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The White Tiger Paperback – 14 October 2008
by Aravind Adiga (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 10,982 ratings
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
The stunning Booker Prize-winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright's Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India's caste society. "This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before" (John Burdett, Bangkok 8).
The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China's impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society.
Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation--and a startling, provocative debut.
Review
"Adiga's training as a journalist lends the immediacy of breaking news to his writing, but it is his richly detailed storytelling that will captivate his audience...The White Tiger echoes masterpieces of resistance and oppression (both The Jungle and Native Son come to mind) [and] contains passages of startling beauty...A book that carefully balances fable and pure observation." - Lee Thomas, San Francisco Chronicle
"An exhilarating, side-splitting account of India today, as well as an eloquent howl at her many injustices. Adiga enters the literary scene resplendent in battle dress and ready to conquer. Let us bow to him." -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook
"Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger is one of the most powerful books I've read in decades. No hyperbole. This debut novel from an Indian journalist living in Mumbai hit me like a kick to the head -- the same effect Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man had. - USA Today
"Compelling, angry, and darkly humorous, The White Tiger is an unexpected journey into a new India. Aravind Adiga is a talent to watch." -- Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
"Darkly comic...Balram's appealingly sardonic voice and acute observations of the social order are both winning and unsettling." - The New Yorker
"Extraordinary and brilliant... At first, this novel seems like a straightforward pulled-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, albeit given a dazzling twist by the narrator's sharp and satirical eye for the realities of life for India's poor... But as the narrative draws the reader further in, and darkens, it becomes clear that Adiga is playing a bigger game... Adiga is a real writer - that is to say, someone who forges an original voice and vision. There is the voice of Halwai - witty, pithy, ultimately psychopathic... Remarkable... I will not spoil the effect of this remarkable novel by giving away ... what form his act of blood-stained entrepreneurship takes. Suffice to say that I was reminded of a book that is totally different in tone and style, Richard Wright's Native Son, a tale of the murderous career of a black kid from the Chicago ghetto that awakened 1940s America to the reality of the racial divide. Whether The White Tiger will do the equivalent for today's India - we shall see." - Adam Lively, The Sunday Times (London)
"Fierce and funny...A satire as sharp as it gets." - Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times
"The perfect antidote to lyrical India." - Publishers Weekly
"There is a new Muse stalking global narrative: brown, angry, hilarious, half-educated, rustic-urban, iconoclastic, paan-spitting, word-smithing--and in the case of Aravind Adiga she hails from a town called Laxmangarh. This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before. Adiga is a global Gorky, a modern Kipling who grew up, and grew up mad. The future of the novel lies here." - John Burdett, author of Bangkok 8
"This fast-moving novel, set in India, is being sold as a corrective to the glib, dreamy exoticism Western readers often get...If these are the hands that built India, their grandkids really are going to kick America's ass...BUY IT." - New York Magazine
About the Author
Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. He is the author of the novels Amnesty; Selection Day, now a series on Netflix; The White Tiger, which won the Man Booker Prize;and the story collection Between the Assassinations. He lives in Mumbai, India.
Product details
ASIN : 1416562605
Publisher : Free Press (14 October 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 304 pages
ISBN-10 : 9781416562603
ISBN-13 : 978-1416562603
Dimensions : 13.97 x 2.29 x 21.43 cmBest Sellers Rank: 522,466 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)220 in Indian Literature
380 in Epistolary Fiction
1,401 in Australian & Oceanian LiteratureCustomer Reviews:
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 10,982 ratings
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Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.
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From Australia
Ashanti
5.0 out of 5 stars A rare beast, the White Tiger.
Reviewed in Australia on 13 January 2014
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We were on our first trip to India when I started reading this book so a lot of what the author was describing was right there in front of us. I was enthralled from the first page and could not stop reading. Adiga accurately describes the attitudes and treatment of "lesser" beings by those who consider themselves to be better as well as the harrowing cruelty and hardship that afflicts so many Indians. The manipulation of people, not only by the moneyed and powerful but by family members, is depicted in stark detail.
The writing is flowing and easy to read and I would highly recommend this book, not only as a really good read but also as an incisive insight into Indian society.
