THE WHITE TIGER by Adiga, Aravind

Balram Halwai’s seven acerbic letters to the Chinese Premier representing himself as ‘tomorrow’ combines humor and pathos to tell the story of Modern India and its insecurities. Recounted in the first person account, The White Tiger launched Aravind Adiga into literary fame, winning him the Man booker Prize as a debut novelist.

Summary Of The Book

The white tiger is an animal that is foremost a representation of power and individuality, and in a country of over 1.22 billion people, Aravind Adiga chose Balram Halwai - the son of a rickshaw puller who becomes a successful entrepreneur - to take on this mantle.

But Halwai’s story isn’t a didactic impression of the rags to riches fable; it’s a muddy first person account in which he confesses to crimes and amoral cunning used to rise above the ‘Darkness’ to become a successful entrepreneur.

Halwai’s journey begins in the ‘Darkness’, where Halwai is born into a lower caste family and is categorically thrown into the unsympathetic whorls of servitude. However this white tiger decides to throw off his banal enslavement. So he learns to drive and moves to New Delhi as a chauffeur. His master’s involvement with corruption finally drives him to murder and theft, among other crimes. 

He then travels to Bangalore with a bag of cash stolen off his deceased employer, where amongst the sassy metropolitans he starts his taxi service. He is now the satiated entrepreneur; the owner of a successful business with statutory bribes, and the freedom he so coveted.

Halwai tells the story of his life, exonerating himself from his crimes by rationalizing the pursuit of freedom that has begotten him a taxi service and an elevated rank. A darkly humorous novel, The White Tiger provides a distinctly contemporary voice to the India that is far from its rigor of economic progress and resides in the hearts of the marginalized.

The White Tiger has been hailed for its uncompromising stance on removing notions of a generic India and engaging themes of globalization, freedom and individuality. First published in 2008, it not only earned Aravind Adiga the Man Booker Prize the same year but also made it to the New York Times bestseller list selling over 200,000 copies. The novel is to be adapted to a movie.

About Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga is an Indian writer and journalist.

His other books are Between the Assassinations in 2009, Last Man in Tower in 2011 and also a few short stories like The Elephant, Smack, and Last Christmas in Bandra.

He was born in Chennai in 1974. He studied at Canara High School, and St. Aloysius High School in Mangalore. He studied English literature at Columbia University in New York and later at Oxford. Aravind Adiga, at the age of 33, became the second youngest winner of the Man Booker Prize for The White Tiger, his first novel. Adiga began his tryst with the medium of writing as a journalist; first interning at the Financial Times and worked atTIME magazine as a South Asia correspondent for three years.