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The White Tiger
WINNER of the Man Booker Prize - 2008 for fiction, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards, The White Tiger, is not just the story of Balram Halwai, the protagonist who undergoes a metamorphosis. From "a sweet innocent village fool" he turns into a wicked person, who kills his master, takes his money, and changes from a being hunted criminal into a solid pillar of the Bangalorean society by donning his master’s identity and name, Ashok. In an epistolary form, the writing is a powerful scrutiny, lending an incisive insight into the other face of India residing in slums and villages, with no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation and sense of hygiene. In his lengthy epistle to the Chinese Premier, Balram professes how the India put on display by the crafty diplomats is just a fa`E7ade, a chimera. He takes him on an odyssey to show the real ailing India, perceived through his eyes. The author — a deft storyteller — helps us have a peek into Balram’s psyche to show how circumstances corrupt a helpless person. A mouthpiece of the author, Balram, draws our attention to the depressing and gloomy side of India, of which we seem to be oblivious. How corrupt officials siphon the funds meant for the betterment of the poor is proved by the manner in which the Inspector of Schools pockets the scholarship money awarded to Balram because of which he had to drop school and work in a teashop. The deaths of his mother and rickshaw puller father due to non-attendance and utter poverty, too, scar child Balram’s psyche and make him cherish the dream of living like the rich, sans all worries. While working as a chauffeur to a big shot, Balram witnesses that the dreams of the rich and the dreams of the poor never overlap. The prose, with its biting sarcasm, brings to the forefront how the "poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and look like the rich and the rich dream of losing weight and look like the poor". For his master, Balram is not just a driver but literally a 24x7-slave who is assigned other odd jobs too. "The fatsoes made their thin servants — most of them drivers, stand at various spots on that circle with bottles of mineral water and fresh towels in their hands. Each time they completed a circuit around the building, they stopped next to their man, grabbed the bottle — gulp — grabbed the towel — wipe, wipe — then it was off on round two". Living with a penny-pinching master, who forces him to take upon himself the blame for a murder committed by his wife, being a silent spectator to the fatal nexus between business tycoons and politicians and their corrupt practices like bribing the officials in order to evade tax and for many other favours, how can Balram not feel the anger and resentment? The story points out the violent increase in inequality between the incomes of rural and urban population. The urban elite have every reason to feel good as they have plenty to spend on their whims and fancies — the latest automobiles, dresses, lavish food etc. But they are completely blind to the sufferings of their servants who live in sub-human conditions. Wouldn’t in such a capitalist society a large majority of have-nots revolt one day against deprivation and acute destitution? This is the question that the author throws at the readers. This fundamental issue confronting democracy is the undercurrent of the novel. Balram adopts a shortcut to escape the world of poverty — he murders his employer and escapes with his money, knowing well that the poor cannot escape their lot, the "chicken coop" trap, by treading the path of honesty. The narrative is a dexterously woven satire on our present day politicians, highlighting how their fraudulent practices rooted through their corrupt agents and officials have outdone even the colonial masters in their disregard for the welfare of the masses. It goes to show how the world’s greatest democracy is in fact a mockery of democracy where poor illiterate people — whose opinions are manipulated with regional, communal and casteist bias — cast their votes and choose their representatives. The defunct electricity poles, thin rickshaw pullers, malnutritioned children, old beggars, polluted rivers, Indians’ habit of spitting, frequent traffic jams, tobacco and petrol pollution, overloaded animals etc — do not miss the writer’s keen eye for detail. The fact that exploitation, violence, poverty and corruption have sullied the principles of equality, liberty, fraternity and the poor are reduced to mere statistics, forms the backbone of the novel. It is the perceptive sensitivity of the author that grasps the subtle details of not just a poor person’s childhood or growing old but the sweating terrain that lies in between. His simple style — reflective and real — brings out a story that introduces us to the unrecorded voices of the poor. Exploring the gamut of poor-rich relationship, of haves and have-nots, focusing on the layered hopes, disappointments, guilts, regrets, expectations and redemptions, it is a reflection of Indian reality with a veiled commentary on the police, political system, servant classes and businessmen. On the whole the novel is a must read with a warning that it would certainly make a sensitive reader uneasy.
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