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Stargirl456
4.0 out of 5 stars Intricately woven story telling a delicate yet full bodied plot
Reviewed in Australia on 28 March 2016
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White Tiger is so written, in a voice of a young driver who later becomes enlightened about the injustice of his existence . The main character quietly turns from an ever loyal servant to a killer who kill not only for theft , but to show he to can make a mark in the world.
I'm still wondering if his lust for wealth kept him blinded to the immoral way of getting his fortune, or whether his his competitive nature came to the fore and he made the best of a sorry situation.
It's a short read and worth it
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Renee' Clare
3.0 out of 5 stars Clever storyline
Reviewed in Australia on 1 December 2016
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I did appreciate the clever storyline and the well written book. My husband loved this book and recommended it to me however I found it didnt excite me as it did him. I found it monotonous and although I was determined to finish the book it wasn't to my taste.
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Creekside14
5.0 out of 5 stars Just read it!
Reviewed in Australia on 14 September 2019
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A superb, brilliant book. Could only have been written by someone from India, despite some reviewers and interviewers critical of his wealthy upbringing and education as a potential deterrent to his writing of such a book. His perspective is magnificent. Empathy, sadness and humour, all there. A first novel; all hail to him. A well-deserved prizewinner. It was suggested to me recently that I read it. Sorry that I didn't discover it years ago but so thankful that I now have; a treasure.
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Victoria
4.0 out of 5 stars Black humour, Indian style
Reviewed in Australia on 7 February 2019
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This was an interesting read of a struggling Indian man who took every opportunity with both hands. An interesting way of telling the story. Unfortunate inequalities that exist in India re prevalent throughout the book. It is very sad in parts and funny at other times. India - what a land of contrasts. Get rid of the class system and the country, and it's beautiful people could flourish!!
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Joel Hopkinson
5.0 out of 5 stars Grade 11 English literature textbook
Reviewed in Australia on 13 March 2024
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I bought this book for my son in grade 11 and it served its purpose well.
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Anne Whight
4.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating depiction of a young man's rise in Modern India
Reviewed in Australia on 4 August 2015
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Fascinating story highlighting the immense gap between the wealthy and desperately poor in modern India. This is the beautifully written story of a the young and ambitious Balram, born into a very poor family where the father is a rickshaw driver. The story is told through Balram's words, the accent and intonation of which can almost be heard, so cleverly are they written. Balram uses every means possible to become a successful business man, and in so doing reveals the corruption in the system that is necessary for his rise. Interesting and believable characters, setting and plot.
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Sarngini Kumar
2.0 out of 5 stars Easy Read.
Reviewed in Australia on 24 February 2021
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Great storyline. Easy read.
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Jude
4.0 out of 5 stars Slum dog Millionaire parallels
Reviewed in Australia on 13 May 2019
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Balram tells his tale of rising from one of the lowest castes to entrepreneur and shows an India through his eyes. The baser human language and descriptions of the lowest of the low had me instantly recalling Slum dog millionaire. Gritty and raw. Yet I saw beauty profound.
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Geoff Phillips
4.0 out of 5 stars Tyger tyger burning bright
Reviewed in Australia on 17 March 2020
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A brilliant, witty and most enjoyable novel. You will not be disappointed in your choice. By the end of the story you will have a big grin on your face just like me. :-)
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Roars of anger
This article is more than 15 years old
Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland. He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country's dark side
Stuart Jeffries
Thu 16 Oct 2008
How do you get the nerve, I ask Aravind Adiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you're an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?
It's the morning after Adiga, 33, won the £50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga's homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of India's economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight's Children (a book that Adiga recognises as a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.
Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question. Or as affronted as a man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media hoopla can be. Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: "I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me." On a shortlist that included several books written by people very much like their central characters (Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire suburbanites during the miners' strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.
But isn't there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others' suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfil his literary ambitions? "Well, this is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. In somewhere like Bihar there will be no doctors in the hospital. In northern India politics is so corrupt that it makes a mockery of democracy. This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day, but people like me - middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better than England's - don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the poor of India endure.
"At a time when India is going through great changes and, 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 process of self-examination."
That, though, makes Adiga's novel sound like funless didacticism. Thankfully - for all its failings (comparisons with the accomplished sentences of Sebastian Barry's shortlisted The Secret Scripture could only be unfavourable) - The White Tiger is nothing like that. Instead, it has an engaging, gobby, megalomaniac, boss-killer of a narrator who reflects on his extraordinary rise from village teashop waiter to success as an entrepreneur in the alienated, post-industrial, call-centre hub of Bangalore.
