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Slumdog entrepreneur

February 25th, 2009 Molly - Central

The subject headings in the library catalog for The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga include chauffeurs, poor, ambition, businesspeople, Bangalore, India, epistolary fiction and detective and mystery stories. The main character is indeed a poor chauffeur who is ambitious and becomes a successful businessman, but what this novel is really about is the improbability of rising from the slums of India in order to obtain the life you were meant to lead and what it takes to get there.

The White Tiger is not written in letters in the traditional sense, so to describe it as epistolary fiction is a bit of a stretch. The narrator, Balram, sends a series of emails to the Premier of China upon the occasion of Wen Jiabao’s visit to India. Balram recounts his life as a poor, low-caste boy with little education forced to work at a very young age. He learns to drive and is able to move up a step by becoming a chauffeur and second servant to the son of a wealthy landowner. Balram writes to the Premier under the guise of educating the Chinese about entrepreneurship in India: technology start-ups, call centers and his own success story. He openly shares with the Premier how he achieves comfort and wealth by lying, stealing, and committing murder.

This novel is not a mystery in the traditional sense, either. The reader knows from the very beginning that Balram murders his master and gets away with it. The real strength of the story lies in the details of poverty, filth, corruption, cruelty, heartlessness, danger and expense necessary to move between castes in modern day India. Ambition, cunning and luck are on Balram’s side but it is obvious that in order to make a new life for himself, he must make terrible choices. The winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize for international literature, this debut novel is darkly humorous, cynical and disgusting. I loved every word of it.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction