A Critical Study of Socio-Cultural, Political and Economic Realities of Contemporary India in The White Tiger
Dr. Sahabuddin Ahamed
Pandit
Sundarlal Sharma (Open) University
Chhattisgarh,
Bilaspur, India
&
Praveen Toppo
Department of English
Assistant Professor
Pandit Sundarlal Sharma (Open) University
Chhattisgarh, Bilaspur, India
Abstract
This paper
critically analyses how Aravind Adiga’s The
White Tiger (2008) portrays the contemporary India as a dark and exotic
nation due to the existing social, cultural, political and economic problems in
the nation. In the novel, Adiga paints a realistic picture of modern India,
characterized by disparity, discrimination, exploitation, oppression,
dehumanization, subordination and poverty under which a section of people in
the country is the most marginal, vulnerable and deprived. This paper offers a
close textual analysis of the novel, depicting the dark realities of modern
India in the forms of feudal landlordism, stark poverty, unemployment,
ill-equipped education system, child labour, false morality, inequality,
injustice, political exclusion and marginalization of vast majority of
population living below the shine and least benefit of the nation’s enormous
economic, infrastructural, technological, institutional and industrial
transformation and development. It also unveils how social ills which include
political corruption, economic inequality and uneven power structure prevalent
in the contemporary Indian society drive the protagonist Balram Halwai, a
representative of underprivileged class in India, to commit crimes in order to
lead his privileged and materialistic life without any humanistic concern. By
disclosing how the protagonist breaks the bonds of invisibility and servitude
and asserts his emancipation, self-esteem and economic-independence, Adiga
emphasizes the possibility of the great changes occurring in the social,
cultural, political, economic and ethical structures of the contemporary
India.
Keywords: Discrimination, Emancipation, Marginalization,
Neo-realism, Postcolonial India, Transformation
Introduction
Indian society in the postcolonial and postmodern period
undergoes enormous transformations in the social, cultural, economic, political
and ethical arena. This radical transformation is brought about by
globalization in the forms of information and communication technology,
transport and infrastructure that have an immense impact on the metropolitan
city life. This great change divides Indian society into two classes-upper
class and lower class, or rich and poor. Privileged middle class is represented
as the rich, “India of light” while underprivileged underclass as the poor,
“India of darkness” (Adiga 14). The country goes through growing
discrimination, inequality, class division, and materialistic life that have
become a major global problem. Apart from class division, politics and power
act in the same way – people’s dream of living in a materialistic society and
of materialistic achievement. Power and politics are inextricable because of
the emphasis on materialism and corruption done through the economic and social
disparity. Power corrupts and more power corrupts absolutely.
Aravind Adiga, a conscious writer of the contemporary
age, points out that the prime task of the authors like him is to depict the
‘dark side’ of Indian society especially during a time when the country was
going through a radical transformation and emerging as the largest global
economy along with China. The White Tiger (2008) by Adiga portrays a
contrast between the rural or dark India and the urban or modern India. Like
his other works including Between the Assassinations (2008), Last Man
in Tower (2011) and Selection Day (2016), The White Tiger not
only depicts different socio-political and economic aspects of contemporary
India, but also kaleidoscopic change of the contemporary world. Centred around
the life adventure of Balram Halwai, the text highlights an antithesis between
the glamorous, urban India, where the rich use their egg-like shelled cars and
the rural India, where the poor like Balram lead a life of darkness, poverty
and struggle – a grim reality for them to combat in order to survive that they
undergo from their birth to death.
In an article on The White Tiger in The
Guardian, Charlotte Higgins states that
“the unpleasant reality of contemporary Indian society is revealed via
mordant sketches of characters, from millionaires in their air-conditioned
tower blocks to the unfortunates who are trapped in poverty and who live
literally below them, catering to their every whim” (n,p.). Some Indian critics
have slammed Adiga for his defiantly exotic and unglamorous portrayal of
India’s social, political, cultural, economic and ethical aspects. For them
Adiga’s portrayal of India is objectionable in its orientalist and
stereotypical undertones as it pays little attention to India’s economic boom
and cultural excellence. Despite such criticism for his representation of India
as a dark and exotic nation, in many ways, the novel proves to be unbiased and
honest in its portrayal of modern India’s grim realities. In an interview with
Stuart Jeffries, Adiga illuminates that his literary ambition is not to write
about himself but about society and people and to unearth the nation’s dark
side:
“At a time when India is going through great changes,
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. That’s what
writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century
and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That’s what I’m
trying to do – it’s not an attack on the country, it’s about the greater
processes of self-determination.” (n.p.)
