Name: Jethwa Monali A
Paper 14:
The African Literature
Roll no:
19
Topic:
Balram’s quest for freedom in Adiga’s “The White Tiger”
Submitted:
Dept.Of.English
M.K.B.U
Introduction
About author:
·
Aravind Adiga was born in
1974 in Madras (now called Chennai), and grew up in Mangalore in the south of
India. He was educated at Columbia University in New York and Magdalen College,
Oxford. His articles have appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, the
Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Times of India.
·
His debut novel, The
White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 2008. Its release was
followed by a collection of short stories in the book titled Between the
Assassinations. His second novel, Last Man in the Tower, was published in 2011.
His newest novel, Selection Day, was
published in 2016.
·
Quest
for Freedom in “The White Tiger”
·
The White Tiger is the debut
novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It is first published in 2008 and won the
40th Man Booker Prize in the same year. It is a novel about a compelling, angry
and darkly humorous man’s journey from Indian village life to entrepreneurial
success.
·
It is about the journey of Balram Halwai, the
protagonist, a village boy who happens to be a sweet make to a successful
businessman. He never turned back. He was annoyed with the society. He thinks
that the poor man in our county is half-baked and he compared them with the
chickens who are kept in the Rooster Coop.
·
How Balram came out of this Rooster Coop and
how the quest for freedom made him to face the nastiest situation that involves
murder, cheating, bribery and stealing is the major theme of the book. He is
referred to as “The White Tiger” which symbolizes power, freedom and
individuality. He is the one who got out of the “darkness” (low caste) and
found his way into the “Light”.
·
So this paper analyses how
Balram Halwai’s thirst for freedom, his anger, protest, indulgence in criminal
acts, prostitution, drinking, chasing, grabbing all the opportunities, means
fair or foul endorse deep-rooted frustration and its reaction against the
“haves” made him a criminal but a successful entrepreneur.
·
The White Tiger is a book about
a man’s quest for freedom. Balram the protagonist in this novel worked his way
out of his low caste and overcame the social obstacles that limited his family
in the past. To complete the mission to become an entrepreneur he does
everything and achieves it by killing his master. By doing this, he shows the
picture of modern India and educates the masses about the criminals who are
born due to inequality, corruption and injustice in the society.
·
The novel provides a darkly
humorous perspective of India’s class struggle in a globalized world as told
through a retrospective narration from the protagonist, Balram Halwai, a
village boy to the Chinese Premier His Excellency Wen Jiabao during seven nights.
·
In detailing Balram’s journey
first to Delhi, where he works as a chauffeur to a rich landlord, and then to
Bangalore, the place to which he flees after killing his master and stealing
his money, the novel examines issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption
and poverty in India.
·
Ultimately, Balram transcends his sweet maker
caste and becomes a successful entrepreneur, establishing his own taxi service.
In a nation proudly shedding the history of poverty and underdevelopment, he
represents, as he himself says, “tomorrow”
·
The white tiger of the 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.
·
Balram moves to New Delhi with
Ashok and his wife Ms Pinky Madam. Throughout their time in New Delhi, Balram
is exposed to the extensive corruption of India’s society, including the
government. In New Delhi, the separation between poor and wealthy becomes even
more evident by the juxtaposition of the wealthy with poor city dwellers.
·
One night Pinky decides to
drive the car by herself and hits something. She is worried that it was a child
and the family eventually decides to frame Balram for the hit and run case. The
police tells them that no one reported a child missing so that luckily no
further inquiry is done. Ashok becomes increasingly involved with the corrupt
government itself.
·
Having being humiliated so many times, during
a trip back to his village Balram insults his grandmother and tells the reader
and the Chinese Premier that in the next eight months he intends to kill his
boss .Balram then decides that the only way that he will be able to escape
India’s ‘Rooster Coop’ will be by killing and robbing Ashok. Balram learns how
to siphon gas, deals with corrupt mechanics and refill and resell Johnie Walker
black label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the coop that no
one else inside it can perceive
·
One rainy day he murders Ashok
by bludgeoning him with a broken liquor bottle. He then manages to flee to
Bangalore with his young nephew. There he bribes the police in order to help
start his own driving service. When one of his drivers kills a bike messenger
Balram pays off the family and police. Balram explains that his family was
almost certainly killed by the Stork as retribution for Ashok's murder.
