The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Summary
Balram Halwai writes seven letters to the Premier of China, who is shortly to visit Bangalore, because he feels the Premier should hear about Indian entrepreneurship from someone who has actually managed it. Over the course of the letters he explains how a sweet maker's son from a village in the Darkness became a driver in Delhi, and how he came to own a taxi company, and what he did in between, which was to cut his employer's throat with a broken whisky bottle.
Adiga gives the whole book to that voice: sardonic, wheedling, self justifying, extremely funny, and entirely unrepentant. Balram calls the servant class the Rooster Coop and is interested in why nobody ever escapes it, having noticed that the cage is not locked.
It is a fast, angry novel about caste, corruption and the two Indias, written against the software boom optimism of the period, and it does not offer anyone the comfort of a sympathetic poor man.
Expect satire rather than realism. Critics in India argued at the time that Adiga was writing poverty for foreign readers, and that argument is worth knowing about. What is not in dispute is the propulsion of the voice, which carries you through in two or three sittings.
Good for readers who want an entry point to contemporary Indian fiction without committing to a nine hundred page family saga, and for anyone who enjoyed the nastier registers of Martin Amis. Not a book that likes anybody in it. It runs to about three hundred pages and never slackens.
Historical Context & Significance
The White Tiger won the Booker Prize in 2008. It was Aravind Adiga's debut novel and he was thirty three, one of the youngest winners.
He was the fourth writer born in India to take the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, whose win had come only two years earlier. The Indian hardback went on to sell more than two hundred thousand copies, an extraordinary figure for literary fiction in that market and largely attributable to the prize.
The novel arrived in the middle of an argument about how India was being written for export, and Adiga was accused by some Indian critics of trading in squalor for a western readership. He was equally defended as the first novelist in years to write about the servant class without sentimentality. A film adaptation followed in 2021.