Adiga’s concept of criticism is not an assailment on the
nation; instead, it is a weapon to reveal the corruption, exploitation and
injustice occurring in Indian society. With the story of Balram Halwai at the
backdrop, Adiga illustrates the brutal and realist misery, darkness and social
evil run in the modern India. He is a social critic and economist as he uses
criticism as a strategy to unearth the follies of preserving rigid social norms
and economic instability in the very structure of the postcolonial Indian
society. To create a different kind of perspective and narrative viewpoint and
enable the readers to perceive the bleak reality of India – the antithesis
between the affluent and the downtrodden, economic boom and moral decline and
haves and haves-not, he adopts the genre of ‘neo-realism’ in his novel. In an
interview, Adiga tells Lee Thomas that
how unlike reportage, neo-realist fiction provides “narrative, ambiguity, and
moral complexity,” lacking “message” and keeping one “thinking and entertained
and disturbed years later too” (n.p.). His work as a realist fiction is
preoccupied with diverse social ills-poverty, anarchy, disparity, hierarchy,
immorality, and patriarchy in the postcolonial nation.
Adiga’s representation of modern India is a subject of
passionate debate if it is viewed from the perspective of what Graham Huggan
calls the “postcolonial exotic.” It is because of the dual picture of India
which Adiga is offering to the readers–its radical transformation and progress
on the one hand, and exotic and traditional-bound India on the other that Adiga
seems to use Orientalist discursive approach to represent the nation. In his
seminal work The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Huggan
defines the “postcolonial exotic” as an examination of “the material conditions
of production and consumption of postcolonial writings” and a critique of the
“global commodification of cultural difference” (vii). According to this
theory, India in Adiga’s novel has become an exotic product and a culturally
Other and is being commodified globally within a late capitalist cultural
industry that controls the processes of Third World cultural production and its
global consumption. In his novel, Adiga seems to employ the strategy of
exoticist and Orientalist outlooks to represent India as an exotic commodity on
the global market that has made him recognized as an international writer in
the manner of Western colonial culture which he is supposed to oppose and
resist.
Basically, Adiga is worried to stark poverty and for the
deprived and the downtrodden people who are grinded by this factor, leading
them to corruption and crudeness, surpassing the value of humanity and
kindness. This sort of scenario is often seen in the India metropolitan cities
like Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, and Delhi. He explains that there are two
different types of India-rural and urban, and “India of Light” and “India of
Darkness.” This seems authentic from the scenario of the class system in
India-the wealthy and the disadvantaged – the domination of the upper middle
class over the underclass. The privileged class achieves higher levels of
socio-cultural status, economic advantage and political power preoccupied with
comfortable, luxurious and opportunistic modern lifestyle while in contrast,
the underprivileged are deprived of the basic necessities of life and
opportunity. This disparity is done through the exploitation and exclusion of
the downtrodden from the proper wage of their labour to maintain their status
quo and through the limitless greed and corruption of the privileged class. In
this sense, Adiga’s portrayal of modern Indian is truly valid and honest.
Adiga’s concept of proper democracy is associated with
three distinguished fields-executive, judiciary and mass media. To him only
healthy democracy can lead a nation like India to the reach of cultural, social
and economic progression. In the text, he unfolds how the democratic values,
such as freedom, equality, inclusivity and justice, have been diminished in
India due to the unfair governance and hierarchy. He defiantly exposes the grim
reality of contemporary Indian politics and power game on the one hand, and the
everyday struggle of the underprivileged for existence on the other. He
emphasizes the importance of the survival of the downtrodden through their
fighting against injustice and discrimination, their emancipation and creation
of a bright future for themselves. The text, therefore, highlights the struggle
of the downtrodden class against the dominant and privileged class represented
by landlords, politicians, policemen and elite class of people who are
unrestrained and depraved enjoying a prosperous and luxurious modern lifestyle.
