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The White Tiger. Some Outstanding Issues to Consider and Summary Notes. Robbie Goh.
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The White Tiger Some Outstanding Issues to Consider and Summary Notes
Robbie Goh • “It is the contradictory nature of Balram – rural yokel who becomes savvy businessman, uneducated and ignorant and yet also representing India’s entrepreneurial “tomorrow” (the locale of Bangalore, one of India’s wealthy and fast-developing high-tech hubs, is significant), simple and yet also capable of treacherous cunning, and above all aware of his ruthless betrayals, yet completely unrepentant – which primarily sustains the reader’s interest in the novel.”
Goh cont. • “[The] novel makes it seem as if Balram’s morality (or lack thereof) is on trial, when actually it is India’s that is being judged.” • Then goes on to talk about the importance of “Balram’s move from rural Bihar to bustling Bangalore in Karnataka state (not a coastal city, but one nevertheless heavily fed by foreign investments and ideas) as a move from “darkness” to “light,” oppressive traditionalism to liberal modernity.” • How persuasive do you find this? Is it quite so simple?
Amitava Kumar • “Halwai’s voice sounds like a curious mix of an American teen and a middle-aged Indian essayist. I find Adiga’s villains utterly cartoonish, like the characters in Bollywood melodrama. However, it is his presentation of ordinary people that seems not only trite but also offensive.”
ChandrahasChoudhury • “What readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh, and moving about Indian novels available to them in English, is often experienced by Indian readers as dull, clichéd, and superficial.”
Indicators of ‘Progress’? Politicians and Their Priorities (p.96) • If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!
Killer with a Conscience?, p.295 • Sir: I am not a politician or a parliamentarian. Not one of those extraordinary men who can kill and move on, as if nothing had happened. It took me four weeks in Bangalore to calm my nerves. - Bangalore = “full of outsiders. No one would notice one more.”
The final death and its aftermath, pp.306-308 • There was a body, a boy, lying on the ground, bloodied. The bike was on the ground, smashed and twisted. • Balram to dead boy’s brother – “I am the owner of this vehicle. Your fight is with me, not with this driver. He was following my orders, to drive as fast as he could. The blood is on my hands, not his.” • The assistant commissioner who sat in the station was a man whom I had lubricated often. He had fixed a rival for me once. He was the worst kind of man, who had nothing in his mind but taking money from everyone who came to his office. Scum. But he was my scum.
Outsourcing and the Question of Culpability, pp.310-311 • And it was not [the driver’s] fault. Not mine either. Our outsourcing companies are so cheap that they force their taxi operators to promise them an impossible number of runs every night. To meet such schedules, we have to drive recklessly; we have to keep hitting and hurting people on the roads. It’s a problem every taxi operator in this city faces. Don’t blame me.
Reflections on Murder Weekly and other Pulp Fictions (pp.125-126) • It’s sold in every newsstand in the city, alongside the cheap novels, and it is very popular reading among all the servants of the city – whether they be cooks, children’s maids, or gardeners ... Now, don’t panic at this information, Mr Premier ... Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn’t mean that they are all about to slit their masters’ necks. Of course, they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses – and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. You see, the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him – and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet ... So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants, Mr Jiabao.
From Dreams to Nightmares, pp.313-314 • Now, what happens in your typical Murder Weekly story – or Hindi film, for that matter? A poor man kills a rich man. Good. Then he takes the money. Good. But then he gets dreams in which the dead man pursues him with bloody fingers, saying, Mur-der-er, mur-der-er. Doesn’t happen like that in real life. Trust me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stopped going to Hindi films. There was just that one night when Granny came chasing me on a water buffalo, but it never happened again. The real nightmare you get is the other kind. You toss about in the bed dreaming that you haven’t done it – that you lost your nerve and let Mr Ashok get away – that you’re still in Delhi, still the servant of another man, and then you wake up. The sweating stops. The heartbeat slows. You did it! You killed him!
The White Tiger, pp.317-318 • When I drive down Hosur Main Road, when I turn into Electronics City Phase 1 and see the companies go past, I can’t tell you how exciting it is to me. General Electric, Dell, Siemens – they’re all here in Bangalore. And so many more on their way. There is construction everywhere … The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like? Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams, policemen. But you never know. It may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can live like humans and animals can live like animals. A new Bangalore for a new India. And then I can say that, in my own way, I helped to make New Bangalore …
The White Tiger, pp.317-318 Haven’t I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making – the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga? True, there was the matter of murder – which is a wrong thing to do, no question about it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India won’t clean my hands again. But isn’t it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our prime minister (including you, Mr Jiabao), has killed someone or other on their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi – but that is glory, and not what I am after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man – and for that, one murder was enough.
Summary of Areas We Have Covered (and others to consider in your own time) • Relationship between form and content in The White Tiger. • Balram as first person narrator. Anti-hero … • Presentation of time in text – importance of foreshadowing, flashbacks et al. • Self-reflexive nature of novel – e-mail conceit, function of literature/popular culture et al. • Questions of Genre – playing with crime/detective novel.
Summary cont. • Extent to which text can be read in relation to series of borders – both the policing and crossing of them. • Examples – man/animal, rich/poor, moral/immoral, global/local et al. • Questions of criminality. Guilt as relative? • Representations of Space and Body in The White Tiger. Why so important? • Key motifs – The Rooster Coop, the road/driving, animal imagery, from zoo to jungle et al. • Reflections on role of the writer/artist – asking the unsettling questions. “Speaking the truth to power.”
Summary cont. • The White Tiger and critical controversy. • Questions of reception of novel and audience for it. • Crucial questions concerning “voice,” “authenticity” and the “real India.” • Collisions of local and global cultures – both in the text and in terms of its wider reception. • The Politics of Literary Prizes. • The Booker-winning novel and author as brand? Liberation and/or entrapment?
