Outsourcing English: Liberty, Linguistic Lust, and Loathing in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

One of the most unique features of The White Tiger is its self-reflexivity, its ability to seemingly self-photograph, and instantaneously render a selfie of a dystopic India devoid of any air-brushing—with no Photoshop enhancements. The result: a crispness of vision delivered through the clearest of lenses to reflect a national landscape likely to “induce a form of social vertigo” (Subrahmanyam 2008: 42) in most Indians. Via one of literature’s unforgettable “endless talkers” (Mukherjee 2009: 287), constituted in the form of an unlikely protagonist, Balram Halwai, Booker winner Aravind Adiga creates a “mobility narrative” (Ibid.: 281), of a “half-baked” Indian (283). The White Tiger is ultimately poised to expose the underbelly of “two Indias”—indeed a “Manichean duality of rich/master/powerful and poor/servant/oppressed” (Schotland 2011: 1).