Discussion
The White Tiger is a
story of an ambitious man’s journey from post-independence India to new modern
India, ignorance to realization, darkness to light and revolution to victory
represented through a series of life adventures and experiences of the
protagonist-narrator, Balram Halwai. Balram is both brilliant and savage at the
same time. He shows his intellectual use of mordant wit and dark humour to
uncover the phenomenon often happening in the modern Indian society especially
from the domestic issue to the parliamentary one. Balram is both victim and
witness, servant and philosopher, and murderer and social entrepreneur. He is
the witness to the corruption and exploitation as he goes through a number of
unpleasant events in a society where he lives and works. He is the upholder of
change, freedom and equity that might eradicate all possible ills—injustice,
corruption, class divide and inequality. This work also vividly portrays and
question the quality of age-old custom, education, life style, politics,
government, elite people, morals and Indian philosophy shocking the reader
because of the gap between their progress and development in India and their
benefits to peoples because the majority of populations live below the shine of
the progressive, changing and developed India.
This epistolary novel, in the tradition of Samuel
Richardson’s novels Pamela and Clarissa, describes Balram’s struggle,
punishment, compensation and survival. Balram comes of an underprivileged class
from the village of Laxmangarh, in the district of Gaya, Bihar. He narrates his
life story to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao through seven letters he writes.
Jiabois likely to come to India to learn how to make skilled entrepreneurs that
India has produced ever in the contemporary times. From Balram’s narrative,
Jiabo comes to understand the real India that receives no wide media coverage
due to lies and propaganda. Balram’s life is a story of corruption, chaos,
inequality, austerity, theft, amoral entrepreneur, murder and bribery. In his
narrative, Balram uncovers how he belongs to “an India of Darkness”-rural
India, in opposition to “an India of Light”-urban India (Adiga 14). He narrates
how he escapes his poor family to be a driver to the Stork’s son, Mr. Ashok,
who arrives in New Delhi to bribe the politicians to win election. In his
mobility narration, Balram tells Jiabo that how he becomes an amoral
entrepreneur in the city of Bangalore by killing his boss, employer Ashok, by
changing his name to Ashok Sharma, and by investing the stolen money in a taxi
company in Bangalore. Balram, the eponymous antihero of the text gains his name
‘the white tiger’ because he is a self-styled entrepreneur and attempts the
impossible by breaking out the shackles of slavery, poverty, and misery.
Despite being born in an ‘India of Darkness,’ he succeeds in becoming a
self-turned entrepreneur reaping the benefits of an ‘India of Light,’ of great
change, technological and infrastructural progress and globalized economy.
Adiga’s novel, a bildungsroman, reflects on
Balram’s transition from an insecure past to a triumphant present, on his
astounding rise from a petty teashop waiter to a high-ranking entrepreneur in
Bangalore. Balram shows the gradual change in his fate as his status increases
rapidly from chauffeur, taxi-driver, assassin, to entrepreneur and philosopher.
Having been born in the rural side of India where there are no education, electricity,
drinking water, sewage system, transportation, good hospital and no
consciousness, Balram represents every Indian village boy who is restrained not
to imagine enormous opportunity and sweetness of life but to accept the dark
reality around him. He feels sorry for the bad situation of his upbringing that
he undergoes since childhood: “Me, and thousands of others in this country like
me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling”
(Adiga 10). Balram is the representative of the subaltern, or the deprived
class in Indian society who try to be rich at any cost and are desirous of
money, power, influence, fame and luxurious life in the metropolitan cities. In
Laxmangarh, most of the villagers are poor and illiterate, living a life of
poverty, sorrow, darkness and uncertain future. They are beyond the access to
the unlimited world of luxurious and materialistic life as poverty, disease,
deprivation, destitution, and anguish are their constant companions. They have
no liberty to wish, the courage to contradict and the vision of better living
as they are becoming the victims of social hierarchy, patriarchy and economic
disparity prevalent in contemporary India. The village is marked by the usual
ills of child labour, dowry system, landlordism, lack of basic education and
health care and money lending.
Even with regard to education system, Balram narrates
that children receive rudimentary and low-quality education at the primary
school in his village. He describes the grim reality of the school that the
government’s promise of “three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at lunchtime” is
not fairly executed by the schoolteachers as they steal government property and
sell them to the local market (Adiga 33). They continue their corrupt and
unfair practices and feel no shame for their crime as their salary is unpaid
for six months. In the village the people support this practice and proclaim
that they would continue it.
