Conclusion

Abstract

At the time of writing this book, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga was awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize. The novel is a far cry from the utopian potential that Amitav Ghosh invested in the far-flung village communities of the Sundarbans where battles with natural disaster parallel those with state apathy, but where also, the village was the site for a renewed faith in engendering positive social change. Although Adiga has claimed that he was inspired in the writing of the novel by the examples of writers like Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens, who ‘helped England and France become better societies’,¹ the novel presents a onesided approach to rural life and rehearses the fears of middle-class metropolitan Indians. The narrative shows the resilience of stereotypes of the village, this time from a new vantage-point of India’s transnational presence where the take of a ‘Slumdog Millionaire’² on ‘India Shining’³ shows up the grim underbelly of national development. The novel depicts the rise of Balram Halwai from acute rural poverty to becoming a chauffeur to a rich man in the city, to running, finally, his own enterprise in Bangalore, the way for which is paved by Halwai murdering his master. Rushdie-esque allegory and fable remain the primary impulse as the city-space of Delhi is configured as ‘Light’, and people appear in Halwai’s narration of his life-story as a series of unsavoury animals and birds, distinguished only by their (limited) function in the grand chain of exploitative being.