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SCMP Reporter

The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga
Atlantic Books
The White Tiger is the much-hyped debut novel of Time journalist  Aravind Adiga. The jacket trumpets that the novel  is 'unlike almost any other Indian novel you might have read' and hails its author as a 'talent to watch'.
Gushing accolades tripping over covers is the staple of novels with formidable advances; thus forewarned, I  armed myself with the armour of patience and waded  into the book.
Waded is incorrect: the book is slim and provides an easy wallow in the literary waters of Mother India; no treacherous eddies confound the reader and this 'unromanticised account of contemporary India' is just that - unromanticised.
Told from the viewpoint of Balram Halwai,  a young tea-shop worker turned chauffeur, The White Tiger charts  his transformation from a yokel to a murderer. In a hubristic voice he narrates the story of his life in seven letters written to  China's premier before his impending visit to India. Wen Jiabao is apparently keen to meet Indian entrepreneurs and learn the story of their success and Balram, 'a self-taught entrepreneur', believes he has much wisdom to impart, declaring: 'I am not an original thinker, I am an original listener.'
Balram comes from the 'Darkness', a vast rural hinterland where resources are so scarce 'villagers banter about local elections like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra', and  dream of escaping into the other India of wealth and light. His restlessness, cunning and curiosity have earned him the sobriquet 'The White Tiger' - a creature that comes along only once in a generation - and Balram is determined to seek his destiny.
In Gurgaon,  India's mega-mall city, while his mistress shops and his master bribes corrupt officials, Balram soaks up the elitist world like a sponge. He avoids the other car drivers idling their time  to flick through pages of Murder Weekly and focuses on learning everything he can to propel himself upwards in the new world.
His boss - US-returned, with a Christian wife - affects the liberal tendencies of his erstwhile country but is a weak-kneed bigot who, Balram learns, can never transcend the prejudice of his upper caste. As he ferries him around Delhi with a perennial stash of cash, Balram decides that in the New India there exist 'only two destinies: eat - or get eaten up'.
Adiga has an observant eye and an acerbic  imagination that he uses well to vivify Balram as the sardonic,  philosophising commentator on a changing India. '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 on to the road - and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.'
However, despite his journalistic training, he makes a fundamental error when Balram boasts: 'The future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through mobile phone usage...' Surely not, when subscribers in China and India exceed those in the US.
Despite the engaging voice, the message is loud and the insights are regurgitated.  The poor-boy-makes-it-big-in-the-city tale has no fresh plot turn and is riddled with stereotypes even Bollywood shies away from:  grinding poverty, systemic injustice,  corruption, a sacrificial mother, bloodsucking relatives, the filthy rich.
In the 1970s  two Bollywood scriptwriters, drawing on the chaos of the times, created the character of an Indian 'angry young man': a man raging against the avarice of an elitist system in which many are sacrificed for the whims of a few. The reputation of Amitabh Bachchan,  the  Hindi film star, rests on his myriad portrayals of just such a defiant character.
Thirty years hence, transported into the newly chaotic India of a booming economy and rising economic divide, Balram is alas a feeble Xerox copy of this angry young man.



The White Tiger