Review of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

*The White Tiger* by Aravind Adiga (2008). Published by Free Press.

When I went to graduate school, I had no idea what to expect when it came to the kinds of books and content I would be consuming. I completely switched fields and disciplines for my master’s degree experience, and I honestly don’t regret it for one minute looking back in hindsight.

That said, I took a course called Power my first semester of graduate school. This was a class on looking at power dynamics through the lens of colonialism, as it was taught my a comparative literature professor who specialized in Caribbean literature. But not every book we read was from that region, as seen from The White Tiger.

We had a week on India and its contemporary issues, and this was the book we read in tandem with texts on neoliberalism in the world. I had never heard of this book before having to read it for class, but man this was a wild ride throughout.

Let’s get into the review!

Balram is going to become one of the most successful entrepreneurs India has ever seen.

Our main character in this novel is Balram, who tells the story through a series of letters. He wrote these over the course of a week, and addresses almost all of them to the Chinese politician Wen Jiabao.

We first begin with Balram’s origins: the son of a rickshaw driver, he completely escaped the circumstances he was born into. He once lived with his entire family in a village, but was unable to attain an education.

He was good at school when he was there, but when his cousin was married off, he had to get work in order to help pay for the dowry she had to give. He finds work at a teashop, where, while eavesdropping, he learns more about the economy, government, and business. His mother dies not long into this section, and he describes what the burning looked like.

Somewhere along the way, he learns how to drive. He is enlisted as the driver for Ashok, who is the son of someone powerful and a landlord locally. Now the main driver for the son, he’s making a good income, but he stops sending it back home. He eventually cuts off his family in a different way after he comes home to the village, but then he goes to New Delhi with his boss.

When he arrives in Delhi, it becomes more apparent to Balram the levels of poverty and corruption that are present in the world. It’s one night while driving everything changes: his boss’s wife is drunk and grabs the wheel. She hits what’s presumably a child, and the employers try to convince Balram to say it was him.

Ashok bribes some people to get out of it personally, and Balram realizes the best scenario is to kill Ashok in order to not end up in poverty himself. He knows that if he ends up poor, he’ll basically be like a chicken in the market. He considers the poor to be oppressed, and he wants no part in being oppressed, even though society is already dictating a chunk of his actions.

He goes through with his plan and kills Ashok with a bottle. He then takes the bribe Ashok had on him at the time, and leaves for Bangalore. There, he bribes the cops to stay relatively peacefully there, and then starts his own business involving taxis.

But it’s here he furthers the cycle: one of his drivers hits a boy, and he bribes the family. We learn Balram’s family probably was killed for everything that happened to Ashok, but Balram thinks it was justified.

Overall Thoughts

On a surface level, this is a novel that seems completely bizarre, and one could chalk its protagonist up as unhinged if they don’t want to look past that initial layer. He’s someone very much impacted and willing to exploit the system to become an entrepreneur and rich, which is a direct critique of class and capitalism in the long run.

That said, I find the structure of the letters to add so much more to the satire elements of the novel. Through the lens of India’s unique struggles, we can learn a lot about the state of the modern world and how people see themselves.

Pick this one up though if it sounds interesting to you—there’s a lot of analysis involved with these kinds of works, and if you’re into this, it’s worth it. I certainly found it compelling!

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