The White Tiger by Arvind Adiga

                  The novel won Man Booker Prize in 2008, which gives realistic and graphic picture of some of the canniest truths about India.  Balram is the protagonist who tells a story his financial rise and moral deterioration by writing series of letters but never send to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, who has come to India to learn about the Indian economic miracle so that China can emulate it.

This blog is part of academic activity given by Prof. Dilip Barad that you can see here.

1.   How Far do you agree with the India represented in the novel The White Tiger?

Ans. Balram portrayed India from his perspective, which is the true but half-necked picture of real India as in beginning he said that it is an autobiography of half-baked Indian. Therefore, we can’t rely totally on his views that are half-true. As he criticize many aspects of Indian Society like Education where teachers are not working properly and get money by selling student’s uniforms in other village. Therefore, he talks about which kind of corruption happen in schools. Religion - he criticized religion that also taught us about servitude by example of Hanuman who was faithful servant of the Lord Rama and we worship him in out temples as shining example of how to serve your maters with absolute fidelity, love and devotion. Elections, he criticize election process and corruption that happens as politicians offer money, some food or drink to needed people to get more votes. They take wrong fingerprints from different people. Land Lords and their wrong practice with poor workers and he gave them name of four animals. He also show the real picture of many other things like villages as dark India, Ganga river, journey of entrepreneurs , Gandhi etc. These all things also can be observed in real Indian Society but some critics do not agree with the India that portrayed in this novel as M.Q Khan discussed in his article. Therefore, India in this novel remains as Adiga’s India not whole India.

2. Do you believe that Balram’s story is the archetype of all stories of ‘rags to riches’?

Ans.  No, we can’t say that Balram’s story is the archetype of all stories of ‘rags to riches’ but it can be present 10 or 20 percent stories of ‘rags to riches’ that is base on the deeds like of Balram otherwise not all successful people are murderers of their masters to be successful. Most of them get something by their hard words and sweat not by wrong deeds the way Balram did. Many successful people or entrepreneurs come out by their intelligent mind and hard work. These are the links from where you can know more about successful entrepreneurs and their life stories from ‘rags to riches’.

          
5 rages to reaches stories and 7 inspiring rags to riches stories of entrepreneurs

3. "Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique, deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay' (Derrida, 1978, in Lodge, 1988, p. 108). Is it possible to do deconstructive reading of The White Tiger? How?

Ans. Yes, this text can be deconstructed as he himself said that he was half-baked Indian in this,

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep—all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.”

By this, we can say that how the half-baked Indians who do not get proper education and have half- digested ideas can present their critical views about India.

So, Balram who considers himself as the half-baked how can people believe that his picture of India is true India.

4. Is it possible to read The White Tiger in context of the Globalization?

Ans.  Globalization has two side beneficial and non-beneficial, its defenders present it as generating fresh economic opportunities like rise of Call Centers (outsourcing)and companies give jobs to many people because of LPG (Liberalization, Privatization and Globalization), cultural diversity and open up new exiting world. Its critics see globalization as harmful, increased domination and control by wealthy over poor and increasing hegemony of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. It creates relationship of master and slave, person who is in power/rich rule over powerless/poor people. The novel critically analyzes the effects of the capitalism on increasing economy and Balram is representative of the new breed of the globalization who put self before the family for personal growth. We can read a novel from in context of globalization by many aspects like “only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up”, this means you have to take your food/money/economy otherwise you will become food for others.

“For surely any successful man must spill a little blood on his way to the top” , this sentence also describes the way in which many people have done wrong things to reach at top or being successful in this globalised society.