Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger:
From Zoo to Jungle
Lecture 2 Presentation
E-mail – john.masterson@wits.ac.za
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The White Tiger, p.50
•Stories of rottenness
and corruption are
always the best
stories, aren’t they?
The White Tiger and Questions of
Criminality
What are the greatest crimes
committed in the text and
who are its greatest
criminals?
Structure of text
• Split into 7 Nights.
• Consider presentation of time.
• Balram occupying the spaces and working the hours
others don’t/won’t. Symbolic significance?
• Function of chapter endings – what impact on
reader?
• Consider the end of ‘The First Night’
• I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction
of my village – and then I did something too
disgusting to describe to you.
Well, actually, I spat. Again and again. And then,
whistling and humming, I went back down the hill.
Eight months later, I slit Mr Ashok’s throat. (p.42)
Self-reflexive nature of narrative, p.47
• True, eventually Mr Ashok and I had
a disagreement or two about an
English term – income tax – and
things began to sour between us, but
that messy stuff comes later on in
the story. Right now we’re still on
the best of terms: we’ve just met, far
from Delhi, in the city called
Dhanbad.
Balram’s reflections on the mysterious nature of his narrative, p.113
• Remember, Mr Premier, the first time, perhaps as a boy, when
you opened the bonnet of a car and looked into its entrails? ...
remember how mysterious and magical everything seemed?
When I peer into the portion of my story that unfolds in New
Delhi, I feel the same way. If you ask me to explain how one
event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or
weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my
master to thinking that – I will tell you that I myself don’t
understand these things. I cannot be certain that the story, as
I will tell it, is the right story to tell. I cannot be certain that I
know exactly why Mr Ashok died.
It will be good for me to stop here.
When we meet up again, at midnight , remind me to turn
the chandelier up a bit. The story gets much darker from
here.
Globalization and
Outsourcing
How and why do these two
concerns inform The White Tiger
as a whole? Consider the
following images …
Bangalore and Outsourcing, p.38
• It is almost three in the morning.
This is when Bangalore comes to life.
The American workday is coming to
an end, and mine is beginning in
earnest. I have to be alert as all the
call-centre girls and boys are leaving
their offices for their homes. This is
when I must be near the phone.
The Voices of Modern Bangalore, p.54
• Go to any pub or bar in Bangalore with
your ears open and it’s the same thing
you hear: can’t get enough call-centre
workers, can’t get enough software
engineers, can’t get enough sales
managers. There are twenty, twenty-five
pages of job advertisements in the
newspaper every week.
Things are different in the Darkness …
Bangalore’s Voice, pp.297-298
• I tried to hear Bangalore’s voice, just as I had heard
Delhi’s.
I went down M.G. Road and sat down at the Café
Coffee Day … I had a pen and a piece of paper with me,
and I wrote down everything I overheard.
I completed that computer program in two
and a half minutes.
An American today offered me four hundred
thousand dollars for my start-up and I told him, ‘That’s
not enough!’
Is Hewlett-Packard a better company than IBM?
Everything in the city, it seemed, came down to one
thing.
Outsourcing. Which meant doing things in India for
Americans over the phone. Everything flowed from it –
real estate, wealth, power, sex. So I would have to join
this outsourcing thing, one way or another.
Mangalore and Outsourcing
• Adiga - ‘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 …
[Indian] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with US
President Barack Obama at a G20 meeting
Consider Structure of The White
Tiger
Beginning and Ending with reference
to e-mail.
Final line of novel =
boss@whitetigertechnologydrivers.com
The White Tiger – Voice and Language,
p.3
• “Mr Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are
some things that can only be said in English.”
- Consider this in relation to ‘politics of language’
debates in novel and beyond.
- What is English the language of? Any chance of
this being threatened?
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.”
Balram as “truth-teller,” p.4
• See, the lady on the radio said, ‘Mr
Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to
know the truth about Bangalore.’
My blood froze. If anyone knows the
truth about Bangalore, it’s me.
