Indians have won two prestigious global awards this year, Adiga the Booker and Rehman the Oscar, for genuinely mediocre work. Rehman is a versatile genius who was ironically honoured for possibly his least creative work, but he din't have much control over the circumstances that wrought the award, and hopefully it wont tarnish his image much, but in Adiga's case, its hard to see him maturing into anything but a global Chetan Bhagat. This review does full justice to his work. - ZADesk The double darkness of Aravind Adiga's *The White Tiger* by Chandrahas Choudhury
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2008/05/double-darkness-of-aravind-adigas-white.html ** *A shorter version of this piece appeared in Mint<http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/10000011/In-the-dark.html> .* <http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_YEO7o3p6AAQ/SCfNwBVZWaI/AAAAAAAAAPU/lKg_e-xNIE4/s1600-h/The+White+Tiger.jpg>When compared to the journalist or the scholar, the fiction writer seems absurdly free. He or she can construct a story in any way he chooses. His characters have freedom to say whatever they like – in fact they are most persuasive when we feel them to be “free” of an authorial hand. All we demand in return is not that the story be true but that it be *plausible* - that it not give the appearance of being contrived. But this requirement shows us that the fiction writer’s freedom is actually a difficult freedom. Constructing a plausible story from scratch – a story in which narration, dialogue, and plot construction work together to produce the effect of lived experience – can be harder than reporting or analysing a true story. This is the reason why, when judged by the highest standards, most novels are failures, some are honorable failures, and few are successes. Fiction writers can misuse their freedom through simple incompetence, or by manipulative plotting, or by a failure to imaginatively realise the inner lives of their characters, or by simplified and schematic thinking that waters down the complexity of the world. Aravind Adiga’s novel *The White Tiger* <http://www.harpercollins.co.in/BookDetail.asp?Book_Code=1891> seems especially instructive in this regard, because it seems to me to be culpable in all the ways mentioned above. *The White Tiger* takes the form of a series of letters addressed by an entrepreneur, Balram Halwai, to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. It is a slick monologue somewhat reminiscent of Mohsin Hamid’s *The Reluctant Fundamentalist<http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/04/on-mohsin-hamids-reluctant.html> *, but while Hamid’s protagonist Changez addresses the *reader*, Balram addresses Wen for no plausible reason: why not Ratan Tata or Rahul Bajaj instead?. Over the course of seven nights, Balram tells Wen the story of how he was for long a denizen of “the Darkness” and how, after murdering his employer, he made good. Some other reviews of Adiga’s novel have praised Balram’s cynical, worldweary voice as a refreshing view-from-below, an antidote to romantic thinking about “the new India”. But they ignore the extent to which *The White Tiger* itself participates in the perpetuation of simple binaries. “Please understand, Your Excellency,” declares Balram to Wen, “that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness”. The two most conspicuous words in the narrative are “malls” (prosperous, materialistic urban India) and “the Darkness” (benighted, suffering rural India), a realm of rapacious landlords, corrupt politicians, and fatalistic citizens reconciled to living in “the coop”. Elections in the Darkness are always rigged. “I am India’s most faithful voter, and I have still not seen the inside of a voting booth,” declares Balram. “I’ve heard that people in the other India get to vote for themselves,” says Balram’s father. Balram’s village, Laxmangarh, has many malnourished children with eyes that shine “like the guilty conscience of the government of India”. Now it is certainly true that India’s malnourished children are an indictment of government. But would a man like Balram – himself a murderer and a corrupt entrepreneur who knows how to work the system – conceptualise a situation in these terms? Or is this just Adiga speaking to the reader over the head of his character, trying to score some points for being a bleeding heart? Would a man like Balram, who calls himself a "half-baked man" because he was never allowed to complete his schooling, be able to declare, as Balram does, that "Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia"? We are never quite sure what to make of Balram, because Adiga cannot convincingly inhabit the voice or perspective of a hick from the hinterland. We get not Balram, but Adiga/Balram, and we find the sometimes attractive cynicism of the character ("There are three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever") mixed