Tales of Labyrinths - The White Tiger and the Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic - Peter Lang
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Tales of Labyrinths – The White Tiger and the
Postcolonial Metamorphosis of Gothic
When Aravind Adiga was interviewed about the origins of his novel The White
Tiger he explained that it was the result of his “coming back to India”, “after
having lived in Australia, and studied English literature at Columbia University
in New York and Oxford University”, in other words after having lived “abroad
from the age of 15 until 28” (Adiga 2008: 2). Clearly then, according to its au-
thor, The White Tiger is a narrative born from a ‘return’ to, a ‘re-acquaintance’
with, and a ‘reappraisal’ of social, psychological, and national realities, which
had seemingly melted into the larger frame of a Western educational framework,
but which were definitely ‘there’, waiting to ‘haunt’ Adiga and claim their right to
being voiced, in fictional form. Considering the long period of time that he spent
abroad in his formative years, the young author belongs to the category of the so-
called “deshi-writers”, i.e. Indian writers who often return to India in what they
write, not just to placate a most natural nostalgia, but also because of a shift in
perspective, leading to a double discovery of their country of origin and country of
choice (Kumar: xiv). Interestingly, Adiga seems to have brought from abroad, and
locally revived not just a fresh, inquisitive spirit, perhaps (not necessarily, though)
more alert in depicting Indian and Western realities, but also the Gothic, a genre
that saw the light of day in eighteenth century England and managed to survive
into our postmodern world. Recently Gothic has extended beyond its claimed and
familiar domains (psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism) and allowed for juxtapo-
sitions with postcolonialism. At first sight this seems an ‘uncanny’ marriage, as
Smith and Hughes remark:
Theories of postcolonialism and scholarship on the Gothic might, superficially,
appear to be the product of rather different intellectual, cultural and historical tradi-
tions. The Gothic, a fantastical literary form that had its heyday in the late-eighteenth
and early-nineteenth centuries might seem to inhabit a different world than that con-
fronted by writers working in postcolonial contexts in the twenty-first century. How-
ever, the picture is more complex that this because an historical examination of the
Gothic and accounts of postcolonialism indicate the presence of a shared interest in
challenging post-enlightenment notions of rationality. In the Gothic, as in Romanti-
cism in general, this challenge was developed through an exploration of the feelings,
desires and passions which compromised the Enlightenment project of rationality
calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviours. (Smith and Hughes: 1)
25
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of WellingtonThis unlikely juxtaposition between Gothic and postcolonialism may be under-
stood in view of the many unsolved (and still lingering) problems of colonialism
which could be addressed better – ironically – via a European narrative mode
par excellence, reputed for its ambiguities and its transgressions, but mostly for
preserving a strong sense of history.22 The works so far recognized as belonging to
postcolonial Gothic, and on whose analysis resides the very existence of this new,
emergent sub-field include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Margaret Atwood’s
Lady Oracle and The Robber’s Bride, Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh,
Fury and Shame, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s Heat and Dust, Naipaul’s Guerrillas
and Toni Morrison’s Beloved to name but a few. In all these narratives Gothic
and postcolonialism display a “shared interest in challenging post-enlightenment
notions of rationality”, as a most obvious point of convergence with “the Gothic
[which] gives a particular added emphasis to this through its seeming celebration
of the irrational, the outlawed and the socially and culturally dispossessed” (Smith
and Hughes: 1). It is particularly this “seeming celebration of the irrational, the
outlawed, and the socially and culturally dispossessed” that forms the substance of
The White Tiger and inspires my present analysis. More specifically, my reading of
Adiga’s novel focuses on the discussion of typical Gothic tropes in a postcolonial
context, such as: the Other versus the Self, light versus dark, döppelganger, ab-
ject and grotesque; the theoretical framework of this chapter draws on (withough
being limited to) Jansson’s theory of Internal Orientalism, Bahktin’s discussion
of the grotesque, Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the Other, Spivak’s view of
the subaltern, Stirner’s critique of the concept of the universal human, and Kriste-
va’s notion of the abject. Equally important is another aim of my discussion of
Adiga’s novel, one that is derived from and linked to the theoretical framework
employed; I seek here to establish connections and parallels with other Gothic
or Gothic-influenced narratives, so as to contextualize a Gothic reading of a text
which has not been analyzed so far from this particular perspective.
