The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Essence: The truth about India through the description of their corrupt values and lack of morals.
Brief Summary of Text: The White Tiger is presented as an epistolary novel, a series of letters written over the period of seven nights to the president of China as a creative approach on the white tiger of this novel, Balram Halwai's, personal story. He describes his transformation from a poor Indian villager with great ambition to a Bangalore entrepreneur, all in result of his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society.
Prompt: 1995 Writers often highlight the values of a culture or society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class, or creed. Choose a novel or a play in which such a character plays a significant role and show how that character’s alienation reveals the surrounding society’s assumptions or moral values.
In The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, the author uses Balram Halwai's alienation as the White tiger in the darkest part of India as animal imagery to depict the dominant but negative qualities of Indian Masters, servile instincts of the lower class and social castes as animal cages to overall portray the degraded and degenerated moral values highlighting the Darkness of India.
In the novel animal imagery is Adiga's central way he portrays the idea of social castes and animalistic views in India. Four animals, the Buffalo, Stork, Wild Boar, and Raven, are compared to the four landlords of the village, who "fed on the village, and everything that grew in it, until there was nothing left for anyone else to feed on" (26). The animals seem to symbolize the landlords characteristics as beast -like animals who use their power, strength, and pride to their advantage to hold the entire village in enslaved labor. Balram introduces his philosophy to be “let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That’s my whole philosophy in a sentence” to show that both the wealthy and the poor “live like animals” because they both make immoral choices, due to desperation (237). Balram is also unable to “live like a human,” in his case because of the poverty and desperation he was born into and while he strives to live like a human he turns even more into an animal by becoming corrupt as he begins to plan to murder his master. Balram thinks for the first time in a not-loyal way about his master as he begins to question "what if one day, for instance, a driver took his employers money and ran? What would his life be like?"… I will answer both for you(…). It would, in fact, take a White Tiger" (169-170). His thinking changes from total loyalty towards his master to thinking in an egoistic way, which is due to the city corrupting him. The white tiger symbolizes someone who can manage to escape from the system in a way, whether it is through immoral actions proving that white tigers are a rarity like people from the Darkness who get into the Light. Balram identifies himself as this animal as he achieves his goal.
Balram represents the servant class that has been trained to exist in perpetual servitude and unwilling to rise against the masters, powerful and strong in terms of class, community and status, which represents the rooster in "the rooster coops" who are usually symbolized to be quick thinkers, practical and resourceful, preferring to stick to what is tried and true rather than taking messy, unnecessary risks. Balram calls this prison the rooster coop as he describes "hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting in each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench –the stench of terrified, feathered flesh" (167). The rooster coop symbolizes the cage that Balram lives in since he’s dependent on his master who decides what to do, where to go, yet he decided to break away from the coop illuminating how he is indeed the white tiger, symbolizing individualism, since he broke away from the natural rooster ways and decide to take a risk.
According to his philosophy, individual action is the key to break out of the rooster coop and the servants are self-trapping. He validates his evil actions to his master by saying, "I think the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr. Ashok – who, for all his numerous virtues, was not much of a master – to be weeded out, and exceptional servants like me to replace them" (275). This prove one of the seven deadly sins, which are portrayed throughout the book, this one being pride. Balram justifies his immoral actions by explaining that at times there needs to be those white tigers who are willing to take risks. Balram submerges himself into greed, gluttony, envy and lust as he becomes obsessed with the idea of power and breaking out of his social class. He is jealous of the people living in the lightness while he must live in the darkness, making it a goal of his to reach the living in the lightness. This jealousy mixed in with wrath from the idea of social classes and having to live a life like his poor, rickshaw driver father maddens him and drives him to betray his moral values, losing himself completely in "the struggle that every poor man here should be making--the struggle not to take the lashes your father took..." (273). The sin of sloth is one which comes directly from the coop itself because the roosters have the mentality that life will be better if they don’t take risks and don’t make a mess out of things. This is how the "rooster coop was doing its work. Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs. The coop is guarded from inside" (166). Not only are the roosters, symbolizing the people of the dark, lazy creatures but they are also envious of each other and unwilling to allow a fellow rooster to escape the coop if they can not as well and for that reason in the end an immoral act like murder is the last resort people must go to for the "chance to be a man" (274).
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