Besides this, Balram unveils how the family structures
and customs like marriage and dowry force the poor village people to borrow
money from the moneylenders. For example, Balram’s family borrows money from
the Stark to marry off the daughters. Balram like other children of the village
is compelled to leave his schooling and to work in a tea shop so that he can
earn money not just for himself but for the family.
To Mr Premier, Balram recounts how he becomes ‘the white
tiger,’ the name is given by the school inspector who praises him due to his
quick response and intelligence. The inspector points his cane at him and says,
“You young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd
[students] of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals –
the creature that comes along only in a generation?” (Adiga 35). Balram’s
answer is ‘the white tiger,’ and the inspector says, “That’s what you are, in
this jungle” (Adiga 35). Throughout the text, the repeated animal imageries are
used to describe the nature of people. Balram uses this technique because the
post-independence India has been a wilderness to run a jungle law. To him the
post-independence condition worsens after the British left the country, and it
has become a nation of corruption, inequality and discrimination at the hands
of the elite politicians who reduce the democratic values of the nation as they
buy and sell democratic elections. He mocks how the Great Socialist leader wins
elections by violence and bribery and how the underclass people are robbed of
their democratic right that they cannot assert properly during election, and
their votes are sold off. The class hierarchy in his village is apparent as the
landlords exploit the downtrodden people and bribe the elected leaders to win
election. As he moves to Delhi as driver of Ashok and Pinky Madam, he
understands the nature of the Indian political scenarios–elections, ministers
and the balance between felony and punishment that he wonderfully satirizes in
his letters.
Balram narrates that how election in his village–in the
Darkness becomes a farce that he learns from his father, and in this way, his
narrative is honest and accurate, revealing the dark side of India: “‘It’s the
way it always is,’ my father told me that night. ‘I’ve seen seven
elections–five general, five state, two local–and someone else has voted for me
twelve times” (Adiga 100). In the village, on election day when a poor man
declares his democratic right by casting his vote freely, he gets killed by a
lynch mob of the local leader.
The social hierarchy of his village is dominated by the
landlords who are represented as animals for their limitless greed, dishonesty,
corrupt practice and power: “the Stork,” “the Wild Boar,” “the Buffalo,” and
“the Raven” (Adiga 24-5). The scenarios of class divide and inequality are also
aparent in the cities, such as New Delhi, where Stork’s son, Ashok bribes the
politicians in favour of winning election, getting involved in politics and
living a wild way of life associated with power, corruption, intoxication, and
consumerism even though he campaigns for the rights of the poor.
Casting off his rural village, frustrating family and his
desolate destiny, Balram learns driving. After his moving to Delhi, Balram
realizes the opportunity which is awaiting for him and learns much about the
cosmetic world around. However, he is appalled by the social and economic
disparity in the capital city: “Rickshaws are not allowed inside the posh parts
of Delhi, where foreigners might see them and gape” (Adiga 27). His description
of rickshaw-pullers there is accurate in uncovering the hidden of the country: “thin, sticklike men, leaning
forward from the seat of a bicycle, as they pedal along a carriage bearing a
pyramid of middle-class flesh–some fat man with his fat wife and all their
shopping bags and groceries” (Adiga 27). The narrator describes the grim
reality of the city–poverty, squalid living, homeless poor people, traffic jam
and pollution:
“Thousands of people live on the sides of the road in
Delhi. They have come from the Darkness too–you can tell by their thin bodies,
filthy faces, by the animal-like way they live under the huge bridges and
overpasses, making fires and washing and taking lice out of their hair while
the cars roar past them. These homeless people are a particular problem for
drivers. They never wait for a red light–simply dashing across the road on
impulse.” (Adiga 119-20)
Indian caste system and gender inequality are easily
obvious. For instance, when Ashok, a returnee from America, faces his family’s
disapproval for marrying his foreign wife, Pinky Madam. Later he tries to
impose traditional Indian customs on her, controlling her emotions.
