In the Driver’s Seat?

Abstract

Abstract Most readings of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger tend to regard Balram, its servant-protagonist and narrator, as an unrepentant, hardened criminal. Chapter 5 offers a more sympathetic reading and granular understanding, attentive to the novel’s irony, satire, and literary cues. It calls attention to Adiga’s presentation of several systemic problems that conjointly constrain Balram from his early village life onward: the feudal landlord system, the joint family system, the failures of democracy, the complicity of religion. Examining some key tropes—animal imagery, light and darkness, the rearview mirror—this chapter tracks two strands in this novel: Adiga’s exploration of the gendered psychology of servitude, and the servant protagonist’s growth from desiring servitude (as an alternative to abject poverty and degradation) to desiring freedom. It argues that Adiga in this novel provides a more damning indictment than Gunesekera does, both of servitude as a system and of the nation that enables it.