How I became an entrepreneur …
India, China and Orientalism, p.5
• in keeping with international protocol, the prime
minister and foreign minister of my country will
meet you at the airport with garlands, small takehome sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a
booklet full of information about India’s past,
present, and future … I read about your history in
a book, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, that I
found on the pavement, back in the days when I
was trying to get some enlightenment by going
through the secondhand book market in Old
Delhi.
• WHAT A F**KING JOKE!
Orientalism – Performing the Exotic, p.154
• It wasn’t his fault, what happened between
them – I will insist on that, even in a court of
law. He was a good husband, always coming
up with plans to make her happy. On her
birthday, for instance, he had me dress up as a
maharaja, with red turban and dark cooling
glasses, and serve them their food in this
costume. I’m not talking of any ordinary
home cooking, either – he got me to serve her
some of that stinking stuff [pizza] that comes
in cardboard boxes and drives all the rich
absolutely crazy.
Strategies of Subversion? Performing the Part of the
‘Spiritual’ Servant?, p.90
• Having passed a temple –
He touched me on the shoulder.
‘What is your name?’
‘Balram.’
‘So Balram here touched his eye as a mark of respect. The villagers are
so religious in the Darkness.’
That seemed to have impressed the two of them, so I put my finger to
my eye a moment later, again.
‘What’s that for, driver? I don’t see any temples around.’
‘Er … we drove past a sacred tree, sir. I was offering my respects.’
‘Did you hear that? They worship nature. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed
by, and turned to me for a reaction of piety – which I gave them, of
course, and with growing elaborateness: first just touching my eye,
then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my nipples.
Edward W. Said
Edward Said’s Introduction to Orientalism
• I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not
an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as
the Occident itself is not just there either. We must
take seriously Vico's great observation that men make
their own history, that what they can know is what
they have made, and extend it to geography: as both
geographical and cultural entities - to say nothing of
historical entities - such locales, regions, geographical
sectors as "Orient" and "Occident" are man-made.
Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an
idea that has a history and a tradition of thought,
imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and
presence in and for the West. The two geographical
entities thus support and to an extent reflect each
other.
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Samad - ‘Please. Do me this one, great favour,
Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are
back home – if you, if we, get back to our
respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak
of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a
register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your
judgement. If you are told “they are all this” or
“they do this” or “their opinions are these”,
withhold your judgement until all the facts are
upon you. Because that land they call “India”
goes by a thousand names and is populated by
millions, and if you think you have found two
men the same amongst that multitude, then you
are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the
moonlight.’
How and why do certain
‘Orientalist’ ways of thinking
persist today?
Consider contemporary media
representations and tourist
discourse
The White Tiger and Tourist Discourse, p.15
• One fact about India is that you can take almost
anything you hear about the country from the prime
minister and turn it upside down and then you will
have the truth about the thing. Now, you have heard
the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and
hundreds of American tourists come each year to take
photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or Benaras,
and our prime minister will no doubt describe it that
way to you, and urge you to take a dip in it.
No! – Mr Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga,
unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy
parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven
different kinds of industrial acids.
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual
• [The intellectual] is an individual endowed with a
faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a
message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to,
as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it,
and cannot be played without a sense of being
someone whose place it is publicly to raise
embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and
dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone
who cannot easily be co-opted … The intellectual does
so on the basis of universal principles: that all human
beings are entitled to expect decent standards of
behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly
powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent
violations of these standards need to be testified and
fought against courageously.
Satire and/as Subversion? , p.40
• (By the way, Mr Premier: have you noticed
that all four of the greatest poets in the world
are Muslim? And yet all the Muslims you
meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in
black burkas or looking for buildings to blow
up? It’s a puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure
these people out, send me an e-mail.)
• Who/what is really being attacked here?
Edward Said’s 2003 Preface to Orientalism
• In the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom
the label “terrorist” serves the general purpose of
keeping people stirred up and angry, media images
command too much attention and can be exploited at
times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post9/11 period has produced. Speaking both as an
American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to
underestimate the kind of simplified view of the world
that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have
formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic
worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and
unilateral regime change – backed up by the most
bloated military budget in history – are the main ideas
debated endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that
assigns itself the role of producing so-called “experts”
who validate the government’s general line.