Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:
From Zoo to Jungle
E-mail – john.masterson@wits.ac.za
Office - SH3011
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Aravind Adiga
Approach to be taken in these lectures
• Text in Context
• How and why can sensitive engagement with
novel serve as springboard into much wider
contextual debates?
• More substantial sense of what we mean by
context – historical, geographical, economic,
political, ideological, cultural, literary et al.
Key Areas to be covered in lectures
• 1st lecture – introduction to Adiga and The White
Tiger.
• Introduce key debates concerning production,
consumption and reception of text as well as
audience for it.
• Overview of certain key stylistic/formal features –
narrative voice, questions of genre, reliance on
certain ‘conceits,’ dominant motifs used to
structure the novel et al.
• Significance of title given to lecture series.
Key areas continued
• Consideration of interdisciplinary appeal of The
White Tiger? What does it focus on and why?
• What features make the novel very much a
‘product’ of the 21st century?
• How does it relate to the previous two texts you
have looked at this quarter?
• How do we figure The White Tiger in relation to
‘development’ of Indian-Anglophone literature in
late 20th and early 21st centuries? The Dark Turn?
The White Tiger, p.206
• Standing around books, even books in a
foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity
buzzing up towards you … It just happens, the
way you get erect around girls wearing tight
jeans.
Except here what happens is that your brain
starts to hum.
Key issues to be considered
throughout lectures
• The White Tiger and the “politics” of literary
prizes.
• Impact of and critical debates sparked by Adiga’s
Booker Prize win in 2008. £50,000.
• The branding/marketing of texts and authors.
• Cult of literary celebrity?
• Authors as brands?
• To what extent does award of such a prize,
particularly for a debut novelist (also think of
Arundhati Roy), prove help or hindrance?
Literary Prizes – The Book as
Commodity
• What are the criteria upon which awards of
literary prizes are based?
• What would yours be?
• Why are literary “value judgements” often so
contested?
• Literary prizes in the postcolonial era? The
politics of cultural redress? Think about winners
of the Nobel Prize for Literature over past 40
years.
• The Empire Writes Back?
Communication – The Exploded View
• Text and technology. Consider key debates
concerning ‘print culture’ in novel. Books and
electronic communication?
• The e-mail conceit of The White Tiger –
distinctive mode of narrative delivery.
• What will be the first Facebook or Twitter
novel?
• Adiga and the function of the author
webpage.
• Information – access – technology and the
globalized communication
Chinese Prime Minister - Wen Jiabao
Aravind Adiga’s Official Website
•http://www.aravind
adiga.com
Aravind Adiga Biographical Information
• Aravind Adiga was born in 1974 in Madras (now
called Chennai), and grew up in Mangalore in the
south of India. He was educated at Columbia
University in New York and Magdalen College,
Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications
such as the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the
Financial Times, and the Times of India. His first
novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker
Prize for fiction in 2008. His most recent novel,
Last Man in Tower, was published in 2011.
Marketing of all subsequent texts in light of 2008 Booker Win?
Amitava Kumar in The Boston Review,
November/December 2008
• “After university [Adiga] returned to India,
where for three years he worked as TIME’s
correspondent before quitting to write fiction.
Adiga told me that his novel is the fruit of his
labors as a reporter in India. He traveled to
various parts of the country, including places
whose backwardness shocked his sensibility.
The White Tiger is his rebuke of the cheerful,
and false, notion of a new, transformed India.”
Impact of Adiga’s Professional
Background on The White Tiger
• Time Magazine’s Asia/India correspondent between
2003 and 2005.
• What stories are and ARE NOT told, both in fiction and
non-fiction?
• Encounter that provides impetus for novel taking place
in Kolkata.
• Adiga - “Since I knew nothing of a rickshaw-puller’s life,
I explained, I would like to meet him every evening,
after he was done with his work, for perhaps a week .
“You can come for a year if you want,” he said. “No
one has ever wanted to talk to me before.”
Adiga and the Indian ‘Professional’
Diaspora
• From article ‘City of the white tiger’
• “India, to which I returned in 2003 after 12
years abroad, was a sequence of shocks.”
• Consider the significance of these New York,
Oxford, Delhi negotiations when it comes to
thinking of Adiga’s authorial ‘vision’ as
evidenced by The White Tiger.