Balram narrates the pictures of social turmoil, Naxalism
and political upheaval. He presents the scene how common people like him suffer
these traumas: “The fighting between the Naxal terrorists and the landlords was
getting bloodier. Small people like us were getting caught in between. There
were private armies on each side, going around to shoot and torture people
suspected of sympathizing with the other” (Adiga 84)
Under the mask of his creative character Balram, Adiga
crosses the barriers that restrict one’s freedom, personal autonomy and
emancipation to depict a different picture of India that is hardly untold. At
the final moments of the text, he raises concern about the conditions of the
minority class with a more precise and original artistry: “I’ve come to respect
Muslims, sir. They’re not the brightest lot, except for those four poet fellows
[Iqbal, Rumi, Ghalib], but they make good drivers, and they’re honest people,
by and large, although a few of them seem to get this urge to blow trains up
every year.” (Adiga 311).
With a reserved approach, Adiga uncovers the social evils
and corruption that policemen are involved in. He is critical of their illicit
and corrupt activities as they receive money from anyone who is influential and
rich. For instance, Balram bribes the police to remove the case when his driver
runs over a boy. This reveals how affluent peoples dominate the innocent and
poor people, and their hypocrisy and selfishness are made in a moderate way.
Adiga seems to expose that anyone in power and money is associated with abuse
of power, corruption and arrogance.
Hegelian master-servant relationship is illustrated well
throughout the novel. Balram uses the metaphor of the “Rooster Coop” to explain
the hidden hated of the masters and the honesty of the servants and the class
inequality between upper class and lower class:
“The greatest thing to come out of this country in the
ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. . . . On the wooden desk
above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs
of a recently chopped-up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark
blood. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know
they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop.
The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.” (Adiga 173-4)
In this passage the butcher symbolizes the upper-class
people and the rooster symbolizes the subaltern or the underprivileged people.
Roosters are not rebellious because they know that there is no way to reverse
this oppressive system. Balram seems to explain to the readers how the coop is
a symbol of two forms of underdevelopment for the poor. First, the upper class
exploit the lower class. Second, the lower class try to discourage their own
members from achieving self-esteem, emancipation, progress and achievement.
Sometimes lack of unity and courage among the underclass people becomes their
habit of accepting the socially-constructed identity as the marginalized like
roosters staying in the rooster coop to be slaughtered—as they fail to
contradict and eradicate inhumane activities done to them.
In a postcolonial context, the above-mentioned passage is
a parable to illustrate the global economic inequality and underdevelopment as
the ‘Third World’ countries become economically dependent on the ‘First World’
ones through being exploited and corrupted by the latter ones in the forms of
neo-colonization, globalization and global capitalism. The former colonized
countries have been stagnated culturally, politically and economically after
their independence due to European colonization of them which has led to their
underdeveloped economic status. This is also suitable to Balram’s narrative of
“the yellow man and the brown man,” which refers to the people of China and
India respectively, who are destined to take over the world and to emancipate
themselves from being economically and culturally exploited and dominated at
the hand of “the white-skinned man” who represents the colonialist and
capitalists of the ‘First World’ countries (Adiga 5). Balram is hopeful that
that people from the ‘Third World’ countries may lead the world in the fields
of technology, entrepreneurship and economy while the white Western people may
not as they waste themselves through debauchery and mobile phone. He comments
that though the status of the developing countries in the South Asia is deep-rooted
in the colonial oppression by the Western countries, but the emergence of India
and China as a leading global economy has challenged the hegemony of the ‘First
World’ nations. More interestingly, the division between the haves and the
have-nots seems to be associated with Adiga’s ideas of local inequality between
the affluent and the underpriviledged and the global inequality between the
‘Global North’ and ‘Global South.’
Balram’s disinterests in religion and gods in Indian
society stem from the privilege, profit and manipulation of them at the hands
of the politicians, landlords, and bureaucrats. Nevertheless, he never loses
his respects for them. From his narrative, it is clear that unlike politicians,
poor people do not benefit from them, as they born into the ‘India of
Darkness:’
“See,
the Muslims have one god.
The Christians have three gods.
And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.
Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to
choose from.
Now, there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists
like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of
these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There’s just
us and an ocean of darkness around us. . . . It’s true that all these gods seem
to do awfully little work – much like our politicians – and yet keep winning
re-elections to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That’s not to
say that I don’t respect them, Mr Premier.!” (Adiga 8)
In the above-passage Balram unveils the strategies of
winning power, influencing people and securing one’s social and economic
position in modern India by manipulating religious sentiments of people.
