What Book to Read?

The White Tiger won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and I’m not sure how I missed it at the time. But I’m really glad I’ve made up for it now. Funny but sad to the point of tragic, it is a biting satire on the divisions between rich and poor in India. At least I assume it’s satire, and that the details are an overstatement to make a point; if it is an accurate description of reality, then I guess it’s not in the least funny.

The book takes the whimsical form of a letter from Balram Halwai to Wen Jiabao, Premier of China, the purpose of which is to explain, by reference to his own experience, how India fosters entrepreneurship. China, apparently, lacks entrepreneurs, whereas ‘our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewerage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs’. Written over several nights, most of the letter focuses on Balram’s life up to the point where he starts his own successful version of outsourcing (ie ‘doing things in India for Americans over the phone’); this is covered in a few very clever pages. So most of the book is about his experiences as the son of a poor village rickshaw-puller who becomes a driver for a rich master in New Delhi, and how by a single act of ‘social entrepreneurship’, he becomes an entrepreneur himself.

Balram uses two metaphors to describe the life of the poor in India. They live in ‘the Darkness’, whereas the rich live in ‘the Light’. And the poor live in ‘the Rooster Coop’, meaning not only do they live confined in terrible conditions, but they think of themselves as having no escape. ‘The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop’, Balram says. The essentials of the coop include the bonds of family and location, economic dependence on the rich, chewing paan and a deep sense of servility. Anyone who tries to buck the system is picked off and destroyed. ‘Democratic’ elections, the police and the justice system are nothing more than shams, and inequality is cemented by corruption at every level of society. Hence the picture of the rooster on the cover.

So how does Balram escape? He isn’t sure himself. ‘If you ask me to explain how one event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my master to thinking that – I will tell you that I myself don’t understand these things’. When he is at school, he is able to read, and so rare is this accomplishment, the school inspector dubs him a ‘white tiger’ – a creature that comes along only once in a generation. Poetry also has something to do with it: Balram hears the lines ‘You were looking for the key for years/But the door was always open!’ and realises ‘a man can make himself vanish with poetry’.  ‘The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave,’ he says. ‘To hell with the Naxals and their guns shipped from China. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India’. But it takes more decisive action for Balram to free himself. Hence the title, and picture of the white tiger accompanying that of the rooster on the cover.

You might wonder how all this poverty and misery can be funny. Here are just two out of many possible examples of Adiga’s skill with words and ideas: first, while Balram is still a driver – ‘From the amount of garbage thrown outside the walls of the house, you knew that rich people lived here’, and second, when he has become an entrepreneur – ‘You’ll see my friends when you visit Bangalore – fat, paunchy men swinging their canes, on Brigade Road, poking and harassing vendors and shaking them down for money. I’m talking of the police, of course’. However dark the story, and as Balram warns, it is dark, Adiga’s light touch and ironic view make the book thoroughly satisfying for me. His achievement is all the more remarkable, given that this is his first novel.

You can read more about Adiga here. His second novel Last Man in Tower (2011) is described as a painful tragicomedy, so I guess it’s pretty much in line with his first.