Prepared by- Urvi Dave
Course- M.A.-II
Semester- 4
Paper no. - 13
Paper name- The New Literature
Enrollment no. – 14101009
Batch- 2014-16
Email id- dave.urvi71@gmail.com
Submitted to- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English
Maharaja
Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Introduction
Aravind Adiga is an Indian-Australian writer and journalist.
His debut novel, The White Tiger won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. During his
freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger. The novel studies the contrast
between India’s rise as a modern global economy and the lead character. Balram,
who comes from crushing rural poverty? Adiga says-
“At a time when India is going
Through great changes and, with
China, is likely to inherit the
World from the west, it is
Important that writers like me
Try to highlight the brutal
Injustices of society (Indian). That’s
What I’m trying to do- it is not
An attack on the country, it’s
About the greater process of
Self examination”
Story
Balram Halwai is a composite of various people of India;
Adiga has portrayed Ashok, his family and the other upper class as harsh. Rich
and poor divide and corrupt in India are not going away. Balram narrated whole
about his life in a letter which he writes to a Chinese Premier, Wen Jiaboo, He
tells everything that how the son of a rickshaw puller struggled and managed to
become a successful businessman and an entrepreneur. He was born in a rural
village of Laxmangarh, where he lived with his big family. He was a bright
child but couldn’t study due to their financial condition. He then starts to
work in a tea shop where he begins to learn about India’s government and
economy from customer’s interaction. Balram then decides to become a taxi
driver and learns driving. He then starts working in New Delhi with Ashok and
his wife Pinky madam. During his stay in Delhi, Balram gets exposed to
extensive corruption. Contrast between the poor and rich is visible through
their proximity to one other. One night, Pinky madam was drunk to forced Balram
to leave the car so that she can drive. In a drunken state, she hits something
and drives away. Balram is forced to confess that he was driving the car.
Ashok bribes the government officials in order to increase
the benefit of their family coal business. Balram plans to kill Ashok and hits
him with a bottle and takes away a large share of bribe along with him. He then
arrives in Bangalore where he Bribes the police so that he can startup a new,
his own taxi business, Balram then explains that his own family was killed by
Ashoka’s relatives as retribution for his murder. In the end, Balram
rationalizes his actions and considers that his freedom is worth the lives of
his family and of Ashok.
Beginning the Topic
Balram mentions two things about Delhi-
1 Systematic housing lane and traffic.
2 People live like animal in a forest do.
He gives every minute description of urban and rural life.
The novelist also tells how teachers stole the money which was given for
student’s charcoal could be arranged from government mines by paying culprits
and criminals protected themselves by grassing the palm of carried out openly
and brazenly. Balram explores a new India in New Delhi itself and gets
attracted towards it. Imitating his master, he starts going to red light areas
and consumes alcohol. Villagers are always eager to live this type of life and
so does Balram thinks about living it so to lead a lavish and wealthy life, he
kills Ashok as Adiga wrote about two destinies- eat or get eaten. Adiga tells
us that increasing gap between upper and the lower class produces criminals
like Balram.
Adiga talks about the progress in almost all the fields but
behind this bright shine there are billions who are deprived of basic necessities
of life. He exposes and explores this grim facet of Indian life. Negative
aspects of Modern India are presented in a very humorous way. Economic growth
has been accelerated but this poor rich gap has widened due to globalization.
The narrator says-
“The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen”.
Adiga hints to stop corrupting at all the levels create
social awareness and close monitoring of functioning of the government
machinery. Balram is presented as a modern Indian hero, in the midst of the economic
prosperity of India in the recent past. He represents the poor in India who
yearn for their tomorrow. His story is a parable of the new India with a
distinctly macabre twist. He is not only an entrepreneur but also a roguish
criminal remarkably capable of self justification. The background against which
he operates is one of corruption, poverty and inequality. Social Discontent and
violence has been on the rise.
Adiga had highlighted the ever widening gap between the rich
and the poor and the economic system that lets a small minority to proper at
the expense of the majority. There has been greater economic disparity since
the neoliberal economic reforms. The story of Balram moves from “darkness” to
“light” i.e. from rural India to urban India. His thirst for freedom came alive
when he visited his thirst for freedom came alive when he visited his native
village. He describes-
“While Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam
Went to an excursion… It was a very
Important trip for me…while Mr. Ashok
And Pinky Madam was relaxing…
I swam through the pond…walked
Up the hill… and entered the black
Fort for the first time… Putting
My foot on the wall, I looked
Down on the village from there.
