Having won the Man Booker for his debut novel The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga must now steel himself for the inevitable backlash that comes with any high-profile prize. Adiga’s book — a sharp, ironic first-person account by an enterprising driver who makes up his mind to break through India’s seemingly impenetrable class barriers — has engendered debates ever since it was included on the shortlist a few weeks ago.
Many have called it a reductive counterpoint to the “India Shining” story, a chronicle of the country’s “hidden darknesses”, carefully packaged for the Western reader. “He’s talking to a foreign audience and he talks like a foreigner,” writes a member of an email group I’m part of. “Both are exactly how not to write about India and how to win international prizes.”
The more interesting debates centre on the question of the novel’s authenticity. On Sepia Mutiny (http://sepiamutiny.com/) Amardeep Singh, professor of English at Lehigh University, says: “I haven’t been able to shake the sense that The White Tiger, despite its topicality and its readability, is fundamentally fake.” Examining a passage where the book’s narrator Balram eloquently describes himself and thousands of others like him as having their heads full of unformed ideas, Singh points out that “no one who was ‘half-formed’ in the way described here would be capable of actually realising and articulating it in this way.
This should be a third-person narrator’s comment, not a first-person confession”. In the same vein, Chandrahas Choudhury of The Middle Stage (http://middlestage.blogspot.com) asks, “Would a ‘half-baked man’, never allowed to complete his schooling, be able to declare, as Balram does, that ‘Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia’”
These are fair arguments, but they can have equally valid ripostes, such as the one from a Sepia Mutiny commenter who suggests that Balram isn’t meant to be a psychologically realistic person. “If anything, he is a caricature constructed to make a socio-political point about India’s “dark side” — the masses of poor and uneducated who are effectively colonized by English-speaking elite.” Manish Vij of the blog Ultrabrown (http://www.ultrabrown.com) agrees that The White Tiger “is primarily a novel of ideas over plot. It goes down more smoothly as a parable, an argument, an exposé rather than purely as a telling of events”.
A more frivolous criticism is that Adiga had “no right” to try to provide a voice to India’s downtrodden, given that he himself has led a relatively privileged life. Needless to say such an argument would immediately render a good deal of literature (and other artistic endeavour) invalid. Vij says that though it’s acceptable to argue that Balram’s voice is not believable, it’s problematic “to suggest that an Oxbridge-walla has no business writing in a driver’s voice”.
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A little overwhelmed by all the serious literary discussion, I click on to the Rediff.com messageboard — the virtual world’s finest menagerie of cretins and dimwits — for some entertainment. I’m not disappointed. The comments are initially warm and congratulatory (also jingoistic and grammatically challenged — apparently “this bookie prize show that Indians is redy to conker the world”) but soon the first signs of acrimony appear.
Commenter 1: “Aravind adiga = a kannadiga”. He has made all kannadigas proud!
Commenter 2:<.I> Shut up you mallu! Everyone knows Amitav Ghosh deserved the prize more…He is a Bong....good.... Bongs are superior class in India....I am Proud.
There are more darknesses in India than the ones chronicled in The White Tiger.
