THE WHITE TIGER: JUST ANOTHER STORY?

I am sure by now all of us would have heard about the book “The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga and many of you might have also finished reading it. The book shot to fame after it won the Booker prize for the year 2008. But for the fame and the hype surrounding the book I wouldn’t have read the book. The book has evoked a lot of reaction from the readers and has been talked about quite a bit. From most of these reactions I read and heard about the book, it appeared to me that independent of what they have to say about the book, this book was being treated as some kind of a testimonial for India. This is the point on which I disagree. One of the popular reactions is to criticize and dismiss the book as an analysis by an outsider who was allegedly catering to the western notions about India. The other extreme reaction is sort of a self-congratulatory one by a few people who are now saying, “I had said so”. They are using the book as another excuse and justification for India-bashing.


The book essentially a rags-to-riches story of a person called Balaram, that’s all. But this analysis would be an over simplification of the book or of Adiga’s message. This takes to the question, “What exactly is Adiga trying to say”? Actually throughout the book Adiga does not say anything at all. That’s just an outcome of the style Adiga has chosen for his book. The book has no preface or a word from the author and throughout the book Adiga only speaks to his readers through his character Balaram. This style gives Adiga a lot of freedom to indulge in hit-and-run kind of an arguments and analysis; it also gives him immunity form criticism. It’s not Adiga who presents his analysis but Balaram who paints the image of India as he has seen, as he has perceived. Of Course, Balaram is a character created (if he is real as understood) by Adiga. On the whole the book comes out as a vague mixture of facts and fiction. At places the descriptions given makes one wonder and question as to where the facts and reality are taken over by the creative freedom of the writer. For example consider the following extract form the book:

A month before the rains, the men came back from Dhanbad and Delhi and Calcutta, leaner, darker, angrier, but with money in their pockets. The women were waiting for them. They hid behind the door, and as soon as the men walked in, they pounced, like wildcats on a slab of flesh. They were fighting and wailing and shrieking. My uncles would resist, and managed to keep some of their money, but my father got peeled and skinned every time. ‘I survived the city, but I couldn’t survive the women in my home,’ he would say, sunk into a corner of the room. The women would feed him after they fed the buffalo.

That’s the kind of exaggerated descriptions that can be found in the book.

I completely support Adiga’s observation about the quality of life and the hardships faced by the underprivileged in India. But his descriptions and arguments when taken at face value can lead the readers to erroneous conclusions about India. The reader will have to be sensitive to the plight of the poor and at the same time be cautious and “filter-out” all the exaggerated descriptions. First Adiga presents an exaggerated account of the village and then uses it to extrapolate and pass judgments on the whole of India. That’s one reason why I am asking the readers to filter out the noise and only take the signal from the book.


The book presents this one particular story as a “reference story” of India. In many places Balaram dismisses almost anything and everything Indian by making statements like, “Here in India………”, “Every Indian entrepreneur……….”, “Every Indian politician……….”. This is the tone of the book, which tries to present all of Balaram’s realities as THE reality of India.


One big and obvious positive from the book is that has firmly answered those people who believed/or still believe in “India Shining” to be THE reality of India. But I am sure that anybody living in India, or even aware about India could have ever believed that “story”. Five years back when the term was coined a row of farmer suicides had shown us how much India was shining, and today, a host of UN and WHO reports are there to answer any such claims.

I know that I am not wise enough to critically analyze the Indian society and it’s components. I have been in India for all my life and I still feel I have very little grasp about India. But one thing that is clear to me is that India does not have any one reality about itself. India is a land of contradictions, where one reality contradicts another. This does not make any one of those realities any less real. These contradictions exist in each and every sphere of society in India. Adiga’s book completely misses this point (this is assuming he was trying to judge India in the book) and he ends up presenting a hopelessly one-sided picture about India. Balaram says that the Indian system is corrupt, non-performing and inefficient. I agree. But the very same system has produced and efficiently accomplished projects like Delhi Metro and Chandrayaan. Both of which were completed before schedule and within the allotted budget. The same Delhi metro set up is not working that well in Bengaluru, and in Hyderabad (Under E.Sreedharan himself) the project is not progressing smoothly. There are police officers who take bribe and those who lay down their lives for the country. The crucial point is that we cannot use one side of the story to either defend or defame the other side or the entire system. The very same NREGA ( National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) has worked brilliantly in Rajasthan and AP where it has impacted the lives of the poor and the underprivileged, but it has failed miserably in Bihar & Jhakhand. Above are only a few examples of contradicting realities. Given all this, I think India certainly has a lot of contradictions inbuilt into herself. It would take nothing less than a genius to come up with one grand-unified analysis for the whole of India.

Now, again may be Adiga is not analyzing India at all and is simply trying to tell a story. But that he has not made clear anywhere in the book or through any statements of his that I have heard of. He passes judgments about India at regular intervals through out the book. His style of mixing facts and fiction is very irritating because he tries to slip-in and distribute tit-bits of gyaan about India to his readers in between the story. For example, he starts the letter by saying

Mr. Wen Jiabbo
Premier of the Freedom loving nation of China.

I am not some big critic of China, but where is the backing or a reference on the basis of which he claims China to be a freedom loving nation? I am saying so because that is not what the generally accepted fact is. He also says that China was never ruled by foreigners and India was ALWAYS ruled by foreigners. (Remember these are Balaram’s words). I am no student of history but I know that Mongols, British and the Japanese had conquered/ruled parts of China. May be the Mongols got finally assimilated into China like the Mughals in India. Also, what about the Gupta’s, Maurya’s, Maratha’s and many other glorious Indian empires we had in the past? There are people like Nehru who have written about India in a much more detailed and rigourous manner. There the material clearly reflects the study and the rigor behind it. The documentary “The Story Of India” made by Michael Wood for BBC is another example where the study and the rigor of the person shows. That is the kind of rigor that is expected from people who wish to capture India in their books or documentaries. Adiga’s book does not even come close to meet this requirement. It is as I had already said a loosely written hit-and-run book.

Finally, I would just like to say that our Adiga’s, (namma Kann-Adiga’s ) book is nothing for us to be proud of; it’s not even impressive as a story, and it’s certainly no testimonial for India.