This is for people who prefer their journalism in the form of a novel.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga was on my list of to-be-read books before it won the Booker Prize simply because of my interest in the subject matter.  The novel is about a lower caste servant in contemporary India who murders his boss, steals his money and uses it as seed money for a start-up in Bangalore.  After having spent a bit of time working in India and developing an interest in the changes that are happening in the country, this novel sounded like something that would be right up my alley.  The awarding of the Booker, one of the few literary prizes that more often than not goes to authors whose work I actually like, certainly raised my expectations.

Judging by my own experience and by other accounts of contemporary India that I’ve read, the novel does succeed as a work of journalism of sorts.  The brutal relationships between servants and masters, as well as the brutal relationships among servants, are well-drawn.  Sometimes it seems as if every human relationship in the country is a power struggle, and this fiction certainly does not sanitize the culture as so many others have done.  It is no surprise that Adiga is in fact a journalist (or was, prior to this literary success) and that most of his work has been for Western periodicals.  This is a work of fiction written not for Indians but rather for a Western audience, who of course will greatly appreciate having the curtain pulled back by a “real Indian” who will reveal for them that crazy country’s true nature.

Yes, Adiga is Indian, but he is certainly not from the class of workers to which the novel’s narrator belongs.  Although raised mostly in India, he and his family also lived in Australia.  He holds dual Indian and Australian citizenship.  More telling, Adiga attended Columbia University and then Oxford University.  Sorry, but such opportunities are only possible for members of the upper crust of Indian society.  The White Tiger has been compared to Native Son by many reviewers and blurb writers, and the author himself has spoken of Richard Wright as an influence (along with Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin).  Okay, maybe that’s true, but this just strikes me as a conscious attempt by the author (or his publicist) to spin this first-novel as the “Native Son of India.”  But this is Native Son written by the (sympathetic) white oppressor, not by one who has lived the experience himself.  Adiga may be Indian but he is not from the same India as his narrator.

For more on this, read Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s refreshingly critical piece in the London Review of Books.  The White Tiger, of course, was written in English.  But the narrator himself does not speak English, and Subrahmanyam is particularly devastating when criticizing of the narrator’s language.

Despite the odd namaste, daal, paan and ghat, his vocabulary is not sprinkled with North Indian vernacular terms. His sentences are mostly short and crudely constructed, apparently a reflection of the fact that we’re dealing with a member of the ‘subaltern’ classes. He doesn’t engage in Rushdian word-play. But he does use a series of expressions that simply don’t add up. He describes his office as a ‘hole in the wall’. He refers to ‘kissing some god’s arse’, an idiomatic expression that doesn’t exist in any North Indian language. ‘Half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas’ and the Chinese prime minister is advised never to ‘let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull’. On another matter, he sneers: ‘They’re so yesterday.’ A clever little phrase appears: ‘A statutory warning - as they say on cigarette packs - before we begin.’ Dogs are referred to as ‘mutts’. Yet whose vocabulary and whose expressions are these? On page after page, one is brought up short by the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions. This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being able to pull it off. This is not Salinger speaking as Holden Caulfield, or Joyce speaking as Molly Bloom. It is certainly not Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, whom Adiga has claimed as his models in speaking for the underdog. What we are dealing with is someone with no sense of the texture of Indian vernaculars, yet claiming to have produced a realistic text.

Alright, then what if we forget reality and just treat the novel as an self-contained work of fiction?  If this novel took place in some fictitious land and not in the new India that everyone finds so fascinating these days, I think we’d never have heard of it.  From the hero’s rise through the ranks of servitude to the murder of his boss to the rapid success of his start-up, the novel’s twists and turns are too unrealistic to be interesting.  Everything moves as quickly as in a children’s book.  The murder and escape are over in just over two pages.  Perhaps ten pages later, the hero has gone from from servant-murderer a successful business owner.  Most of the novel up until that point is simply a catalog of the many injustices that the narrator is forced to endure.  Yes, we’ve seen this story before.  It’s the same old paradigm.  But now it’s India’s turn.

The characters?  Apart from the narrator, they’re all dosa thin, each serving as a representative of an archetype of contemporary Indian culture:  the entrepreneur, the abused lower caste servant, the Muslim, the money-hungry family matriarch, the corrupt government official, the self-righteous upper class business man with his bottle of Johnny Walker Black (the weapon that will be used to murder him…one detail I’ll admit that I loved) , the spoiled American-born woman with her crazy western ideas.  There are more one-dimensional cartoons than fully drawn characters here.

Yes, the narrator himself is of some interest and has a good sense of humor.  But I never really believed that this character exists.  He was more of an authorial device than a seemingly real human being.  It did not help that each chapter is supposed to be a letter to a Chinese premier who is soon to visit Bangalore.  This gimmick serves no purpose whatsoever but has the effect of continually reminding the reader that she is reading a work of fiction.

So if you want to learn a little bit about contemporary India by means of a fast-moving novel rather than by visiting the place or reading a work of journalism or non-fiction, then The White Tiger may have something to offer you.  If you’re craving an interesting work of literature, go elsewhere.

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