Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:
From Zoo to Jungle
Lecture 3 Presentation
E-mail – john.masterson@wits.ac.za
Office - SH3011
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The White Tiger and Corruption
From Religion to Politics
– what/who is really
being ‘attacked’?
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
The Ultimate Betrayal of Gandhi’s Legacy? Balram as Alternative
Tourist Guide (pp.136-137)
• I looked out the window to see a large bronze
statue of a group of men – this is a well-known
statue, which you will no doubt see in Delhi: at
the head is Mahatma Gandhi, with his walking
stick, and behind him follow the people of India,
being led from darkness to light.
The Mongoose squinted at the statue.
‘What about it? I’ve seen it before.’
‘We’re driving past Gandhi, after just having given a
bribe to a minister. It’s a fucking joke, isn’t it’ ...
‘Things are complicated in India, Ashok. It’s not like
in America. Please reserve your judgement.’
2009 Figures
The White Tiger and Satire (p.18)
• Surely you’ve heard of Bodh Gaya – the town where
the Lord Buddha sat under a tree and found his
enlightenment and started Buddhism, which then
spread to the whole world, including China – and
where is it, but right here in my home district! Just a
few miles from Laxmangarh!
I wonder if the Buddha walked through Laxmangarh
– some people say he did. My own feeling is that
he ran through it – as fast as he could – and got to
the other side – and never looked back!
Buddhism and Branding? Enlightenment as Industry?
The Debunking Power of The White Tiger (pp.19-20)
• Your Excellency, I am proud to inform you that Laxmangarh
is your typical Indian village paradise, adequately supplied
with electricity, running water and working telephones; and
that the children of my village, raised on a nutritious diet of
meat, eggs, vegetables and lentils, will be found, when
examined with tape measure and scales, to match up to the
minimum height and weight standards set by the United
Nations and other organizations whose treaties our Prime
Minister has signed and whose forums he so regularly and
pompously attends.
Ha!
Electricity poles – defunct.
Water tap – broken.
Children – too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty
conscience of the government of India.
The White Tiger and the question of
fate.
• Free will versus determinism? To what extent
can novel be read as ‘celebration’ of human
ingenuity? Balram’s battle against the odds …
• (p.38) – “Working in a tea shop. Smashing
coals. Wiping tables. Bad news for me, you
say?
To break the law of his land – to turn bad
news into good news – is the entrepreneur’s
prerogative.”
Humanity and Bestiality? (p.51)
• Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir,
and look at the men working in that tea shop –
men, I say, but better to call them human spiders
that go crawling in between and under the tables
with rags in their hands, crushed humans in
crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their
thirties or forties or fifties but still ‘boys.’ But that
is your fate if you do your job well – with honesty,
dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would
have done it, no doubt.
I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of
dedication, and insincerity – and so the tea shop
was a profoundly enriching experience.
Establishing India as duality (pp.8-9)
• My country is the kind where it pays to play it
both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be
straight and crooked, mocking and believing,
sly and sincere, at the same time.
So: I’m closing my eyes, folding my hands in a
reverent namaste, and praying to the gods to
shine light on my dark story.
Indication of division of critical opinion
in relation to The White Tiger
• Robbie B. H. Goh -
• “What characterizes the narrative is the
chilling frankness and simplicity with
which Balram recounts his career of
poverty and oppression, desperation and
finally murder of his employer and theft
of the fortune that sets him up in his
successful business.”
Amitava Kumar
• “Halwai’s voice sounds like a curious
mix of an American teen and a
middle-aged Indian essayist. I find
Adiga’s villains utterly cartoonish, like
the characters in Bollywood
melodrama. However, it is his
presentation of ordinary people that
seems not only trite but also
offensive.”
Chandrahas Choudhury
• “What readers around the world
frequently find instructive, fresh,
and moving about Indian novels
available to them in English, is
often experienced by Indian
readers as dull, clichéd, and
superficial.”
Why are concepts such as “the real
India” and “authentic voice” so hotly
contested when it comes to The
White Tiger?
Class mobility vs. Caste immobility? (p.56)
• The old driver asked, ‘What caste are you?’
‘Halwai.’
‘Sweet-makers,’ the old driver said, shaking his head. ‘That’s
what you people do. You make sweets. How can you learn
to drive? … That’s like getting coals to make ice for you.