Balram Halwai narrates his story through letters he writes, but doesn't send, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Wen is poised to visit India to learn why it is so good at producing entrepreneurs, so Balram presumes to tell him how to win power and influence people in the modern India. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skulduggery, toxic traffic jams, theft and murder. Whether communist China can import this business model is questionable. In any event, Balram tells his reader that the yellow and the brown men will take over the world from the white man, who has become (and this is where Balram's analysis gets shaky) effete through toleration of homosexuality, too slim and physically weakened by overexposure to mobile phones.
Halwai has come from what Adiga calls the Darkness - the heart of rural India - and manages to escape his family and poverty by becoming chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to Delhi to bribe government officials. Why did he make Halwai a chauffeur? "Because of the whole active-passive thing. The chauffeur is the servant but he is, at least while he's driving, in charge, so the whole relationship is subverted." Disappointingly, Adiga only knows of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic from reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. But that dialectic is the spine of his novel: the servant kills his master to achieve his freedom.
The White Tiger teems with indignities masquerading as employee duties. Such, Adiga maintains, is India - even as Delhi rises like a more eastern Dubai, call-centres suck young people from villages and India experiences the pangs of urbanisation that racked the west two centuries ago. "Friends who came to India would always say to me it was a surprise that there was so little crime and that made me wonder why." Balram supplies an answer: servitude. "A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9% - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude." What Balram calls the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy; unlike China, he reflects, India doesn't need a dictatorship or secret police to keep its people grimly achieving economic goals.
"If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them," says Adiga. "That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like." Adiga conceived the novel when he was travelling in India and writing for Time magazine. "I spent a lot of time hanging around stations and talking to rickshaw pullers." What struck him was the physical difference between the poor and the rich: "In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs. But also their intelligence impressed me. What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers."
It is not surprising then that the greatest literary influences on the book were three great African-American 20th-century novelists - Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. "They all wrote about race and class, while later black writers focus on just class. Ellison's Invisible Man was extremely important to me. That book was disliked by white and blacks. My book too will cause widespread offence. Balram is my invisible man, made visible. This white tiger will break out of his cage."
For Indian readers, one of the most upsetting parts of that break-out is that Halwai casts off his family. "This is a shameful and dislocating thing for an Indian to do," says Adiga. "In India, there has never been strong central political control, which is probably why the family is still so important. If you're rude to your mother in India, it's a crime as bad as stealing would be here. But the family ties get broken or at least stretched when anonymous, un-Indian cities like Bangalore draw people from the villages. These really are the new tensions of India, but Indians don't think about them. The middle- classes, especially, think of themselves still as victims of colonial rule. But there is no point any more in someone like me thinking of myself as a victim of you [Adiga has cast me, not for the first time, as a colonial oppressor]. India and China are too powerful to be controlled by the west any more.
"We've got to get beyond that as Indians and take responsibility for what is holding us back." What is holding India back? "The corruption, lack of health services for the poor and the presumption that the family is always the repository of good."
Our time is nearly over. Adiga doesn't know how he will spend his prize money, isn't even sure if there's a safe bank in which to deposit it. Doesn't he fear attacks at home for his portrayal of India? After all, the greatest living Indian painter, MF Husain, lives in exile. "I'm in a different position from Husain. Fortunately, the political class doesn't read. He lives in exile because his messages got through, but mine probably won't."
Adiga, who says he has written his second novel but won't talk about it ("It might be complete crap, so there's no point"), flies home to Mumbai today to resume his bachelor life. His most pressing problem is that Mumbai landlords don't let flats to single men. Why? "They think we're more likely to be terrorists. I'd just like to say, through your pages, that I am not. In fact, if you check the biographies of Indian terrorists you'll find they are mostly family men who are well-off. It's a trend that needs to be investigated."
Possibly in a new novel by Adiga, yet again analysing the unbearably poignant torments of the emerging new India. Ideally, though, with jokes.
· This article was amended on Saturday October 18 2008. We were wrong to originally describe author Philip Hensher as Sheffield-born; he was born and lives in London. This has been corrected.
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