Cite this Essay
MLA:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online, 17 April 2023, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .
Chicago:
Anjaria, Ulka. “Aravind Adiga.” Indian Writing In English Online. April 17, 2023. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/aravind-adiga-ulka-anjaria/ .
“What we Indians want in literature, at least the kind written in English, is not literature at all, but flattery. We want to see ourselves depicted as soulful, sensitive, profound, valorous, wounded, tolerant and funny beings… But the truth is, we are absolutely nothing of that kind… We are animals of the jungle, who will eat our neighbour’s children in five minutes, and our own in ten.”
—Aravind Adiga, Selection Day (233)
Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Chennai, and completed his schooling and advanced degrees in India, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He is best known for his novel The White Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 2008. He is also the author of several short stories as well as three additional novels: Last Man in Tower (2011), Selection Day (2016), and Amnesty (2020).
The White Tiger broke new ground in Indian English fiction for its move away from some of the genre’s common themes and aesthetics. In contrast to the writings of previous Indian winners of the Booker Prize, The White Tiger noticeably eschews pathos and rejects the sensitive and emphatic portrayal of characters from marginalized sections of society as seen in the writings of Rohinton Mistry, and the righteous sense of injustice or anger against the system as seen in Arundhati Roy. Rather, Balram Halwai, The White Tiger’s protagonist, is a ruthless self-promoter, his frustrations at the obstacles put in the path of his social advancement generating a sense of gritty motivation that leads him to become a social climber at all costs. He uses the language of late capitalism to articulate his own aspirations; he is a self-styled “entrepreneur” (1). He is a member of an underclass that does not seek pity or empathy but faces challenges with a hard-nosed pragmatism that is at once cynical and agentive. If some of the most famous Indian novels in English of the 1980s and 1990s reflect a profound disillusionment with the failures of the Indian nation-state, Adiga’s works mark a newer era in the genre, which we might call post-disillusion, when there is nothing of the illusion left at all and so rather than lament its loss the only thing to do is pick up the pieces and stitch together a livable life from them.
The White Tiger is set in a contemporary India that has been stripped of its moral values. Any symbol or model of moral righteousness – Gandhi, Nehru, literary icons, spiritualism, secularism, socialism – is presented in his works through a cynical gaze, upturning conventional morality so that, at its extreme, right is wrong and wrong is right. For instance when Balram walks into a tea shop for his first day at work, he sees the shopkeeper “sitting under a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, and [he] knew already that [he] was going to be in big trouble” (31); the image of Gandhi, which might have once signaled virtue, now represents its opposite. Balram scoffs at the men working in tea shops in rural India who “do [their] job well – with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt” (43), aware that their hard work will get them nowhere in life. By contrast, Balram claims, “I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience” (43), while this is a humorous inversion of conventional ideas of education and enrichment, it is also a perceptive critique of the limitations on social advancement in contemporary India, where if you’re poor or otherwise marginalized, hard work is futile. Instead, Balram “used [his] time at the tea shop… to spy on every customer at every table, and overhear everything they said. [He] decided that this was how [he] would keep [his] education going forward” (43). Balram presents street smarts and cleverness, rather than belief in the virtue of labor, as the only option for social mobility in a profoundly broken system.
Although The White Tiger advances a social critique, there is no hope of reform; patriarchy, capitalism, casteism, greed and selfishness have so completely taken over that the only “hope” (which is in fact a cynical gloss on hope) is to bend these forces to one’s advantage. Thus, victimhood can become agency, even if that agency involves theft and murder. In The White Tiger, Adiga replaces the bleak/fatalistic attitude of an earlier generation of Indian writers in English with a more cynical/pragmatic perspective that is always on the lookout for an opportunity for breaking out of one’s social circumstances but is not at all interested in reforming the whole system. For this reason, The White Tiger has been criticized by some scholars as being neoliberal –celebrating a rags-to-riches, bootstraps narrative rather than offering a concerted critique of structural inequalities. Certainly, there is very little that is Marxist about The White Tiger; there is no class solidarity and the narrative of advancement is not only individualistic but actively anti-collective. This is less a progressive critique of capitalism than a perceptive recognition of a new world order in which the very possibilities for subaltern advancement have already been tainted by half-a-century of corruption that has saturated the very fibers of Indian society.
