India.

Adiga is very humorous in his depictions. Describing the difference between the rich and the poor, he writes:

“A rich man’s body is like cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours is different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope,the kind that women use to pull water the story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”

Thus the writer narrates openly about the rich the poor. Middle class is somehow away from the bad habits. Men drink because they are sick of life. Once the saying “ Honesty is the Best policy” was applicable but in todays world only honest man suffers. The witer says about police:

There is no end to things in India, as Mr.Ashok used to say. You can give the police all the brown envelope and red bags you want, and they might still screw you. A man in a uniform may one day point a finger at me and say, Time’s up, Munna.

The writer is young and daring, he raised voice against the system and wrote openly about the corruption which is in the politics. There is no original political thinking during last fifty years. They try to fool public. They promote the bribe system and train  the poor innocent people like Balram to get involved in this corruption. Balram in hope of better life learns this new morality. The writer describes about the honesty of the poor people, poor driver and their loyalty towards their masters. He says that the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of Indian economy:

“ Masters trust their servants with diamonds in this country! It’s true. Every evening on the train out of Surat, where they eun the world’s biggest diamond cutting and polishing business, the servants of diamond merchants are carrying suitcase full of cut diamonds the they have to give to someone in Mumbai why doesn’t that servant take the suitcase full of diamonds? He’s no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s you and me.”

Thus in this way Aravind Adiga has tried to tell a very real story, a tale of two Indias.