Poor-Rich divide in Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”.

Name: Bhatt Urvi P.

Role No. : 31

Std: M.A-2 (Sem-4)

Paper no. : 13

Paper Name: The New Literature

Topic name: Poor-Rich divide in Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”.

Submitted to: S. B. Gardi Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Gmail ID: bhatt.urvi22@gmail.com

Poor-Rich divide in Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”.

v About Aravind Adiga:

                            Aravind Adiga [born- 23^rd October, 1974] is an Indian-Australian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. He began journalist, interning at the financial Times. Ha is the fourth Indian author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai (though born outside India). 

                      In April 2009 it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a feature film. Propelled mainly by the Booker Prize win, The White Tiger’s Indian hardcover edition has sold in excess of 200,000 copies.

                      In an interview a question was asked to the author, about the inspiration of the protagonist’s character:

Que : From where did the inspiration for Balram Halwai come? How did you capture his voice?

Ans:  Balram Halwai is a composite of various men I've met when traveling through India. I spend a lot my time loitering about train stations, or bus stations, or servants quarters and slums, and I listen and talk to the people around me. There’s a kind of noise never gets recorded. Balram is what you’d hear if one day the drains and faucets in your house started talking. 

               Another question is related with the portrayal of upper class characters:

Que: Although, Ashok has his redeeming characteristics, for the most part your portrayal of him, his family, and other members of the upper class is harsh. Is the corruption as rife as it seems, and will the nature of the upper class change or be preserved by the economic changes in India?

Ans: Just ask any Indian, rich or poor, about corruption here. It’s bad. It shows no sign of going away, either. As to what lies in India’s future…that’s one of the hardest questions in the world to answer.

 

v Plot overview:

                Balram Halwai narrates his life in a letter, written in seven consecutive nights and addressed to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. In his letter, Balram explains how he, the son of a rickshaw puller, escaped a life of servitude to become a successful businessman, describing himself as an entrepreneur.

          Balram was born in the rural village of Laxmangarh, where he lived with his grandmother, parents, brother and extended family. He is a smart child but is forced to leave school in order to help pay for his cousin-sister's dowry and begins to work in a tea-shop with his brother in Dhanbad. While working there he begins to learn about India's government and economy from the customers' conversations. Balram describes himself as a bad servant and decides to become a driver.

                After learning how to drive, Balram finds a job driving Ashok, the son of one of Laxmangarh's landlords. He stops sending money back to his family and disrespects his grandmother during a trip back to his village. Balram moves to New Delhi with Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam. Throughout their time in Delhi, Balram is exposed to extensive corruption, especially in the government. In Delhi, the contrast between the poor and the wealthy is made even more evident by their proximity to one another.

                One night Pinky Madam takes the wheel from Balram, while drunk, hits something in the road and drives away; we are left to assume that she has killed a child. Ashok’s family puts pressure on Balram to confess that he had been driving alone. Ashok becomes increasingly involved in bribing government officials for the benefit of the family coal business. Balram then decides that killing Ashok will be the only way to escape India's Rooster Coop. After bludgeoning Ashok with a bottle and stealing a large bribe, Balram moves to Bangalore, where he bribes the police in order to help start his own taxi business. When one of his drivers kills a bike messenger, Balram pays off the family. Balram explains that his own family was almost certainly killed by Ashok's relatives as retribution for his murder. At the end of the novel, Balram rationalizes his actions and considers that his freedom is worth the lives of his family and of Ashok.

[Wikipedia]

v The White Tiger- A Realist Picture of New India by Amarjeet Nayak

                    Adiga’s novel is a trenchant critique of contemporary India. India is emerging as a powerful country in the globalized world. He talks about the progress in almost all the fields but behind this bright shine there are billions who are deprived of basic necessities of life. The novelist exposes and explores this grim facet of Indian life. The novel presents the negative aspects of modern India through a narrator in a humorous way. Because of the Globalization the economic growth has accelerated but the rich-poor gap has widened.

                      The novel undertakes the extraordinarily difficult task of gaining and holding the reader’s sympathy for a thorough going villain. The Narrator says,-

“The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.”     

