Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:
From Zoo to Jungle
Lecture 4 Presentation
E-mail – john.masterson@wits.ac.za
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Representations of Space in The
White Tiger
Literal and Figurative Significance
Power and the Policing of Borders
Consider potential links with South
Africa …
Representations of Space in The White
Tiger
• Literal and figurative significance of particular
buildings – malls, apartment blocks, call centres,
tea-shops, restaurants.
• Politics of inclusion/exclusion? Space as
hierarchical.
• The White Tiger and South African resonance?
• Representations of micro and macro spaces in
text?
• Collisions of the local and global. SPATIALITY =
absolutely key concern throughout the novel.
Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Neocolonialism? Representations of the Nation
Space (pp.21-22)
• (For this land, India, has never been free. First
the Muslims, then the British bossed us
around. In 1947 the British left, but only a
moron would think that we became free
then).
Now the foreigners have long abandoned the
Black Fort, and a tribe of monkeys occupy it.
- From Macro to Micro Spaces in The White
Tiger …
Laxmangarh Fort
Space and Segregation – critical preoccupation
throughout The White Tiger (pp.23-24)
• The rickshaw-pullers parked their vehicles in a line
outside the tea shop, waiting for the bus to disgorge its
passengers.
They were not allowed to sit on the plastic chairs put
out for the customers; they had to crouch near the
back, in that hunched-over, squatting posture common
to servants in every part of India. My father never
crouched – I remember that. He preferred to stand, no
matter how long he had to wait and how
uncomfortable it got for him. I would find him
shirtless, usually alone, drinking tea and thinking.
Rickshaw Pullers in Delhi
Buildings and/as Taxonomies of Power (pp.129-130)
• I don’t know how buildings are designed in your
country, but in India every apartment block, every
house, every hotel is built with servants’ quarters
– sometimes at the back, and sometimes (as in
the case of Buckingham Towers B Block)
underground – a warren of interconnected rooms
where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids,
and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep,
and wait. When our masters wanted us, an
electric bell began to ring throughout the
quarters – we would rush to a board and find a
red light flashing next to the number of the
apartment whose servant was needed upstairs.
• Underground histories? The “worm’s-eye view”?
Taxonomy
1. The science of classification, esp.
of living and extinct organisms
2. A scheme of classification
Representations of the Landlords in
The White Tiger (p.24)
• The Buffalo was one of the landlords in
Laxmangarh. There were three others, and each
had got his name from the peculiarities of
appetite that had been detected in him.
The Stork was a fat man … He owned the river
that flowed outside the village, and he took a cut
of every catch of fish caught by every fisherman
in the river, and a toll from every boatman who
crossed the river to come to our village.
Landlords and The Ordering of Space
(p.25)
• All four of the animals lived in high-walled
mansions just outside Laxmangarh – the
landlords’ quarters. They had their own
temples inside the mansions, and their own
wells and ponds, and did not need to come
out into the village except to feed.
Town View of Laxmangarh
Dark Satire in The White Tiger (p.48)
• There were three black goats sitting on the steps to
the large, faded white building; the stench of goat
faeces wafted out from the open door. The glass in
most of the windows was broken; a cat was staring
out at us from one cracked window.
A sign on the gate said:
LOHIA UNIVERSAL FREE HOSPITAL
PROFOUNDLY INAUGURATED BY THE GREAT
SOCIALIST
A HOLY PROOF THAT HE KEEPS HIS PROMISES
Welcome Home (p.85)
• Kishan had a lot of news for me – and since
this was the Darkness, all of it was bad news.
The Great Socialist was as corrupt as ever. The
fighting between the Naxal terrorists and the
landlords was getting bloodier. Small people
like us were getting caught in between. There
were private armies on each side, going
around to shoot and torture people suspected
of sympathizing with the other.
Representations of the Great Socialist
in The White Tiger (pp.103-104)
• The great man folded his palms and bowed all
around him. He had one of those either/or
faces that all great Indian politicians have.
This face says that it is now at peace – and you
can be at peace too if you follow the owner of
that face. But the same face can also say, with
a little twitch of its features, that it has known
the opposite of peace: and it can make this
other fate yours too, if it so wishes.
Space and Delineations (p.82)
• On the road to Laxmangarh – Everyone stared
at us. Some children began running alongside
the car. Mr Ashok waved at them, and tried to
get Pinky Madam to do the same.
The children disappeared; we had crossed
a line they could not follow us beyond. We
were in the landlords’ quarter.
