The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga

In Adiga's The White Tiger, Balram Halwai's character serves as the primary representation of success in a simultaneously globalized and developing nation that still holds on to its pre-colonial class system, despite claiming democracy.  It is important for the higher-status characters in the novel that this class system be maintained and exploited, as it is a large means of their success.  (While the traditional caste system at this time is technically illegal, it is still an important aspect of the culture, as can be seen when the family Balram drives for asks what caste he belongs to, as well as when Balram and his brothers are hired in tea shops because their caste name Halwai means "sweetmaker." It should be pointed out that only those of a lower class are asked their caste, and not anyone in the higher classes.) It is a similarly underhanded series of actions that allows Balram to break out of being associated with the caste system and achieve his upward mobility - very simply, Balram owes his success as an entrepreneur and businessman to the corrupt side of globalized capitalism.  Had he never killed Mr. Ashok or abandoned his family to the hands of his former masters, as the end of the novel Balram would still be a servant for Mr. Ashok and his family, making very low wages and living in poor conditions.  Adiga seems to be suggesting that in a corrupt power structure, only the corrupt can prosper.  One of the first hints of Balram's own corruption comes at the middle of the novel, when he lists the ways a driver can make a little more for himself by taking advantage of his master's trust in him.  In the third bullet of the list Balram asks "Is my master careless? If so, what are the ways in which I can benefit from his carelessness?" (141).  It is here that we see Balram begin to understand that in order to do will for himself, he must use others the way others have used him, as well as everyone he knows from the Darkness. On the next page, Balram explains: "The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me" (142). From the beginning of his life, Balram wishes to do well for himself despite being from the Darkness, but only when he realizes the way he is being used (through the way he is using his master) does he become angry at his situation and methodically plan to take some sort of action against it.  This corruption is only seen as a tactic by Balram for survival in the society; even though he openly refers to it as murder, it is simply a fact of life in his world.  Indeed, everyone he sees who is successful has committed some sort of crime.

        In the White Tiger, the reader is shown a different side of underdeveloped and developing cities, and Balram as a narrator admits freely to the audience that this side is covered up by the corrupted leaders running the country.  This novel was received with mixed feelings in India, as it is claimed to be outlandish, cartoonish, and to portray India as a country that it is not.  One reader, Amitava Kumar,comes from the state of Bihar where Balram was born, and says, "As I continued, I found on nearly every page a witty observation or a fine phrase, and on nearly every page inevitably something that sounded false.  I stopped reading on page 35." Whereas this writer hails from the state represented in the first part of the novel, or "the Darkness" as Balram refers to it", Adiga comes from a middle class family and was born in a major city in the state of Tamil Nadu.  This difference causes problems from Kumar and it is obvious throughout the novel that Adiga is not wholly familiar with the place he is writing about. 

 Adiga has defended the difference between his own upbringing and Balram's, claiming that he saw this as a story worth telling whether or not he had a native insider's perspective. In an interview with The Guardian, he says, "the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me" and later in the interview states that "This is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well."  Much in the same way Slumdog Millionaire was attacked and defended by its director, The White Tiger is Adiga's attempt to tell a story that is often willfully overlooked by Indian society, and not one the public particularly wants to hear.  However, in trying to show his readers another side of India's culture, he may have actually made the matter more confusing--should we believe the nuances of Balram's life, behavior, and change in character, or should we question these based on Adiga's lack of personal experience? Our mental representations of India might shift, upon reading this book, from an image like the one at the top to an image more like the one at the bottom--we may begin to see India as a wholly corrupt place instead of one that is wholly lacking in corruption, in which case Adiga's aim may become futile.  By writing The White Tiger, Adiga is trying to expand our current understanding of his society, but may in fact be flattening it by choosing to show only the corrupt as the powerful and successful.