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The White Tiger. Aravind Adiga. Author Background. Born in 1974 in Madras (now called Chennai) Grew up in Mangalore in the south of India. Attended Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, Oxford.
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The White Tiger AravindAdiga
Author Background • Born in 1974 in Madras (now called Chennai) • Grew up in Mangalore in the south of India. • Attended Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College, Oxford. • Journalist, published in New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India. • The White Tiger was his first novel. It won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2008 (Adiga was 33.) • Last man in Tower published in 2011. • Names key writing influences as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. http://www.aravindadiga.com/bio/index.html
Interview with Adiga AravindAdiga’sofficial website:http://www.aravindadiga.com/index.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4tAPvWVorY&safe=active Interview with Adiga:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2008/oct/16/booker-prize-india
Influences/Controversy: “It is not surprising then that the greatest literary influences on the book were three great African-American 20th-century novelists - Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. "They all wrote about race and class, while later black writers focus on just class. Ellison's Invisible Man was extremely important to me. That book was disliked by whites and blacks. My book too will cause widespread offence. Balram is my invisible man, made visible. This white tiger will break out of his cage.” “For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels.” “How do you get the nerve, I ask AravindAdiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you're an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?”
Social Commentary: "At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize “The book deals with an India smack in the middle of “the boom,” and it challenges a lot of comfortable assumptions about Indian democracy and economics. I want to challenge this idea that India is the world’s greatest democracy. It may be so in an objective sense, but on the ground, the poor have such little power.” http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/09/express/india-a-view-from-below
Social Commentary: Rail: But on the surface the class divide seems to be shrinking. The media tells us things like call centers and outsourcing are not only threatening the American economy but also revolutionizing Indian society. Adiga: I wanted to problematize the depiction of outsourcing within India and outside. In the long run it’s not a particularly good thing for the country. It doesn’t create real jobs. It doesn’t actually give employees any skills. It’s kind of like a shot of sugar—it’s great at first, but it actually has no nutrition. Anyone who thinks outsourcing is going to fix India’s economic problems is deluding himself. Outsourcing counts for less than 1% of the economy. 99% of Indians have problems that are entirely separate: water, agriculture, irrigation, electricity. I wanted to show that this is a very small, weird part of the Indian economy and the bulk of life is way outside this.
The “Light” vs. “The Darkness” Rail: To describe the Indian hinterlands in which poor people try to make ends meet, your narrator uses this eerie generic term, “the darkness.” How did you come up with that? Adiga: I wanted something that would provoke and annoy people. I was trying to capture this gulf in the country. When I was in Calcutta, I spent the night with people who pulled hand-rickshaws. (People in Bombay, by the way, don’t believe me when I tell them that there are hand-rickshaws in Calcutta, because it seems incredibly primitive to them.) A lot of these hand-rickshaw drivers were Muslims from Bihar, and I asked them, “Why do you do this? Why don’t you work in the fields? Even that has to be better than this.” One man pointed to the shed in which they were staying and said, “This may seem to you like a dirty dark place, but for us, this is a city of light. Back home is the darkness.”
Map: Setting in The White Tiger http://www.bookdrum.com/books/the-white-tiger/9781843547228/map.html
The Black Fort: Laxmangarh, India
Caste System http://uwacadweb.uwyo.edu/religionet/er/hinduism/HORGS.HTM
Guiding Questions: How/where do we learn the most? To what degree are we shaped by our environment, culture, and social structure? To what degree can the individual shape his or her own identity and “transform” oneself? What does it mean to be a “self-made man”/is this possible? Is an “eye for an eye” or “the ends justify the means” philosophy justified in a corrupt political or economic system? What do we owe our family? What do they owe us? Are we tied to our birthplace physically and how does where we are born affect our worldview?
Guiding Questions: What are the benefits and dangers of being a dreamer? Is there such thing as the archetypal “American Dream” and how does this dream alter or function in other cultures? What are the physical, emotional, and psychological ramifications of being an “other” or “outsider” in one’s culture? Can being an outsider become a positive force in self-improvement? What moral sacrifices come at cost of self-improvement? What has more strength: moral or material power/motivation? What impact does technology have on cultural norms? How does culture change when a country becomes a “world power”? What are the main components of happiness and success?
Rare, beautiful, honored • Hunted, endangered, on display • “Mutant” recessive gene • 2nd largest Tiger • Solitary animal/fiercely defensive • 1 in 10,000 tigers are White Tigers, only 12 found in the wild in the last 100 years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tiger http://www.indiantiger.org/white-tigers/
Title Animal: The school inspector tells Balram that he is “an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots,” and asks, “In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals—the creature that comes along only once in a generation?”(30). His answer, “the white tiger,” prompts the inspector to affirm that, “That’s what you are, in this jungle”(30). What does the inspector mean by both his naming of Balram and his use of the metaphor of him in the jungle? How does this name work symbolically in the text? Why does Adiga choose this symbol as his title?