Indicators of ‘Progress’? Politicians
and Their Priorities (p.96)
• If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage
pipes first, then democracy, then I’d go about
giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to
other people, but what do I know? I’m just a
murderer!
Balram outside the President’s House
(pp.135-136)
• Somewhere inside those domes and towers
that were all around me, the big men of this
country – the prime minister, the president,
top ministers and bureaucrats – were
discussing things, and writing them out, and
stamping papers. Someone was saying,
‘There, five hundred million rupees for that
dam!’, and someone was saying, ‘Fine, attack
Pakistan, then!’
Gurgaon – an American Oasis (pp.121-122)
• Ten years ago, they say, there was nothing in
Gurgaon, just water buffaloes and fat Punjabi
farmers. Today, it’s the modernest suburb of
Delhi. American Express, Microsoft ,all the big
American companies have offices there. The
main road is full of shopping malls – each mall
has a cinema inside! So if Pinky Madam missed
America, this was the best place to bring her.
• Mall as exclusionary space – South African
resonance? “We – a dozen or so chauffeurs –
were waiting for our masters to finish their
shopping. We weren’t allowed inside the mall, of
course – no one had to tell us these things.”
Sigma Mall - Bangalore
Space and Ecology. The Road as Defining Symbol? (pp.137138)
• A man driving a buffalo cart had stopped in front
of us; a pile of empty car engine oil cans fifteen
feet high had been tied by rope to his cart. His
poor water buffalo! To carry all that load – while
sucking in this air!
The autorickshaw driver next to me began to
cough violently – he turned to the side and spat,
three times in a row. Some of the spit flecked the
side of the Honda City. I glared – I raised my fist.
He cringed, and namasted me in apology.
‘It’s like we’re in a concert of spitting!’ Mr
Ashok said, looking at the autorickshaw driver.
Well, if you were out their breathing that acid
air, you’d be spitting like him too, I thought.
An Autorickshaw
The White Tiger
Modes of Transport and
Taxonomies
Delhi, Pollution and the Car as ‘Egg’ (pp.133-134)
• The pollution is so bad that the men on the motorbikes
and scooters have a handkerchief wrapped around their
faces ... as if the whole city were out on a bank heist that
morning.
There was a good reason for the face masks; they say
the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years off a
man’s life. Of course, those in the cars don’t have to
breathe the outside air – it is just nice, cool, clean, airconditioned air for us. With their tinted windows up,
the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads
of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open –
a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches
out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water
bottle onto the road – and then the window goes up,
and the egg is resealed.
Policing Space (p.148)
• The [mall’s] glass doors had opened, but the man
who wanted to go into them could not do so.
The guard at the door had stopped him. He
pointed his stick at the man’s feet and shook his
head – the man had sandals on his feet. All of us
drivers too had sandals on our feet. But everyone
who was allowed into the mall had shoes on their
feet.
Instead of backing off and going away – as
nine in ten in his place would have done – the
man in the sandals exploded, ‘Am I not a human
being too?’
Construction and Globalization (p.158)
• There is construction work in any direction you look in
Delhi. Glass skeletons being raised for malls or office
blocks; rows of gigantic T-shaped concrete supports, like a
line of anvils, where the new bridges or overpasses are
coming up; huge craters being dug for new mansions for
the rich ... ‘The city is going to be like Dubai in five years,
isn’t it?’
‘Five?’ I said contemptuously. ‘In two years!’
‘Look at that yellow crane. It’s a monster.’
It was a monster, sitting at the top with huge metal jaws
alternately gorging and disgorging immense quantities of
mud. Like creatures that had to obey it, men with troughs
of mud on their heads walked in circles around the
machine; they did not look much bigger than mice. Even in
the winter night the sweat had made their shirts stick to
their glistening black bodies.
Reification
The process by which you convert a
person, abstraction etc. mentally into
a thing.
In The White Tiger – where does
animal end and human begin?
Where does human end and machine
begin?
Bangalore
Hotels as status symbols, pp.199-200
• Now, Delhi is full of grand hotels ... but the five-stars of
Delhi are things of mystery to me. I’ve been to all of
them, but I’ve never stepped past the front door of
one. We’re not allowed to do that; there’s usually a fat
guard at the glass door up at the front, a man with a
waxed moustache and beard, who wears a ridiculous
red circus turban and thinks he’s someone important
because the American tourists want to have their
photo taken with him. If he so much as sees a driver
near the hotel, he’ll glare – he’ll shake a finger like a
schoolteacher.
That’s the driver’s fate. Every other servant thinks
he can boss over us.