·
At the end of the novel Balram rationalizes
his actions by saying that his freedom is worth the lives of Ashok and his
family and the monetary success of his new taxi company.
·
Balram’s quest to becoming an
entrepreneur shows the oppression of the lower caste system and the superiority
of the upper caste. He tells the story of how India still has a caste system
and political and economic corruption is still present.
·
Balram shows the country of
India in which a person high on the caste system can bribe people such as
police officers with money to cover up murders, sabotage political opponents by
rigging votes and money, and have privileges such as shopping in a mall
specifically for those of high social and economic importance.
·
He also shows the side of India in which those
who are born into poverty and low castes may forever remain there and so will
their children. Balram is a rare exception, as he experiences both sides of the
caste system and manages to move up the social ladder. According to Adiga poor
people are the victim of economic inequality of our society like we see Balram
Halwai in The White Tiger.
·
He wants to take revenge of all
the actions of his master. He wants to get rid of the slaveness. He tries to do
all these things by visiting prostitutes because he has seen his master Ashok
enjoying life with girls in the malls and hotels.
·
As Mr. Ashok always traveled with golden hair women
and had sex, Balram also wants to take pleasure with the women in golden hair:
I held it up to the light. A strand of golden hair I’ve got it in my desk to
this day.
·
Balram’s commentary is replete
with incongruity, contradiction and anger that runs like a toxin throughout
every page. As Adrian Turpin reviews, Balram’s violent bid for freedom is
shocking. What, we’re left to ask, does it make him -- just another thug in
India’s urban jungle or a revolutionary and idealist? It’s a sign of this
book’s quality, as well as of its moral seriousness, that it keeps you guessing
to the final page and beyond."
·
As Adiga says “Balram’s anger
is not an anger that the reader should participate in entirely-it an seem at
times like the rage you might feel if you were in Balram’s place-but at other
times you should feel troubled by it, certainly”.
·
In portraying the character of Balram, Adiga
has succeeded in projecting him as a person with an antisocial disorder. As
Balram’s education expands, he grows more corrupt. Yet the reader’s sympathy
for the former tea boy never flags.
·
In creating a character that is both witty and
psychopathic, Mr. Adiga has produced a hero almost as memorable as Pip, proving
himself the Charles Dickens of the call-centre generation. (The Economist )
Mainly the actions of the psychopathic are influenced by the actions of others.
They are perverted. They are interested only in their personal needs and
desires without concern for the effects of their behavior on others.
·
So the mission of Balram is completed by
killing his master and become a big entrepreneur. This is the servant’s
perspective. It is his subjective views, which are pretty depressing. There are
also two crimes that he commits: he robs, and he kills, and by no means do I
expect a reader to sympathize with both the crimes. He’s not meant to be a
figure whose views you should accept entirely.
·
There’s evidence within the novel that the
system is more flexible than Balram suggests, and it is breaking down faster
than he claims. And within the story I hope that there’s evidence of servants
cheating the masters systematically...to suggest a person’s capacity for evil
or vice is to grant them respect—is to acknowledge their capacity for volition
and freedom of choice .
·
So the innocent village boy from Laxmangarh
goes to New Delhi and works as a driver, humiliated by his masters, learnt
corrupt practices and bribing money to buy politicians and policemen to kill
and loot at last decides to kill his master and steal the money (Rs.
7,00,000/-) and became an entrepreneur.
·
His thirst for freedom made him to do so. So
his actions make the audience thinks about the Indians and many types of
aspirants and frustration they represent. The novel is an intelligent and
ruthless portrait of India in which downtrodden people like Balram suffers
under the rich. Here the author shows the true picture of Indian society.
·
He also educates the masses about the
criminals who are born due to inequality, corruption and injustice in the
society. But the Indian people should not overlook the bloody acts,
opportunism, entrepreneurial success of people like Balram and emergence of
Socialists in India, and it is the duty of each and every citizen that they
should try their level best not to indulge in corruption activities (taking and
giving) which may give birth to so many Balrams which is very very dangerous to
the society
.
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