My little Laxmangarh, I saw the
Temple tower, the market, the glistening
Live of sewage, the landlord’s mansion
And my own house, with that dark
Little cloud outside that water
Buffalo. It looked like the most
Beautiful sight on the earth. I
Learned 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. Ashoka’s Throat.
His schooling in crime begins with the reading of murder
weekly as all drivers do, to while away their time. He feels degraded as a
human being, deprived of basic human rights to enter a shopping mall. A poor
driver couldn’t enter a mall as he belonged to the poor class. He knows full
well that Ashok comes from a caste of cooks and yet now he has to serve the
wretch who is moneyed. He decides to break out of this fate of the poor in
India, as from a Rooster coop. Ashok spent a lot of time visiting malls, along
with Pinky madam, his wife to Mongoose. Balram’s job was also to carry all e
shopping bags as they came out of the malls. The mean and stingy behavior of
the rich is shown through the lost coin episode where Mongoose insults Balram
for not while getting out of the car. He was so bothered about a rupee coin
after bribing someone with a million rupees.
Such mean behavior of the masters continues when they
instruct the servants about do’s and don’ts. Balram is told never to switch on
the AC or play music when he is alone. Taunting Balram of his lack of an English
Education was great fun for Ashok and Pinky madam. It patched up their
quarrels. When he mispronounced ‘maal’ for ‘mall’, they had their ironic
laughter. When Pinky madam left Ashok
suddenly in a rage, Balram had driven her to the airport in the middle of the
night for which he was rewarded with a fat brown envelop filled with forty
seven hundred rupees. Introspecting on the tip, Balram recounts:
Forty seven hundred rupees… odd sum of money wasn’t it?
There was a mystery to be solved here. He is educated in the
mean ways of the rich which imbibes him in course of time. Balram, a victim of
rich-poor divide, reverses the role and becomes ‘master like servant’. When he
is alone, he takes pleasure in masochism. While in Delhi, Balram experiences
two kinds of India with those who are eaten, and those who eat, prey and
predators. Balram decides he wants to be an eater, through his criminal drive;
Balram becomes a businessman and runs a car service for the call centers in
Bangalore. The protagonist confirms that the trust worthies of servants are the
basis of the entire Indian economy. This is paradox and a mystery of India.
Because Indians are the world’s most honest people… No, it’s because 99.9% of
us are caught in the Rooster coop just like those poor guys in the Poverty
market. Balram wants to escape from the Roster coop. Having been a witness to
all of Ashoka’s corrupt practices and gambling with money to but politicians,
to kill and to loot, he decides to steal and kill. Adiga delves deep into his
subconscious as he plans to loot Rs.70, 000 stuffed into red bag.
In creating a protagonist like Balram in The White Tiger, as
Adiga come forward to make subaltern speak through crime? Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak’s concept of subaltern leads to the premise that subalterns cannot
speak. It is not a classy word for oppressed, for other, for somebody who’s not
getting a piece of the pie, but it signified “proletarian” whose voice could
not e heard, being structurally written out of the capitalist bourgeois
narrative. Speaking on the master-slave relationship, Adiga says-
The servant-master system implies two things: One is that
the servants are far poorer that the rich-a servant has no possibility of ever
catching up to the master. And secondly, he had access to the master- the
master’s money, the master’s physical person. Yet crime rates in India are very
low. Even though the middle class who often have three or four servants are
paranoid about crime, the reality is a master getting killed by his servant is
rare… You need two things (for crime to occur) - a divide and a conscious
ideology of resentment. We don’t have resentment in India. The poor just assume
that the rich are a fact of life… But I think we’re seeing what I believe is a
class based resentment for the First time.
Injustice and inequality has always been around us and we
get used to it. How long can it go on? Social discontent and violence has been
on the rise. What Adiga highlights is the ever widening gap between the rich
and the poor.
Conclusion
Poverty trends in India have been debated by that claming
decline in poverty and those disproving it. Angus Deaton and Jean Dreze in
their thought provoking essay “poverty and inequality in India: A
Re-examination” state that some claim that here has been a period of
unprecedented improvement in living standards, while others argue that the
period has been marked but widespread impoverishment. This novel is an
excellent social commentary on the poor rich divide in India Balram represents
the downtrodden sections juxtaposed against the rich.
Works Cited
Sebastian, Dr. A J. "Poor-Rich divide in
Adiga's The White Tiger." Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the
Social Sciences 1 (2009).
Sebastian, Dr. AJ.
"Poor-Rich divide in Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger"."
(2015).
Tiger, The White.
http://studenthelpline.co.in/2015/06/poor-rich-divide-in-aravind-adigas-the-white-tiger-prof-aj-sebastian-sdb/
Class Notes
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