Space and Class, pp.203-204
• Now, PVR Saket is the scene of a big cinema, which shows ten
or twelve films at the same time, and charges over a hundred
and fifty rupees per film – yes, that’s right, a hundred and fifty
rupees! That’s not all: you’ve also got plenty of places to
drink beer, dance, pick up girls, that sort of thing. A small bit
of America in India.
Beyond the last shining shop begins the second PVR. Every
market in Delhi is two markets in one – there is always a
smaller, grimier mirror image of the real market, tucked
somewhere into a by-lane.
This is the market for the servants. I crossed over to this
second PVR – a line of stinking restaurants, tea stalls, and
giant frying pans where bread was toasted in oil. The men
who work in the cinemas, and who sweep them clean,
come here to eat. The beggars have their homes here.
PVR Saket
The ‘Other’ PVR Saket
Policing Borders – South African
Resonance? (p.222)
• Coloured pieces of glass have been
embedded into the boundary wall of
Buckingham Towers B Block – to
keep robbers out. When headlights
hit them, the shards glow, and the
wall turns into a Technicoloured,
glass-spined monster.
To what extent is The White Tiger all
about boundaries/borders and the
crossing of those borders?
Examples –
Animal/Man
Darkness/Lightness
Rural/Urban
Regressive/Progressive
Local/Global
Immoral/Moral
Those excluded by walls/Those protected by
them
Space, Exercise and the Absurd, p.225
• See, with all these late-night parties, all that drinking
and munching, the rich tend to get fat in Delhi. So they
walk to lost weight.
Now, where should a human being walk? In the
outdoors – by a river, inside a park, around a forest.
However, displaying their usual genius for town
planning, the rich of Delhi had built this part of
Gurgaon with no parks, lawns, or playgrounds – it was
just buildings, shopping malls, hotels, and more
buildings. There was a pavement outside, but that was
for the poor to live on. So if you wanted to do some
‘walking,’ it had to be done around the concrete
compound of your own building.
Less is More in The White Tiger, p.220
• A rickshaw-puller drove up next to me, a small,
unshaven, stick-thin man, who looked dead tired
as he wiped his face and legs clean with a rag,
and went to sleep on the ground. On the seat of
his rickshaw was a white advertising sticker:
IS EXCESS WEIGHT A PROBLEM FOR YOU?
CALL JIMMY SINGH AT METRO GYM: 9811799289
The mascot of the gym – an American with
enormous white muscles – smiled at me from the
slogan. The rickshaw-puller’s snoring filled the
air.
The Rooster Coop
Why such an important motif in The
White Tiger?
The Rooster Coop – from the literal to the figurative, pp.173-174
• Go to Old Delhi, behind the Jama Masjid, and look at the way
they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale
hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wiremesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking
each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for
breathing space’ the whole cage giving off a horrible stench –
the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk
above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the
flesh and organs of a recently chopped-up, still oleaginous
with a coating of dark blood. The roosters in the coop smell
the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers
lying around them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not
rebel. The do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this
country.
The Rooster Coop (pp.175-176)
• Why doesn’t that servant take the suitcase full of
diamonds? He’s no Gandhi, he’s human, he’s you
and me. But he’s in the Rooster Coop. The
trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the
entire Indian economy ... Never before in human
history have so few owed so much to so many,
Mr Jiabao. A handful of men in his country have
trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong,
as talented, as intelligent in every way – to exist
in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that
you can put the key of his emancipation in a
man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with
a curse.
“can a man break out of the coop?” pp.176-177
• Only a man who is prepared to see his
family destroyed – hunted, beaten, and
burned alive by the masters – can break
out of the coop. That would take no
normal human being, but a freak, a
pervert of nature.
It would, in fact, take a White Tiger.
You are listening to the story of a social
entrepreneur, sir.
Foreshadowing in The White Tiger
• Consider how and why Adiga plays with the
genre of detective/crime fiction …
• “Once you walk into the house, you will see –
if any of them are still living, after what I did –
the women. Working in the courtyard” (p.21)
• Impact on reader?
The White Tiger, p.320
• I think the Rooster Coop needs people like me to
break out of it. It needs masters like Mr Ashok …
to be weeded out, and exceptional servants like
me to replace them ... I have switched sides: I am
now one of those who cannot be caught in India.
At such moments, I look up at this chandelier, and
I just want to throw my hands up and holler, so
loudly that my voice would carry over the phones
in the call-centre rooms all the way to the people
in America:
I’ve made it! I’ve broken out of the coop!