I just finished reading ‘The White Tiger’, the first novel by Aravind Adiga. The novel had won Man Booker Prize in 2008 against a stiff competition from Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and 4 others.
Though the novel is a fast read and starts involving you once you have crossed the first 50 pages of the book, I must admit I was not impressed with the writing style. The novel is a series of letters written to the Chinese premiere with a continuous use of ‘Sir’. A similar style was in the book ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ by Mohsin Hamid where the narrator keeps addressing an unknown foreigner ‘Sir’ in almost every alternate sentence. I feel this is an unnecessary respect granted to a person of a different nationality considering him to be of superior race than people of South Asian descent.
Moving on to the second issue with the style, is what I see with most of the other Indian authors appealing to international audience – showing extreme poverty, people defecating in the open, children in torn clothes bathing in open black sewage, malnutrition, corrupt political and legal system etc…basically the so-called real exposed truth behind the modern India which we have been trying to project to the outside investor world. Now I am not saying it’s not true. Every Indian will admit that whatever these guys have written is absolutely true and can be seen in any slum prevalent in every city of India. But somehow it has become a habit of authors to exploit it. Why does books exposing such realties are the ones which win awards? It should also be noted that the author emigrated to Sydney in mid-90s and spent the rest of his life outside India. So the entire experience has been written by someone who has hardly lived in India.
This reminds me of Sanjeev Bhaskar and his BBC documentary on India’s call centers in which he shows some of the worst possible environments for the industry. Once again an extreme projection of India by someone who would have hardly witnessed the emergence of this industry…
The novel also has a lot of disparaging remarks about Muslims; yet somehow hasn’t invited any controversy… Sample this: “Have you noticed that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslims? And yet all Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in Black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up?” Another one: “Full of things that the modern world forgot all about – rickshaws, old stone buildings and Muslims”.
Having said above, I don’t want to be only a critic of the book which I said earlier was a fast engrossing read. It has its own plus points. The book, I believe, has been successful in its objectives of creating awareness on the plight of servants in Indian households… I for once had never thought what a driver goes through sitting in an AC car waiting for his master whole day outside his office…a 24*7 house worker on seeing his employers enjoying the luxuries of life while he sleeps in either a kitchen or some sort of shabby servant quarters… when the kind of leverage the servants have on our daily lives, when they have the easiest access to the house wealth and its owners, still the proportion of crime committed by them is almost negligible… most of them are loyal to their masters throughout their lives… So all in all the book is a good and recommended read and leaves a sense of skepticism and suspicion in you...
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