White light

The over-politicised Nobel is a demonstration of how one can get away without honouring great art for being just that, great art 8212; or how one can ignore it altogether; the Booker itself raises eyebrows. Aravind Adiga has succeeded not with sweetness but a strong light. Which is not to take away from those others who didn8217;t win. It is to say that Adiga makes us view the vortex of the storm, without himself or ourselves being there. For reader and author alike, at the vortex the centre doesn8217;t hold; and yet the vortex the artist must make anew for us every time. The first-person narrative of The White Tiger doesn8217;t merely keep the author invisible, it constructs a sociological discourse without once ever sounding or being didactic. Adiga doesn8217;t spell anything out, although his narrator may seem to. But the narrator is not the author8217;s proxy. We are asked to judge him too.

Some commentators have written that The White Tiger is a book about Bharat, as opposed to India. They are wrong. Adiga re-creates the India of Light and the India of Darkness, but the novel is about that nuanced and paradoxical point where the two meet and overlap. Its strength arises from many things 8212; the intelligent and original reworking of otherwise familiar and overworked motifs, a clever narrative strategy and context, a ruthlessly unsentimental tone, the unconscious inspiration from Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright without betraying the anxiety of influence. It comes close to the Indian novel in English from a debutant novelist that steers clear of both a faux socialist concern and the celebratory idiocy of India Shining or Rising. The White Tiger is the debut Indian novel about the 8220;new8221; India in our de facto father tongue that we8217;ve waited for and had despaired of ever reading. It makes italicising redundant. It trashes those photogenic stories of poverty for the West. It speaks in a voice that Adiga could only have achieved through sensitive observation and analysis, by creating and killing and resurrecting the narrator-protagonist in his head a million times. It is not a novel that was written because the author decided he had to write something to market 8220;incredible India8221; and pocket a Booker as fruit for his labour. Another writer of Indian origin who won the Booker in recent memory made some critics despair at the banality and success of that tradition. Adiga8217;s win gives hope instead. The pain of creation is something a sensitive reader should feel reading a good writer.

Poverty degenerates and does so without leaving any scope for sympathy. Adiga8217;s narrator Balram Halwai8217;s story is a sad, almost tragic one, of how the victim becomes the victimiser because he has no second choice. We admire Balram, even knowing he is a criminal. But we don8217;t withdraw in pity and fear because there is only thus far we can approach him in the first place. Yet he speaks to us, by dictating letters to Wen Jiabao who plans to visit India to learn about entrepreneurship 8212; letters about the India in darkness visible. Adiga8217;s nuanced and sometimes blunt details are every bit necessary for the story; they are not meant to create 8220;atmosphere8221; and 8220;effect8221;. It is these details and Balram8217;s story that make the book dramatic, and also an indictment of society for failing its citizens. Everybody is guilty and a thin line separates the law-abiding but desperate man from temptation and capitulation. But while everybody is a thief not everyone is the white tiger 8212; the survivor who lives to tell the tale.

Adiga8217;s triumph is not only in capturing that India which hasn8217;t changed since the Nehruvian era, an India Adiga studied on his travels, but also in making the generic appear particular and vice versa, not therefore as the whole hog but as an amalgamation of most of the subterranean territory the Balram Halwais inhabit.

Now that he8217;s won the Booker, the fourth debutant novelist to do so, and over the likes of Amitav Ghosh and Sebastian Barry, people will trash the award or multiply for him the 700 per cent rise in sales the shortlisted books had seen recently. Readerly common sense says the Book will outlast the Booker. And one must necessarily pay little attention to such awards and yet have the nose to recognise the good book from the bad. What matters is not what the Booker says about the bright book of life but what the reader finds in it.

sudeep.paulexpressindia.com