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The White Tiger Book Review

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is a satirical, political commentary that shows the bottom-up perspective of those who reside in the underbelly of India. In this case ‘Balram Halwai’ is the main protagonist, who on face value is an unremarkable, lower-caste, rural villager stuck in the chokeholds of the unforgiving hierarchical system of India. Adiga sets about his satirical view of India, by consciously writing out an allegory that employs multiple motifs and metaphors to cartograph India as a land of pre-determined hope or despair. The main crux of the allegory – the Rooster Coop – is a metaphor used to describe the oppression of the elite brought upon India’s destitute, which is only then perpetuated by the poor themselves out of entrenched poliical and cultural subordination. Adiga paints Balram Halwai as the exception, the one who breaks out of this cycle of oppression; however, he loses his moral fabric in exchange.

The book is composed as a letter to the Chinese Premier in Beijing, Wen Jiabao, who is addressed to the ironically named “Capital of the Freedom-loving Nation of China”. The main character, Balram, attempts to write out an exposé of the ‘real India’, almost akin to a whistle-blower stripping back the glossy façade to reveal an ugly and ruthless inside. A way in which Adiga attempts is through the use of the motifs of “Darkness” and “Light”. Balram explains how he was born in the “Darkness” and that “India is two countries in one”. Balram’s identification of the ocean brings ‘light’ to the “well off”, but where he resides is along the path of the “Black River” – the “river of death” which suffocates and stunts every “plant” that is grown there. Politically speaking, Adiga could be attempting a criticism of the various degrees of unequal social mobility. Although the Indian Constitution promises liberty and freedom, and anyone can effectively move to the ‘light’, India does not recognize the dire need for equity in these rural areas. The suffocating and stunted plants near the river are symbolic and representative of the people who reside within these rural and cut-off areas, they are not able to flourish on the social ladder or reach the full potential that lies ahead of them. The “black” and “sticky” river that “traps” is indicative of the pre-determined nature of these people and their inability to thrive in the conditions they find themselves in. The “river”, symbolic of the system – the lifeline - itself has failed them from the ground up. This sets a profound precedent in which Balram at first feels institutionalized in his fixed position in society.

This of course opens a psychological discourse of the dichotomy between ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’, another competing source of political misfortune in India, which Balram is symbolic of escaping from, the exception in the cycle of oppression. The caste system is front and centre to this dichotomy, with Balram admitting ‘my caste – my destiny”. Where caste was once a complex system of entrenched hierarchies, which the British Raj reinforced to classify the population, Balram believes he is now living in a simpler time of caste system: “men with big bellies and men with small bellies”. The White Tiger’s exploration of caste again takes a satirical turn in this way, as we can interpret this as the advent of global capitalism, simplifying hierarchy into means of consumption, what we have and what we don’t and of course the means of production. Balram and his family are subordinated to the upper-caste landlords, the ‘Animals’, which terrorize the village over their control of the agricultural land and therefore their means to a living. Politically speaking we can talk about the threat of democratic backsliding in India, but the idea of liberal democracy itself is but an abstract image in the eyes of the destitute, many of whom are trapped within the ‘Rooster Coop’ with the fences of caste and wealth disparity paralyzing them. The idea of a pre-determined fate in India is all too prevalent. The character of Ashok, the wealthy son of the Stork, is a reluctant but accountable individual in bribing corrupt politicians for leverage. Like the motif of the “black river” before, the source that Indians look to for benevolence has been poisoned and corrupted in the pursuit of the capitalist interests of the few – the most contemporary representation of this being the mass Farmer's Protest.

Balram’s escape from the ‘Rooster Coop’ is an idealization of freedom. Balram spits on the ground as he sees his village from afar, where the abandoned Black Fort represents the mystical and colonial past, his vantage point points toward the landlord’s mansion, a source of burden and heavy taxation, and the “glistening line of sewage” – representative of the rural degradation villages suffer as a source of egregious extraction and plunder. This harks back to the British Raj where only the upper-class elite was granted immunity from the harsh realities of imperialism. Balram’s escape from this is then remarkable, he is trapped under the remnants of a feudal system, and therefore his steps towards freedom would not be without consequence – losing his family as a safety net, but also not being there as a source of income for them anymore.

The White Tiger, although an escape from the true grounded realities of India, is still a profound satirical representation of India. The allegory of the ‘Rooster Coop’ is a constant throughout the book, which highlights the institutionalization of oppression itself within the poor, highlighting the lack of a means to social mobility whilst also subordinated by hierarchical social forces. Balram Halwai, the ‘White Tiger’, himself is a unique individual within a story of symbolic caricatures who represent the elite. Balram having to kill his ‘oppressor’ to ultimately emulate the capitalist elite he was subordinated under is ironic within itself and ultimately serves as a lesson in the perpetual cycle of oppression that is the ‘Rooster Coop’ – it is harrowingly “eat or get eaten up”.

Bibliography

Adiga, A., 2008. The White Tiger. 2nd ed. London: Atlantic Books.