Indeed, one wonders if these critiques of The White Tiger had some influence in shaping the direction of Adiga’s subsequent novels. In all three, the cynicism is still there, as are characters who have no moral compass and who, like Balram, reject the language of liberalism and act in extremely self-serving and socially destructive ways. However, in contrast to The White Tiger, at the center of each of the three later novels is a protagonist who has a heart and who does his (they are all men) best to resist the forces of the deeply corrupt world around him. While Balram found criminality as the only path forward in a nation of criminals, the protagonists of the other novels try to remain ethical despite the pressures around them.
Last Man in Tower’s Masterji is a former teacher and elderly resident of a Mumbai apartment building targeted by a builder for redevelopment, providing that all owners agree to the deal. The rest of the residents are gradually convinced, but Masterji remains steadfast in his refusal to sell, partly because of the memories of his deceased wife that still pervade his flat. The other residents get impatient as the deadline comes closer, and in a bid to get the deal through, one of them pushes Masterji to his death, off the building terrace. In this novel, the middle-class society is represented as thoroughly amoral and materialistic. Though Masterji, tries to stay true to the values of learning, family, and morality, he is ultimately a victim to it.
Selection Day is also set in a world,among characters,completely warped by violence and greed. Radha and Manju are brothers and cricket prodigies. They live with their unemployed, controlling, and at times violent father who treats them as his property. Manju, the younger brother, is the novel’s protagonist. Not only does he grow up in the shadow of his older brother and gradually outshine him in cricket, earning both Radha’s and his father’s anger, but he also finds himself sexually attracted to a wealthy boy, Javed, who treats him alternatingly with affection and disdain. Selection Day is a cricket novel – a critique of the business of cricket in contemporary India, from match fixing to corporate sponsorships to the recruiting industry. Manju resembles Balram in that he too must make compromises to succeed. But unlike Balram, who murders his boss and never faces the consequences, Manju’s denial of his sexuality and his abandonment of Javed for the sake of his cricketing career prove ultimately hollow. Manju remains a sympathetic character throughout, from his childhood when he is the victim of emotional and physical abuse by his father, through his adolescence and the eponymous selection day, and beyond, into his listless adulthood. Unlike Balram, the novel focalizes its narration through Manju, allowing us to glimpse his hazy memories of his mother who left when he was a child, his love of the television show CSI, his secret dream to work in a morgue rather than be a cricketer, his fear of his brother and his father, and his unarticulated desire for Javed. In the midst of the ruthless world in which he lives, and despite his own flaws, Manju remains profoundly human.
Danny, the protagonist of Adiga’s most recent novel Amnesty, is also a sympathetic character in an unforgiving world. As an undocumented Tamil Sri Lankan having escaped the Civil War and state repression, Danny lives in Sydney when the novel begins and works as a house cleaner. The novel takes place over the course of a single day that begins with Danny learning that a former client named Radha Thomas has been murdered. In a series of flashbacks, we learn more about Danny’s strange relationship with Radha and her extramarital lover, Dr. Prakash, who were both gambling addicts and highly unlikeable people. Additionally, they knew of Danny’s illegal status and were using it to try to control him. Danny immediately suspects Dr. Prakash as Radha’s murderer, having witnessed violent arguments between them, but realizes that turning Dr. Prakash in to the police would require implicating himself – living in Australia illegally – to the authorities. Danny struggles with the decision over the course of the day, calling the police hotline several times but ultimately hanging up. Finally, having realized that Dr. Prakash is planning to murder Radha’s husband next, Danny does the right thing. The last page of the novel is a press release that reports the tip that resulted in the arrest of Dr. Prakash and in preventing the second murder, but also notes that “the person who tipped police off on the hotline confessed during questioning to being illegally present in Australia and is now being processed for deportation to his home country”(217). Danny’s sacrifice of his own happiness – contrary to his repeated mantra, “I am never going back home” (207) – exposes, once again, the immorality of the outside world through the foil of a character who is able to act morally despite it.
