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They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world. That’s the truest thing anyone said…Even as a boy I could see what was beautiful in the world: I was destined not to stay a slave.

The White Tiger is a grim, biting, unsubtle look at 21st Century India, stuck in the mire of a corrupt, cynical past, and debauching and slaughtering its way into a corrupt and cynical future, told by a working class fellow who, through ambition, intelligence, and a willingness to be utterly ruthless is clawing his way up the rungs of the Indian class ladder. It paints a bleak picture, offering little optimism for an India that will be any cleaner, fairer or more humane than the India it is replacing.


Aravind Adiga - image from The Guardian

While the subject matter is dark, the novel is fast-paced and engaging, drawing the reader in to the cares and concerns of the servant class. The narrator, Balran, may not be the most well written character in literature, but he will do as a vehicle for showing an India in transition from one form of bad to another.

Adiga paints a sharp line between Darkness and Light. The first is represented by rivers, particularly the Ganges, fouled with filth of diverse sorts, while the ocean is considered The Light, pure, cleansing. This seems to correspond to internal versus external. What is Indian in origin is dark and corrupt while what comes in from the outside is pure. Does Adiga really think the product of India is a black muck of corruption and the incoming tides of social change is pure light? I doubt it. His entrepreneurial hotspot of Bangalore is clearly just as corrupt as the traditional world it is replacing.

Adiga goes into some specifics on the sociopolitical structures in India. His narrator’s village was essentially owned by four rich men, feudalism in effect, each named for an animal, each taking a piece of every bit of labor and product in their respective domains.

their children were gone but the Animals stayed and fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on.

Class is written in flesh

A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours are different. My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar; cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks. The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.

The old ways are a drag on the people of India - [regarding the cremation of his mother and the attempt to move her remains into the Ganges]

The mud was holding her back: this big, swelling mound of black ooze. She was trying to fight the mud; her toes were flexed and resisting; but the mud was sucking her in, sucking her in. It was so thick, and more of it was being created every moment as the river washed into the ghat. Soon she would become part of the black mound and the pale-skinned dog would start licking her.

And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras—this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would be liberated here.

Rajkummar Rao as Ashok Shah, Priyanka Chopra as Pinky Madam and Adarsh Gourav asa Balram Halwal from the 2021 Netflix film - image from Radio Times

Class is seen as slavery, but how to cast off those chains, even if one sees what is beautiful? The Great Socialist is the only name of a party leader who proclaims his devotion to the working people but who is merely another corrupt politician. Still, he retains a certain appeal to the proles.

That was the positive side of The Great Socialist. He humiliated all our masters—that’s why we kept voting him back.

Sounds like something with applicability across many nations and cultures. Adiga shows his sharp satirical sense, toward the use of religion in Indian life again and again. After Balram gains an advantage over another servant, the servant is forced to flee.

When I woke up he was gone—he had left all his images of gods behind, and I scooped them into a bag. You never know when those things can come in handy.

And religion is not the only opiate of the masses.

just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly it doesn’t mean that they are all about to slit their masters� necks. Of course they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses—and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. you see, the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him—and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary. It’s when your driver starts to read about Ghandi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants.

There are upstairs/downstairs refrains as well. When Balram and his employer are living in Delhi, the master lives in a nice apartment in the high rise, while Balram is relegated to a tiny, roach-infested space in the basement.

Adiga sums up the have vs have-not relationship

Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many…A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent—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.

After Balram has committed his large crime, he takes care of his young cousin, but sees that their relationship is less one of kin than one of necessity:

Oh, he’s got it all figured out, I tell you. Little blackmailing thug. He’s going to keep quiet as long as I keep feeding him. If I go to jail, he loses his ice cream and milk, doesn’t he? That must be his thinking. The new generation, I tell you, is growing up with no morals at all.

It is clear that while family is a glue that binds Indian together, Balram has abandoned his. In Balram’s brave new world, it is every man for himself.

There is more imagery of class fixity, but enough already. It might have been nice to have seen some rays of light, however faint, in this Stygian gloom. Alas. At least the old India offered some comfort in family and clan. The new India is, in this take, spinning individuals off from even those bases into separate cells, each one striving against all the others for the available scraps. We can only hope that Adiga is wrong.

Published 2008

Review first posted in 2008