A Story of Darkness

Once in a long while, you come across a book that makes you feel like Dostoevsky when he allegedly ran through the streets of St. Petersburg waving a copy of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and shouting, “This man is God of art!” My own reactions when reading Aravind Adiga's 2008 Man Booker Prize winning debut novel White Tiger was, “This man is a poet of Truth!”

White Tiger is an unflinching look at what the author calls the “Darkness”, the vast underbelly of India where people live on the edge of survival, chaffing under crushing poverty, corrupt institutions, and inherited beliefs and practices that perpetuate their cruel fate. It provides a savage, angry counterpoint to the currently popular narrative of India that has it marching inexorably to unprecedented prosperity and global dominance.

Early in the book, Adiga introduces the theme of the novel in a typically lyrical paragraph:

I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please, understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well-off. But the river brings darkness to India – the black river.

Adiga, who did part of his schooling in Sydney, cut his writerly teeth as a correspondent for the Independent, Time and other quality media outlets. This shows in his writing. The narrator, an inhabitant of Darkness who yearns for Light, tells his utterly absorbing story in a language that is a joy to read. Simple, unadorned sentences crackle  with wry humour, sharp wit and sardonic observations that only a uniquely gifted artist can make. Adiga refuses to couch his narrative in Marxist or Manichaen terms, which saves it from being just another banal polemical tract for the underdog.

Unlike some other famous Indian writers, Adiga's voice does not come across as calibrated to appeal to the Western ear. His overriding concern seems to be holding a pitiless mirror to the denizens of the Light and Darkness themselves, and not entertaining distant readers in the cafes of Manhattan or Glebe with fantastic tales of an imagined Orient. Unsentimental, harsh and scathing, Adiga does not absolve the inhabitants of the Darkness themselves from their fate, which he compares to those of butcher-bound roosters trapped in a coop. It is clear to Adiga that the domain of Darkness is not confined to material disparities or geographical boundaries. It subjugates, corrupts and rules the very souls of those who are in its thrall. He has no sympathy for the "human spiders" of the Darkness who, when not wiping tables in cheap roadside tea stalls with dirty rags, occupy themselves with propitiating the absurdly huge array of gods and goddesses of the Darkness, or watching cricket and toothpaste ads on TV.