up with the manipulative cynicism of the novelist, who is not willing to set realistic limits on the character's imagination. Among the many problems in *The White Tiger* – the literary problems engendered by the peculiar way in which the book is written, not the problems of all the desperate Indian people in “the Darkness” – is that of dialogue. Now, dialogue is almost always a knotty issue for the Indian novelist writing in English, because it requires a kind of translation of speech that Indian readers, at least, would recognise is not emanating from a speaker of English. The challenge for the Indian novelist then is to bend or tint his English in such a way that it suggests something of the character’s background, the register and the stresses of his speech, and the limits of his vocabulary in a productive way. That is to say, his challenge, if he is working broadly within the conventions of the realist novel, is the challenge posed by *all*dialogue, with one additional factor thrown in: the sense that this is an analogue of speech in the character’s native tongue. In this sense his attitude towards dialogue might be helpfully understood as being similar to the attitude of a skilled translator. But there is no evidence in *The White Tiger*, with its long stretches of tepid and predictable exchanges between characters, that Adiga has thought seriously about this issue. As with another contemporary Indian novelist, Manil Suri<http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-manil-suris-age-of-shiva.html>, his lead characters seem peculiarly rootless because they speak in such a way as to elide significant distinctions of class and background: these writers attempt to produce realism in social and political detail without taking the trouble over realism in character. Adiga’s dialogue has a kind of colonial hangover. Early in the novel, we see Balram at his first day at his ramshackle village school, being asked by the teacher for his name. Balram says that neither his mother nor his father ever gave him a name other than his nickname “Munna” (itself an improbable claim). “Well, it’s up to me then, isn’t it?” says the teacher, sounding suspiciously like he himself went to school in England. Because there is already a Ram in the class, the teacher names the boy “Balram”, and asks, “You know who Balram was, don’t you?” Later Balram’s nephew asks him, “Give me a glass of milk, won’t you, Uncle?” At a booze shop in Delhi, Balram gets to the counter and shouts, “Whisky! The cheapest kind! Immediate service – or someone will get hurt, I swear!” Balram’s fellow drivers shout out to him one evening, “Come join us, maharaja of Buckingham!” Adiga knows enough about characters living in “the Light” to throw in a few f-words into their speech (“we have this fucked-up system called parliamentary democracy...”; “What a fucking joke!”). But, just like other denizens of the Light whom Balram criticises, Adiga himself is unable to engage with the Darkness, and is himself in the dark about how a character from this domain might think and speak. The anglicisms of his rustics as they rail about “the Light” might be read as complaints about no one more than the author himself, who patronises them in the same way that their employers patronise them. Adiga’s story actually becomes distasteful in one of the book’s closing scenes. Balram now runs a taxi service in Bangalore under the alias Ashok Sharma. One of his drivers knocks down and kills a youth. Balram/Ashok has contacts with the (inevitably corrupt) police, and gets the case hushed up. As a gesture of charity, he visits the aged parents of the deceased with a compensation of twenty-five thousand rupees. The mother will not take it. But “the old man, the father, was eyeing the envelope”, reports Balram. Eventually they take the money. This scene is reprehensible not because Balram is so despicable, but because of Adiga’s implication that anybody – even parents whose grief is fresh as a wound – can be bought in India as long as the price is right. The other India that *The White Tiger* purports to investigate is certainly grotesque, but Adiga, no less than Balram, feasts upon and exaggerates its grotesquerie. And some posts about recent Indian novels which similarly suffocate their characters: Raj Kamal Jha's *Fireproof* <http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/01/irrelevant-detail-in-fiction-of-raj.html>and Manil Suri's *The Age of Shiva<http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-manil-suris-age-of-shiva.html> ,* and on two novels which realise Adiga's crudely imagined "Darkness" much more successfully: Amitava Kumar's *Home Products* <http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/03/on-amitava-kumars-home-products.html>and Siddharth Chowdhury's *Patna Roughcut<http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2005/12/on-siddharth-chowdhurys-patna-roughcut.html> *.