                   The novel is a study of metamorphosis of an uneducated chauffer. It’s written in confessional mood. He communicates to the communist leader the rags-to-riches story of his own life as a microcosm of the ‘new India’. The seven night actions cover the whole life span of Balram which has brought important change in his life. Balram becomes ‘entrepreneur’; the word refers to a person who takes risk in order to make profit.

                The undercurrent of this simple story of murder is sufferings of poor Balram. He curses his poverty and lack of education-

“Why had my father raised me to live like an animal?”

                    Adiga deals with the psyche of a poor Indian who is not able to materialize his dream. His character’s pain is revealed-

“All my life I have been treated like donkey. All I want is that one son of mine- at least one- should live like a man.”

                   Balram’s two remarks about the city (Delhi) are

ü  Unsystematic housing lane and traffic

ü  The second one is people live like animals in a forest do. Minute description of urban and rural life is remarkable.

                    The novelist exposes how money given for students meal is manipulated and stolen by teachers, how the uniforms are stolen and sold by teachers on the pretext of their poor salary, how free coal can be arranged from government mines by paying regular installment of bribe, how culprits and criminals protect themselves by grassing the palm of carried out openly and brazenly. In Delhi Balram explores ‘new India’. Gradually he adopts Ashok’s living style. He starts drinking and going to red areas. This is how villagers are eager to live the city life. Adiga writes about two destinies- eat or get eaten. Like Macbeth to lead a lavish life like wealthy, Balram killed Ashok. 

                  Through the heinous act of the protagonist, the novelist warms the society that the increasing gap between upper and lower class may produce many criminals like Balram. He further hints to stop corruption at all the levels, create social awareness and close monitoring of functioning of the government machinery.

Speaking on the servant-master relationship, Adiga says:

                  Balram Halwai, is presented as a modern Indian hero, in the midst of the economic prosperity of India in the recent past. Balram is representative of the poor in India yearning for their ‘tomorrow’. His story is a parable of the new India with a distinctly macabre twist. He is not only an entrepreneur but also a roguish criminal remarkably capable of self-justification. The background against which he operates is one of corruption, inequality and poverty.

      Social discontent and violence has been on the rise. What Adiga highlights is the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor and the economic system that lets a small minority to prosper at the expense of the majority. It has been pointed out that the period since the neoliberal economic reforms were introduced in India, there has been greater economic disparity. Aravid Adiga’s story of a rickshawallah’s move from the “darkness” of rural India to the “light” of urban Gurgaon reminds us of the harsh facts behind the fiction.

      Balram becomes a true professional busy handling crisis situations sitting in his office. He recalls what poet Mirza Ghalib wrote about slaves:

“They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in the world”.

His thirst for freedom came alive when he visited his native village while Mr. Ashok and wife Pinky went on an excursion.…It was a very important trip for me… while Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam were relaxing…I swam through the pond, walked up the hill…and entered the Black Fort for the first time…Putting my foot on the wall, I looked down on the village from there. My little Laxmangarh. I saw the temple tower, the market, the glistening line of sewage, the landlords’ mansion and my own house, with that dark little cloud outside the water buffalo. It looked like the most beautiful sight on earth. I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction of my village and then I did something too disgusting to describe to you. Well actually, I spat. Again and again. And then, whistling and humming, I went back down the hill. Eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.

 His schooling in crime begins with the reading of Murder Weekly as all drivers do, to while away their time.

         He feels degraded as a human being, deprived of basic human rights to enter a shopping mall. A poor driver couldn’t enter a mall as he belonged to the poor class. If he walked into the mall someone would say,

                He knows full well that Ashok comes from a caste of cooks and yet now he has to serve the wretch who is moneyed. He decides to break out of this fate of the poor in India, as from a Rooster Coop.