These various male protagonists who struggle to make it for themselves under the ruthless logic of late capitalism also demonstrate the ways in which Adiga links masculinity and class. We see this in the scene in The White Tiger where Balram tries to imitate Mr. Ashok, his employer by hiring a blonde prostitute. Balram is devastated when he discovers that her hair is dyed. The fact that the idiom of Balram’s desire for social and economic mobility is that of sex suggests the deep imbrication of class and sexuality. The portrayal of sexuality is more nuanced in Selection Day, where Manju’s burgeoning understanding of his own queer sexuality makes him the target of homophobic taunts from his father and peers, but – and more importantly – gives him a new perspective on ordinary things that allows him, at times, to detach himself from the world around him. In this novel, queerness is presented not only as a question of desire but also as a kind of secret world of survival that enables Manju to develop a sense of self which is at times magically distant from the crude material needs, both bodily and financial, of everyone else around him. Indeed, it is only when he turns his back on his own queerness does his life relapse into mediocrity.
Adiga’s interest in questions of masculinity does not really extend to women, and across the four novels there are very few notable women characters. The White Tiger’s Pinki Madam is a morally reprehensible, wealthy NRI who drives drunk one night, ends up killing someone sleeping on the street, and forces Balram to take the blame. In Amnesty Danny has a healthy relationship with Sonja (probably the only living healthy relationship across all Adiga’s fiction), but the main female presence is the murdered Radha Thomas who appears in Danny’s flashbacks as domineering,manipulative, and entirely reflective of the privilege of her elite class. Yet, while all the female characters verge on caricatures, most of the male characters do as well – the vast majority of characters in Adiga’s fictional worlds are reflections of the corruption of the late capitalist order and have little redeeming about them at all.
Adiga also inhabits a new “transmedia” arena marked by a more complex relationship between literature and other forms of media. Arundhati Roy refused to authorize a screen adaptation of The God of Small Things, and while there have been adaptations of earlier Indian novels in English (perhaps most famously Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the BBC’s recent miniseries A Suitable Boy), the classic IWE texts of the 1990s have rarely been adapted for the screen. But this changed in the first decades of the 21st century, not only with OTT platforms allowing for a wider distribution of varied types of content, but also because authors started writing with adaptation in mind. This is clear in the works of authors such as Chetan Bhagat and Anuja Chauhan, among others, whose fiction reads as somewhat filmi in its characterization, narrative arc, and at times rapid “cuts” between scenes. Both authors’ books have been made into films. Adiga’s novel Selection Day was similarly released as a series by Netflix in 2018, and three years later the film adaptation of The White Tiger was released on the same platform. As Sangita Gopal reminds us, this is not just a question of unidirectionally adapting fiction into film, but of upturning the idea of an original versus an adaptation; a transmedia project means that a film or television series is not a secondary version of an original fiction but that the book too is a version that might find form in another medium. Adiga’s participation in this arena is part of a new moment in Indian literary production in which the sanctity of the book is replaced by a more lateral proliferation of possible forms.[i]
Unlike many contemporary writers, Adiga is a private person who stays largely out of the public domain. He is not active on social media and has never attended the high-profile Jaipur Literary Festival, despite his popularity and the critical acclaim garnered by his works. In this sense he seems to have avoided the pressures that contemporary writers often face to be political commentators as well as practitioners of their craft. But this reclusiveness does not lend his writings a sense of apartness; rather, his stories are marked by their contemporary quality, their grittiness and their refusal of pity or sentiment. For these reasons, his impact on the field of Indian writing in English will continue to grow.
Primary Sources
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. Atlantic Books, 2008.
—. Between the Assassinations. Picador, 2008.
—. Last Man in Tower, Atlantic Books, 2011.
—. Selection Day. Picador, 2016.
—. Amnesty. Scribner, 2020.
Selected Adiga Criticism
Anjaria, Ulka. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture. Temple University Press, 2019.
—. “Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no. 1,2015, pp. 114-137.
Detmers, Ines. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘Condition-of-India Novel.’” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5,2011,pp. 535-545.
Mendes, Ana Cristina. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 275-293.
—. and Lisa Lau. “Hospitality and Amnesty: Aravind Adiga’s Narrative of Legal Liminality.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2022, doi: 10.1080/1369801X.2022.2099940
Shingavi, Snehal. “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 9, no. 3,2014, pp.1-16. https://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/1837.
Walther, Sundhya. “Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 579-598.
[i] Sangita Gopal, “‘Coming to a Multiplex Near You’: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema,” in A History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 359-372.