Mastering a car’ – he moved the stick of an invisible
gearbox – ‘it’s like taming a wild stallion – only a boy from
the warrior castes can manage that. You need to have
aggression in your blood. Muslims, Rajputs, Sikhs – they’re
fighters, they can become drivers. You think sweet-makers
can last long in fourth gear?’
Coal was taught to make ice, starting the next morning at six.
- To what extent does The White Tiger ‘defamiliarize’ (make
strange) debates around caste?
The Caste System
Didactic Imperatives in The White Tiger? Consider
example of Caste (p.63)
• I should explain a thing or two about caste …
See: Halwai, my name, means ‘sweet-maker.’
That’s my caste – my destiny … But if we were
Halwais, then why was my father not making
sweets but pulling a rickshaw? Why did I grow
up breaking coals and wiping tables, instead of
eating galub jamuns and sweet pastries when
and where I chose to? Why was I lean and
dark and cunning, and not fat and creamyskinned and smiling, like a boy raised on
sweets would be?
Robbie B. Goh
• Hindu life is not the only thing that Balram
critiques … he also exposes the prevalent
corruption and economic exploitation in his
society … Hinduism and the caste system now
work as a corollary to a kind of economic freefor-all, reinforcing socio-economic inequality
and Darwinian survival at all cost with notions
of social place and “destiny.”
• Corollary = “supplementary, associated.”
Consider importance of treatment of religion in opening section
of novel – how does it establish what will come later? (p.8)
• Now, there are some … who think that not
many of these gods actually exist. Some
believe that none of them exist. There’s just
an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no
philosopher or poet, how would I know the
truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do
awfully little work – much like our politicians –
and yet keep winning re-election to their
golden thrones in heaven, year after year.
That’s not to say that I don’t respect them, Mr
Premier!
The White Tiger
From Zoo to Jungle
The White Tiger and Naming (p.35)
• The [school] inspector pointed his cane straight at
me. ‘You, young man, are an intelligent, honest,
vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots.
In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals – the
creature that comes along only once in a
generation?’
I thought about it and said:
‘The white tiger.’
‘That’s what you are, in this jungle’ …
So that’s how I became the White Tiger. There will
be a fourth and a fifth name too, but that’s late in
the story.
Tragedy of Balram’s fate? Taken out of his hands?
Variations on the Jungle Motif (p.57)
• The old driver – ‘It’s not enough
to drive. You’ve got to become a
driver. You’ve got to get the right
attitude, understand? … The road
is a jungle, get it? A good driver
must roar to get ahead on it.”
From Zoo to Jungle … (pp.63-64)
• See, this country, in its days of greatness, when it was the
richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. A clean, well-kept,
orderly zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone happy.
Goldsmiths here. Cowherds there. Landlords there … And
then, thanks to all those politicians in Delhi, on the
fifteenth of August, 1947 – the day the British left – the
cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and
ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law.
Those that were the most ferocious, the hungriest, had
eaten everyone else up, and grown big bellies. That was all
that counted now, the size of your belly … To sum up – in
the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies
in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with
Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.
And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.
The White Tiger (p.275)
• Now, Mr Premier, every day thousands of
foreigners fly into my country for enlightenment.
They go to the Himalayas, or to Benaras, or to
Bodh Gaya. They get into weird poses of yoga,
smoke hashish, shag a sadhu or two, and think
they’re getting enlightened.
Ha!
If it is enlightenment you have come to India for,
you people, forget the Ganga – forget the
ashrams – go straight to the National Zoo in the
heart of New Delhi.
White Tigers in New Delhi’s National Zoo
The Ganges River
India as duality cont. (p.14)
• I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of
the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and
wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those
fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and
water buffaloes wading through the ponds and
chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live
in this place call it the Darkness. Please
understand, Your Excellency, that India is two
countries in one: an India of light, and an India of
Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country.
Every place on the map of India near the ocean is
well-off. But the river brings darkness to India –
the black river.
The Ganges River
Near the Ganges River
Key areas to be discussed in
forthcoming sessions
Representations of Space in The White Tiger
Representations of the Body in The White Tiger
Ecological/environmental concerns in The White
Tiger
How and why do the above work in relation to one
another?