Review Article

REVIEW ARTICLE __________________ “The White Tiger” By Arvind Adiga ( Reviewed by Dr Karanam R Rao ) _______________________________________________________________________ _ I don’t ever know what impelled the Booker jury to pick up Mr Arvind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” for the 20008 Award, if only for the simple fact that it’s Mr Adiga’s first book, and that he’s an Indian writer who needed not an unmerited commendation. Neither its narrative nor its technique has the stamp of an expert raconteur whose book bristles with a defiant originality. Then, wherein lies its assumptive greatness? Is it in its surplusage of “details” ? Or in its almost spruced up “tenderness” as the publisher’s blurb claims it has ? The novel centers round the “private life” of Balrams Halwai, the picaresque hero patterned on the typical R.K Narayan character who skims to our view in all Malgudi novels. The son of a rickshaw-puller, Balram lives in the privacy of poverty, and taken away from the school when his father dies. He works in a small-time tea-hotel, and then drafted as a chauffeur to Ashok, the son of his village land-lord. The action of the novel now shifts to Delhi where the criminals and politicians exchange their roles Balram has to take his master from five-star-hotels to the parliamentary streets, and await for his master to return from business. He understands the pathos underlying Ashok’s relationship with his wife Pinky Madam whom he affectionately calls. He becomes a close observer of the various vicissitudes in the life his mentor .Ashok, who turns a psychic desperado when threatened and abused. And when his wife divorces him for some strange reasons, he becomes vulnerable to passion and orgiastic self-seeking. He becomes footloose, starts visiting harlots and throws up money to win favors. This lavish display of emotion and money simply unnerves Balram who till now believed that his master was a paragon of an animal. This morphs Balram into an amiable rogue, and a charlatan who waits to see that Ashok’s “fall” by degrees is his slow ascension into prsumptive glory. And in the end, he murders his master and runs away with his booty to IT’s “maximum city”, Bangalore, to emerge as an entrepreneur. The life-cycle of Balram takes predictable twists and turns, and his emergence as a resolute individual who doesn’t stop with a little success involves his rites de passage into various ramifications of experience where finds a new role to play, and a new avocation to choose. He now understands that the way to “freedom” is through mayhem and murder, and he fits into the scheme so effortlessly that one has almost forgotten to examine the inklings of Balram’s aspirations and flamboyant passion for the luxuriant life that puts him into donning the role of a murderer out of sheer incumbency. Somehow, he’s akin to many of the amiable rogues we are familiar with. And as I said earlier, Mr Adiga has attempted to craft another “ Continent of Circe”, but fails to weave around it a nuanced and filigreed

grace that would have turned it an enduring fictional work. It leaves me with an uneasy suspicion and a feeling of helplessness to accredit Adiga’s novel as a tour de force.