Ashok spent a lot of time visiting malls, along with Pinky Madam, his wife and Mongoose. Balram’s job was also to carry all the shopping bags as they came out of the malls. The mean and stingy behavior of the rich is shown through the lost coin episode where Mongoose insults Balram for not having retrieved a rupee coin he lost while getting out of the car. He was so bothered about a rupee coin after bribing someone with a million rupees:

                       ‘Get down on your knees. Look for it on the floor of the car.’ I got down on my knees. I sniffed in between the mats like a dog, all in search of that one rupee. ‘What do you mean, it’s not there? Don’t think you can steal from us just because you’re in the city. I want that rupee.’

        Where that rupee coin went remains a mystery to me to this day, Mr. Premier. Finally, I took a rupee coin out of my shirt pocket, dropped it on the floor of the car, picked it up, and gave it to the Mongoose.

Such mean behavior of the masters continues when they instruct the servants about does and don’ts. Balram is told never to switch on the AC or play music when he is alone. Taunting Balram for his lack of an English education was great fun for Ashok and Pinky Madam. It patched up their quarrels. When he mispronounced “Maal” for “mall” they had their ironic laughter.

When Pinky Madam left Ashok suddenly in a rage, Balram had driven her to the airport in the middle of the night for which he was rewarded with a fat brown envelop filled with forty-seven hundred rupees. Introspecting on the tip Balram recounts: Forty-seven hundred rupees….Odd sum of money wasn’t it? There was a mystery to be solved here. He is educated in the mean ways of the rich which he imbibes himself in course of time. Balram, a victim of rich-poor divide, reverses the role and becomes ‘master like servant’. When he is alone he takes pleasure in masochisms.

While in Delhi Balram experiences the two kinds of India with those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, through his criminal drive Balram becomes a businessman and runs a car service for the call centers in Bangalore. The protagonist confirms that the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy. This is paradox and a mystery of India. Because Indians are the world’s most honest people… No. It’s because 99.9 per cent of us are caught in the Rooster coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market.

Balram wants to escape from the Rooster Coop. Having been a witness to all of Ashoke’s corrupt practices and gambling with money to buy politicians, to kill and to loot, he decides to steal and kill. Adiga delves deep into his subconscious as he plans to loot Rs.700, 000 stuffed into the red bag.

Go on, just look at the red bag, Balram – that’s not stealing, is it?

I shook my head. And even you were to steal it, Balram, it wouldn’t be stealing. Balram’s comment on the two puddles of red spat out by a paan chewing driver, discloses his mental frame:

The left-hand puddle of spit seemed to say:	But the right-hand puddle of split seemed to say:
Your father wanted you to be an honest man	Your father wanted to be a man
Mr. Ashok does not hit you or spit on you, you people did to your father.	Mr. Ashok made you take the blame when his wife killed that child on the road.
Mr. Ashok plays you well, 4,000 rupees a month. He has been raising your salary without your even asking.	This is a pittance. You live in a city. What do you save? Nothing.
Remember what the Buffalo did to his servant’s family. Mr. Ashok will ask his father to do the same to your family once you run away.	The very fact that Mr. Ashok threatens your family makes your blood boil!

                                  There is perfect communication gap between the two. This is symbolic of the rich-poor divide that is fermenting to take revenge. Balram’s plans are confirmed while visiting the National Zoo in Delhi.

He tells Dharam:

 

                  Balram sounds very pragmatic. His philosophy of individualism comes close to Mr. Ashoke’s Machiavellianism. He prompts his drivers to imitate him if they wished to succeed in life, becoming White Tigers. He dreams of establishing a school for poor children in Bangalore where he could train them in facts of life:

               A school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore!

In portraying the character of Balram, Adiga has excelled in projecting a typical psychopath / sociopath, our society can churn out.

     As Adiga says:

 

                                   Poverty trends in India have been debated by those claiming decline in poverty and those disproving it. Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze in their thought provoking essay “Poverty and Inequality in India: A Re-examination” state that some claim that the  have been a period of unprecedented improvement in living standards, while others argue that the period has been marked by widespread impoverishment.

               The novel is an excellent social commentary on the poor rich divide in India. Balram represents the downtrodden sections of our society juxtaposed against the rich. Deirdre Donahue labels The White Tiger an angry novel about injustice and power which creates merciless thugs among whom only the ruthless can survive.