There is also an excellent review by Sanjay Subrahmanyam at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/diary
On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 1:01 AM, Jogesh Motwani <jogeshmotw...@gmail.com>wrote: > > > Indians have won two prestigious global awards this year, Adiga the > Booker and Rehman the Oscar, both for genuinely mediocre work. Rehman is a > versatile genius who was ironically honoured for possibly his least creative > work, but he did not 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 *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> > *. > > > > > > >
