Visiting India with The White Tiger

For the fourth – and much belated – installment of the Vicarious Reading Book Club, we traveled to India via Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, a book that’s been on my to-read list since it won the Man Booker Prize a decade ago.

The White Tiger stands in stark contrast to India’s literary tradition. There’s no romance here, no poverty-burnished beauty, no redemptive ending. According to Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian:

“Adiga’s novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie’s chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight’s Children, seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.”

That alternative depiction of India is what drew me to Adiga’s debut novel. Its unusual protagonist, Balram Halwai, is more antihero than hero. Born destitute in a part of northern India that he characterizes as “the darkness,” Balram manages to claw his way to the top of India’s new tech-driven economy through a combination of opportunism, audacity, and a willingness to break rules others aren’t. The India of Adiga’s imagination is a place of desperate striving, bottomless corruption, and dark humor – a place where hospitals are unstaffed, suitcases full of cash grease commerce, and the blame for crimes is frequently placed on the nearest servant willing to bear it. And, as Adiga asserted in an interview following his Man Booker win, this India may not be so imaginary after all:

“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.”

What’s so fascinating about The White Tiger is that that process of self-examination feels more human than heavy handed. Adiga’s lessons are told with powerful visuals and apt metaphors. One of my favorites is Balram’s description of his fellow darkness-dwellers as “half-baked:”

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like the one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half formed and half-digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.”

This unflinching look at India has drawn its fair share of critics, including journalist Manjula Padmanabhan, who asked, “As compelling, angry and darkly humorous as this is, is this school-boyish sneering the best we can do? Is it enough to paint an ugly picture and then suggest that the way out is to slit the oppressor’s throat and become an oppressor oneself?”

This was the question that occupied the bulk of our book club discussion last week - whether Adiga’s comically cynical take on an entire country left us dazzled or despondent. I’m firmly in the former camp – not just because I love a highly-articulate takedown, but because I don’t think The White Tiger was entirely pessimistic. It’s not just a story about the cost of making it in modern India, it’s also a story about the benefits of rising. As Adiga writes: “The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.” 

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Discussion Questions (spoilers below!)

• Why do you think this novel was written in the form of an address to China’s Premier? Why does the Premier’s visit finally motivate Balram to tell his story and what does he think he has in common with the Premier?
• Compare this book’s two episodes of running over children. First, let’s look at Ashok and his family's actions after Pinky Madam hits a child – how quick they were to frame Balram for it. Next, let’s contrast it against Balram's response later in the book when his driver hits and kills a child on a bike. Were you surprised at the actions of either? How does Ashok and his family's morality compare to Balram's?
• Let’s discuss Balram’s reasons for killing Ashok. There are lots of plausible reasons – settling the score with Ashok, breaking out of the "rooster coop," and financing his dreams among them. Which ring true to you and which do not? Did you feel Balram was justified in killing Ashok? 
• Did Balram win you over? Is he the protagonist you root for, or the villain you root against? What can we learn from him about ambition, focus, or seizing opportunities?
• This book paints a lot of people as fools – loyalists who support their families at the expense of themselves, American tourists who flock to the ‘darkness’ of the Ganges, even Ashok with his slow descent into misery and corruption. Who (if anyone) are we meant to identify with or cheer for here?
• Is this an optimistic novel or a pessimistic one? The novel reveals an India that is as unforgiving as it is promising. Do you think of the novel, ultimately, as a cautionary tale or a hopeful one?
• This book is full of metaphors, so let’s discuss a bunch of them:
  • Let’s talk about the term “half-baked,” which is first used by Ashok to describe Balram and is then reclaimed by Balram as a sort of point of pride? What does Balram’s transformation from a half-baked person to a charismatic, criminal entrepreneur look like? For example, he educates himself by absorbing the knowledge around him. He listens to what others are saying about stealing the car or sending back less money and learns to exploit these to better his circumstances. He looks out for opportunities and then chases them down.
  • Let’s discuss the darkness vs. the light. Adiga divides India into two parts – the darkness (northern India surrounding the Ganges) and the light (southern India where wealth and industry are concentrated). He has little good to say about the darkness and views much of his life’s work as getting out of it and into the light. Is this the first you’ve heard of this division of India in two? Can you relate at all?
  • Another interesting analogy was of the ‘rooster coop’ among people in the darkness, which is how Balram framed a culture in which class divisions persist because impoverished Indians kept themselves down and kept themselves servile. Is this a dynamic you’ve encountered in your own lives? Did it ring true here?
  • Finally, what about The White Tiger itself? This idea, of a rare and unique species that rises above the rest, gets introduced at the beginning of the novel in Balram’s school and is a periodic theme throughout – for example when he later returns to the zoo with his nephew. Do we think Balram really is The White Tiger of India, or might he be holding himself in too high esteem?