Lynda's Reviews > The White Tiger

"If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them. That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like."--Aravind Adiga

The White Tiger, The Man Booker Prize winner of 2008, has unsettled critics and readers alike. It is a provocative book as it paints an unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude, exposing the country's dark side. This grim world is far removed from the glossy images of Bollywood stars and technology entrepreneurs.


--The author

The entire novel is narrated through seven letters by Balram Halwai, an exceedingly charming, egotistical admitted murderer, to the Premier of China, who will soon be visiting India.

Balram is an Indian man from an impoverished background, born into the 'darkness' of rural India. His family is from the Halwai caste, a caste that indicates sweet-makers. His village is dominated and oppressed by four landlords. Balram gets a break when he goes to work for one of the landlords, and then ends up moving to Delhi via a job as driver to Mr Ashok, the landlord's son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation; crime, corruption, greed, adultery, prostitution and alcohol abuse.

I enjoyed this book. Caught up in Balram's world, and his wonderful turn of phrases, the pages turned themselves, brimming with idiosyncrasy, sarcasm, cunning, and often hilarious.

"Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewerage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology."

There was also a great deal of sadness in the book, especially the treatment of the underclass who built the city, and are trapped there, hidden from plain view, employed in poor conditions and at low grade jobs, and in some cases held in slavery conditions. Balram refers to this as the "rooster coop".

"Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench – the stench of terrified, feathered flesh."

The White Tiger brilliantly portrays the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the poor. For Adiga, his achievement is capturing a stirring, a glimmer of a refusal by the poor to accept the fate ordained for them by their masters.

A splendid, perceptive book. A narrative genius.