Balram exposes how he was compelled by Pinky Madam to
take the responsibility for the crime
that he did not committed but she did it. Her hypocrisy is also reflected when
she ignores his emotions and escapes from the scene so that he will be blamed
for the crime. He soon finds the opportunity to make his own moves towards
breaking out of the shackles of the class divide. He resolves the old problems
in his life by killing his master, Ashoke, by stealing money from him and by
using stolen money as capital to establish his new business of taxi farm in
Bangalore: “Eight months later, I slit Mr Ashok’s throat” (Adiga 42). To be
free from the blame of the murder and to secure his position in society, he
bribes policemen. He rises to a higher class–from a subaltern to privileged
class. He commits an act of rigorous violence to achieve emancipation, and this
is his only viable option to climb the social ladder.
In an interview, when Lee Thomas holds a question about
the tension in his stories between have and have-not in regard to the modern
Indian society, Aravind Adiga rightly explains that:
“I’m a complete misfit in India. I don’t do anything
right. I don’t live the good life that a middle-class person returned from
America should. I don’t own a car, though I could; I don’t keep servants,
though I should. Through sheer incompetence and ineptitude, I’ve discovered
what life is like for the majority of Indians. I take public transportation,
which I shouldn’t; I eat by the roadside, which is dangerous; I talk to
prostitutes and pimps. My stories follow from my experiences-they are the
stories of a fallen and alienated middle-class boy.” (n.p.).
Balram is subjected to discrimination. His ways of
achieving rights, emancipation, freedom, self-esteem and development are valid
and ethical. Finally, he adopts the idea of leading a Western way of life by
wearing pants and shirt, taking the way of emancipation, development and
economic independence. His development stems from breaking out of the
oppression and underdevelopment that he faced because of his masters. Balram
symbolizes every repressed soul who wants to liberate himself from these bonds
and shape his elegant future. The act of killing his master seems to emphasize
his revenge in order to break the limited world, to cross darkness and to
realize his self-consciousness, and his reconfiguration not to lose his faith
to survive in a topsy-turvy world. Balram’s ambition is driven mad by the facts
that his hesitation and murder of his boss are to achieve his freedom, economic
goal and self-esteem. He breaks the bonds of invisibility and servitude to make
him visible and to take advantage of enormous opportunity like other rich men.
However, the emphasis of the text is not on the crime that Balram commits but
is on the breaking of the shackles of generations of bondages and inequality
and on freedom and individual dignity. The issue of becoming a successful
entrepreneur of a servant discloses the great changes of socio-cultural and
economic structure of India in the postcolonial period.
Conclusion
To sum up, throughout the work Adiga illuminates the
rampant transformation in the various fields of Indian society, culture,
politics, and economics with all its unpleasant realities-poverty, social
evils, discriminations, exploitations, violence, economic disparity, class
division, power, communal disharmony, dishonesty and moral degradation. In the
postcolonial and postmodern era, Indian people go through these dark realities
as they are not free from the grip of stark class hierarchy and unfair and
corrupt practices of elite class and politicians. The enormous transformation
of the structure of Indian society and politics with the aid of the revolution
in information and technology helps the rich to be richer and live a more
luxurious and materialistic life in the metropolitan cities. Adiga’s work has
emphasized the need of humanity and equality in every sphere of life and
society to achieve the true goals of democracy-progress, freedom, rights,
development, opportunity and better life. Adiga’s appeal to the reader is to
tackle the existing social evils and problems to establish harmony and unity in
the diverse communities of the country and to make the country more democratic,
prosperous, and powerful.
Work Cited
Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger.
Harper Collins Publishers, 2008.
Higgins, Charlotte. “Out of Darkness: Adiga’s
White Tiger Rides to Booker Victory against the Odds.” The Guardian, 14
Oct 2008. www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/14/booker-prize-adiga-white-tiger. Accessed 28 Apr 2024.
Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic:
Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001.
Jeffries, Stuart. “Roars of Anger.” The
Guardian, 15 Oct 2008. www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize. Accessed 28 Apr 2024.
Lee, Thomas, and Aravind Adiga. “Interview
with Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger.” FictionWriters Review, 15 Apr
2009.
fictionwritersreview.com/interview/interview-with-aravind-adiga-the-white-tiger/.
Accessed 28 Apr 2024.