Against One's Own Class
Possibly no Booker-winner from India has been received with so much resentment at home as Aravind Adiga. Indeed, his debut novel, The White Tiger, winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, has invited so much hostile criticism at home that the Times of India ran a piece recently called "The Hero India Doesn't Want." Given the unexpected nature and intensity of this response, this review perhaps needs to be as much about the critical response as about the book itself. Typically Indians love their Booker-winners. Winning this prize is seen by most Indians as adding to India's rising glory. Both Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy became heroes when they brought this honor to their country. In contrast, look at a sampling of the responses to Adiga's The White Tiger: Khushwant Singh - "darkest, one-sided picture of India"; Manjula Padmanabhan - a "tedious, unfunny slog"; Amitava Kumar - "The novelist seems to know next to nothing about either the love or the despair of the people he writes about." Similar responses abound in the Indian papers. Before we take a look at what Adiga has actually written to provoke such a sweeping and savage rejection at home, let us remember that literary dissidents have a great tradition from antiquity to modern times. Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, was exiled from Rome for his urbane satires. Dante, facing a similar fate, took his revenge by populating the nine rings of his Inferno with thinly disguised representations of his enemies. Even in the modern era, despite much progress in human rights, writers retain an uncanny ability to provoke the ire of the powerful. True, Adiga is not be elevated to the ranks of great modern dissidents like, say, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Ken Saro-Wiwa, or our own Tasleema Nasreen. But, undeniably he is eliciting responses worthy of a true cultural dissident. So, what did he write, and why does it bother so many of his compatriots so much? The White Tiger tells the story of Balram Halwai, a low-caste man from Bihar who escapes the drudgery of a being a tea-boy to become the driver of a rich coal-miner in Delhi. The plot is simple enough: Balram's persistence, and little breaks, allow him to become a driver. But this is not enough for ambitious Balram. So, he commits a crime to set himself free in a more decisive manner. The plot is hardly the point of the story. Rather, the plot, like the conceit of Balram telling his story in letters to the soon-to-visit Chinese premier, provides the narrative structure on which Adiga hangs the drapery of his cultural criticism. Balram is an intelligent man, a quick learner, who knows how to play the role of a servant, even as he grows increasingly angry at its indignities: he hates massaging the legs of his master's father, or being mocked by his master's wife for his country accent, or the petty cruelties of his master's brother. What he comes to hate most, however, is the fact that his master tries to frame him for a false case. Balram's master, Ashok, both inherently kinder than the rest of his family, and supposedly rendered more sensitive by a stint in America, treats Balram with more consideration than anyone else. Initially Balram feels admiration for his master's manners and kindness. But when Ashok tries to frame him, Balram realizes all talk of being "part of the family" is hypocritical blather with which millions of masters in his country try to keep millions of servants lulled into a sense of belonging that doesn't exist. Despite his ambition, and willingness to lie or scheme to get ahead, Balram starts out with a fundamental sense of honesty. Although the other drivers try to educate him in types of corruption available to their profession, he resists such temptations for a long time. It is Ashok's attempt to frame him that shifts something inside Balram. When he sours, he succumbs not to the petty defiance of everyday corruption, but to a great crime to break entirely free. Adiga's story could have become a bore if told with too much earnestness. But, in addition to its humor, it is made lively uncomfortably so at times thanks to the colloquial verve of his language. Capturing the toil and indignity of being a tea boy he writes, "look at the men working in that tea shop…better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still 'boys'." In Adiga's version, India is not so much the largest democracy in the world, nor a land of opportunity for the talented. It is still a country of infinitely graded classes, who depend on a vast structure of patronage; and it is a place where all gains big and small are made mainly through some form of corruption or abasement. This dark and bitter view has provoked so much reaction precisely because it differs from the lived experiences of an increasing majority of the new Indian middle class. The Indian middle class, in harmony with the Indian state apparatus, believes that they as a nation have transcended the most demeaning aspects of a Third World nation. India is now Shining; it is now Incredible. In this pervasive dialog of self-admiration, Adiga in the voice of Balram the servant accuses his own class of living in a state of denial. Adiga does not mind that most of India still lives in what he calls the world of "Darkness." He seems to mind that the dwellers of the "Light" can be so sanguine in their islands of exception. Gayatri Spivak had famously or notoriously asked, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Though Balram starts out as a figure of the subaltern, by the time he speaks he has become a member of the middle class himself. To have the withal to speak, paradoxically, is not to be subaltern. So, it is not the majority of Indians who live still in abjection who have spoken out in this book. Nor is it a middle-class citizen who has spoken on their behalf. It is a middle-class citizen who has spoken out against his own class, embarrassed by their ability to be blinded by their self-marketing. Perhaps not since V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness (1964) has a book enraged so many Indians of the middle class to this degree. Adiga's The White Tiger is a fictionalized update of Naipaul's earlier blow-torch. It is partial, excessive, imperfect. But it also affords an incisive, irreverent and hilarious insight into the maddening contradictions of modern India. Apparently some Indians feel incensed because the Booker Prize lends legitimacy and added circulation to Adiga's criticism which they feel wrongly undermines their hard-earned self-respect. At a subtler level, Adiga's screed actually confirms the cultural puissance that the Indians long for: To produce such a self-criticism from within one's own culture, and to be able to debate it without resorting to book-banning or burning is all a sign of cultural strength. Whether this debut novel deserved the Booker might be debatable, but that it is an entertaining read, which has the power to provoke soul-searching for middle class Indians (or their counterparts in neighboring countries), and which provides cultural eye-openers for any outsider, is beyond a doubt.
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