White Tiger by Arvind Adiga

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is the story of a man named Balram Halwai and his
journey of redemption from regression and suppression. The writer paints a sardonic and dark
picture of India and this article is an endeavour to bring out the truth behind his representation of
the nation. Adiga views India as being infested with servitude and swath, where a man born in a
poor family finds his chances of progress being limited and the conditions prevailing in India are
such that propel the self of an economically deprived individual to justify a crime like murder,

Adiga has raised many issues in his work and it is
a fact beyond contestation that India is being confronted by most of the issues put forth by him.
But what concludes his work as an unacceptable representation of India is that he has increased
the magnitude of the problems manifold, so that they seem to be the dominant factor in Indian
society. It cannot be argued that his work is devoid of reality, but it is indeed the exaggeration of
reality, which makes his work liable to criticism and splenetic reactions.

Through this epistolary novel written in a series of seven letters over seven nights,
addressed to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiaboa, the writer paints a cynical, supercilious and
unromanticized picture of India where education system is defunct, elections are rigged, poverty
is rampant, almost ubiquitous and the poor have to face appalling regression at the hands of the
elites as the writer divides the nation in two distinct zones –
“India is two countries in one: an India of light and an India of darkness. The
ocean brings light to my country. But [the Ganges] river brings darkness to India -
the black river”.

Balram Halwai is born into the grinding poverty of the portion of India he calls the "Darkness." He's a bright student, nicknamed the White Tiger for an animal that appears only once in a generation. Still, by the accident of his birth it appears he's sentenced to a near subsistence-level life in his native village, where raw sewage courses through the streets and the residents are at the mercy of venal landowners.

Balram manages to trade his menial job in a local tea shop for a position in New Delhi as the driver for Mr. Ashok, the son of one of the village landlords, and his wife Pinky Madam. In his new role, Balram astutely grasps the workings of the Indian economy, as Mr. Ashok is forced to bribe government officials in order to carry out his business activities. Although Balram confesses early in the first-person narrative that he's murdered his master, in a tale that faintly echoes Dostoevsky, we learn how the plan to commit that crime gradually and yet inevitably took form. And in a startling denouement, Balram reveals how he capitalizes on his crime to recreate himself as an entrepreneur in the booming Indian economy