White Tiger by Aravind Adiga has already won the Man Booker Prize, and is being hailed universally by the critics for its virtues in presenting a narrative quite different from the Bollywood capers and the modern Indian English fiction. In the wake of some well-deserved praise, my biased review might appear like an afterthought examining a foregone conclusion. My bias rises from my familiarity with characters like Balram Halwai, and from my reverence for uncelebrated works of Indian fiction that present the alternative reality of present day India. Reading the novel left me quite dissatisfied, and this is an exposition of the reason why.
The basic storyline of the novel can be summarized as follows. Balram Halwai grows up in a poor and remote village and ends up working as the driver for Ashok, who has returned from America, and who incidentally is from the family of landlords who run or ruin the life of his fellow visitors. Even though Ashok treats the Balram quite well compared to how servants and drivers are treated by other people, Balram siezes an opportunity to murder his master and run-off with money to become a rich businessmen. The story of Balram's journey from a village to city, the murder and his transformation into a entrepreneur is retold in the form of letters that Balram writes in the course of seven nights. The letters are addressed to the Chinese Premier and are laced with a dark wit and provocative confessions.
The novel succeeds in chartering into a territory unfamiliar and hence exotic for Western audiences, for he chooses a character from the lower classes and makes him into a success story. But likewise, it fails in providing a deep or authentic representation of his protagonists to anyone who is remotely familiar with the cultural, social, caste- and religion-based daily chaos of India. In fact, the parable is replete with the cliched dialogues, observations and methods synonymous with most Indian movies that describe the rise of a virtual nobody from village or slums to riches. The only thing missing here is a romance angle, song and dance situations and the victory of good over evil in the final scene. Further, except maybe for Balram, most characters are caricatures, two-dimensional beings, who perform their parts again like the underdeveloped, underused casts in desi movies.
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