Global Poverty Levels
Link to Key Preoccupations in The
White Tiger
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Visibility/invisibility
Communication/miscommunication
Voice/voicelessness
Subalternity and silence
Revelation/concealment
Exposure/evasion
One of the most significant of all – 2 Indias in
1 – Light/Darkness
From Adiga’s ‘Taking Heart From The Darkness,’ in Tehelka
Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue, 38, 27.9.2008
• Rickshaw-puller – “This place may seem like
an animal’s abode to you, but for someone
like me, who has learnt to speak and think in
the city, home [a village in Bihar] is darkness:
and this Kolkata is like light.”
• Adiga’s conclusion to article – “I couldn’t
convince any newspaper to take my article on
the rickshaw-pullers of Kolkata. But in
December [2006], when I returned to The
White Tiger, what I had heard in that shed in
Kolkata came back to me in a flood.”
Significance of Titles – Novel and
Lectures
• Importance of animal imagery throughout
text. Why?
• Figurative significance?
• From Zoo to Jungle.
• From Darwinism to Social Darwinism – why
does this play such an important role
throughout The White Tiger?
The White Tiger and Questions of
Genre
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Bildungsroman?
Black comedy?
Crime Novel?
Indictment?
Literature and the interrogative function?
Lament?
The Anti-Hero? To be continued …
Description of The White Tiger
• From introduction to Adiga’s article, ‘Taking
Heart From The Darkness’
• The novel is a “worm’s-eye perspective of the
vast class gap in contemporary India.”
Literary Influence and The White
Tiger?
• From Adiga’s ‘How English literature shaped
me,’ published in The Independent, 17.7.09
• “[Agatha Christie] was fascinating for a while,
introducing me to the revolutionary idea that
a killer could narrate a novel … before she
bored me too.”
• Again, what stories can and cannot be told –
AND BY WHOM?
From Robbie B. H. Goh’s ‘Narrating Dark India in Londonstani and The White Tiger:
Sustaining Identity in the Diaspora,’ published in The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 2011, 46: 237
• Discussing more recent Indian English writing
and writers – “Indian Anglophone fiction takes
as it were a “dark” turn, in which the usual
themes (corruption, social injustice,
communalism and factionalism) are worked
out, but without the accompanying affection
for characters and human nature, and the
hope for the redemption of the community,
that is seen in the older generation of writers
in English.”
Goh on Arundhati Roy and potential
connections with Adiga
• “In 1997 Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of
Small Things – certainly a no-holds-barred look at
hypocrisy and social injustice … Like Roy, other
liberal and highly-educated Indians, including
many in the diaspora, have become increasingly
frustrated and increasingly critical of the Indian
socio-political condition, their sense of a systemic
problem in India overwhelming any sense of
optimism and any willingness to romanticize
localized events and personalities.”
The White Tiger and Its Controversies
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•
•
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Language
Violence
Sex
Voice and “authenticity”
Critiques of religious and cultural belief
systems – Hinduism and the caste system in
particular.
• Interrogative literature and the breaking of
taboos?
• How subversive/transgressive is the book?
Mangalore and Outsourcing
• ‘How English literature shaped me’ – “The
world has flooded into Mangalore. India’s
great economic boom, the arrival of the
internet and outsourcing, have broken the
wall between India and the world.”
• From The White Tiger to Tiger Economies?
From the high growth driven by Asian tiger
economies to the emergence of giants India and
China, the region has continued to be a centre of
immense activity, said Commander of the US Pacific
Command, Admiral Robert Willard
[Indian] Prime
Minister Manmohan
Singh with US
President Barack
Obama at a G20
meeting
The White Tiger, p.206
• Standing around books, even books in a
foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity
buzzing up towards you … It just happens, the
way you get erect around girls wearing tight
jeans.
Except here what happens is that your brain
starts to hum.
Daniel Barenboim, Foreword to Edward Said’s Music at
the Limits
• “The genius attends to detail as though it
were the most important thing and, in so
doing, does not lose sight of the big
picture; in fact, this attention to detail
enables him to manifest his vision of the
big picture. In music, as in thought, the
big picture must be the result of the
precise coordination of small details.”