Unmade in India

The White Tiger is an intelligent and ruthless portrait of the India in the making — shining or rising, but always sinking — shot through with wit and black humour that match the author’s economy with words. It is about an India where the old hierarchies are being replaced by the black-and-white categories of “Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small Bellies”. It is also a very angry novel, an anger that defines the narrator-protagonist. But the real power of this book comes from its total lack of sentimentality and the consequent realism it thus manages.

Balram Halwai is the White Tiger, not because he is a rare creature (he is, in fact, an amalgamation of the inhabitants of the dark India), but because he is a survivor, despite the defeated stock he springs from. He is a “thinking man”, and an entrepreneur — a rickshawpuller’s son born in a village near Gaya, whose mother died when he was young, whose father coughed up blood and died of tuberculosis at a government hospital which the doctor never visited, who was compelled to drop out of school and work at a teashop, who subsequently managed to learn how to drive and find employment in Dhanbad, who graduated from Maruti Suzuki to Honda City, who moved to Delhi and then to Bangalore and became a successful businessman, albeit little known.

These are familiar motifs but the handling of the material, the fleshing out of the plot, the narrative and the tone distinguish the book from others in the market. Balram is a halwai whose poor folks lost the sweetshop to a grabber long ago and were reduced to labour of the most bestial sort. From this double reduction begins the narrator’s upward climb. The action begins in the present moment, triggered by the announcement of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s state visit to India, apparently with an eye to acquiring lessons in entrepreneurship from India’s great business story.

Well, Balram takes upon himself the task of educating the premier, through a series of letters he dictates over seven nights, thus unfolding his own story and that of India. He fears that Wen will visit only the India of Light, the shining IT corridors of Bangalore, and will depart without any knowledge of the India that has not risen to shine. He must therefore “offer to tell [Wen], free of charge, the truth about Bangalore”.

The abiding irony of Balram’s story is that he begins as Ralph Ellison’s invisible man — whom we cannot see, whom we choose not to see — and remains invisible even in his success. He is equipped with intelligence, opportunism, necessary scrounging and cruelty — the package that makes an entrepreneur. Adiga doesn’t create a synthetic Indian poverty for a picture story in the western press. He shows just how poverty degenerates and produces beasts like the psychopathic Balram. And the violence that always underlines poverty and never lets go of the poor man’s long hard climb. Balram’s success is built on the blood and money of his erstwhile employer, a relatively decent man, whom he killed. In a land of endemic corruption, a man like him cannot but choose and be compelled to be corrupt. The bridge to the Light runs over blood and bones. Thus Balram, like the murderous black boy from Chicago in Richard Wright’s Native Son, symbolises and embodies a social disconnect. India is to him “a f*****g joke”.

The White Tiger is rich in details that are intricately tied to the narrative and never for effect. Therefore, these often turn into images that sum up the book, such as the “[h]undreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages…[who] see the organs of their brothers lying around them. [Who] know they are next. Yet [who] do not rebel.” Still, Balram’s voice is not the author’s. Balram, after all, is a prisoner of his perspective no matter how sound it is. In the course of the narrative, a vivid India breaks through, but such an outcome is always secondary to fiction.