The plot of The White Tiger is deceptively simple, but rich in allowing
inter-textual exercises. Balram, the son of a poor rickshaw-puller manages to escape
22 Perhaps the contemporary connections between Gothic and postcolonialism are eas-
ily justifiable if one considers them as a natural outgrowth of earlier Gothic works
which tackled the links between colonialism and Gothic. Among such works, Michael
Franklin includes Beckford’s Vathek, a “landmark in the history of European literary
Orientalism”, Gothicized poems such as Walter Savage Landor’s Gebir (1798) and
Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810)
(Franklin qtd. in Hughes and Smith: 3).
26 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonthe narrow confines of his native village and gets a job as a driver with the family of
a Westernized Indian living in Delhi. Although a considerable move upwards on the
social scale, Balram’s new position furthermore intermediates his contemplation of
even higher opportunities which he is determined to grasp at any cost. Although ini-
tially fond of his master and keen to obtain his approval, mimicking him in detail,
Balram will end up slitting his throat and stealing a large amount of money which
will enable him to start a new existence as an “entrepreneur” and a man of substan-
tial fortune. Far from drawing a moral conclusion and punishing his Machiavellian
hero, Adiga chooses to leave the lines of narrative open-ended, a strategy that has
fuelled many controversies and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
Adiga’s narrative structure makes it appear to some of its early commentators as
an “epistolary novel”, although the author clarifies that “there are no real letters in-
volved”. Instead, the reader is witnessing “the narrator […] lying in his small room
in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking aloud about the story of his life”,
“obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider’s gaze […] and stimulated
to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an
important one” (Adiga 2008: 2). From the very first pages then, the time, “11:32 p.m.”
(The White Tiger: 3), the chandelier23 – mute witness to the pouring of thoughts and
feelings and the language of confession – English – a language not shared by either
the confessor, nor the confessant, but employed as a lingua franca or meta-language
of dominance over both past and present, argue for a Gothic and postcolonial per-
spective. The seven nights during which a life-story is told will be brutally dis-
sected by the protagonist of The White Tiger. In their bareness of narration and
directness bordering on violence, the seven nights of story-telling in Adiga’s novel
call to memory The Arabian Nights and their contemporary re-writing in Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children. As argued by Teverson, the attempts of Rushdie’s Saleem to
re-organize post-partition Indian history through the potentiality of the tale-telling
are modelled on The Arabian Nights, frequently referred to and hence converted into
a source of authority (Teverson: 217). However, The Nights as primordial model is
23 At the beginning of his confession, Balram mentions that the only other ‘presence’ in
the room, almost overtaking it, “huge…, full of small diamond-shaped glass pieces”,
with a “personality of its own” (The White Tiger: 7) is a chandelier. By the end of his
confessional journey, after having committed an abominable crime, he considers the
possibility of all his many chandeliers “crushing down to the floor” (The White Tiger:
320), possibly as a sign of divine justice. The personified chandelier calls to mind the
famous one in Gaston Leroux’s Gothic The Phantom of the Opera, which crashes
down on the audience after silently witnessing the development of a plot of betrayal,
love, wild passions and ultimately murder.
27
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonbut a fabricated collection, merely the product of the efforts of Orientalist writers
in the eighteenth century. As Rana Kabbani postulated in her seminal Imperial Fic-
tions; Europe’s Myths of the Orient, The Arabian Nights, a source of inspiration for
many Gothic writers, with Beckford’s Vathek probably the best-known example,
is merely a reflection of a narrative structure considered as meaningful to Western
eyes, designed to satisfy the palate of Western readers, inspire interest in the Orient,
and also establish an authoritative discourse of power over it:
The collection of stories commonly referred to as the ‘Arabian Nights’ was never a
definitive text in Arabic literature as is generally supposed by a Western reader. These
stories, the Alf laila wa laila were first and foremost folklore kept alive orally […]
Thus there was no definitive text of Alf laila wa laila, but numerous variations on that
particular set of oral narrative […] It was only when an European encountered these
stories, decided to translate them and produced a set text that remained in currency
for over a century (1704–1838) that they became institutionalised in the way they are
known to the West. (Kabbani: 48–9)
Obviously inspired by The Arabian Nights and/or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,
Adiga nevertheless goes beyond the labyrinthine, open-ended suggestions of either
Scheherazade or Saleem. Thus, he offers both an alternative to the thousand and
one nights as narrative framework and a way of deconstructing the grand narratives
of the East by opposing them to their Western counterparts, only to subvert the lat-
ter as well. The protagonist of The White Tiger completes the cycle of his deeds
and becomes the master of his own fate, doomed as it may be, in seven nights. Not
only does the structuring figure change – the dark world of Adiga’s novel is told
by the narrator over seven nights, not a thousand, but The Arabian Nights as an al-
ready subaltern, vague, obscure narrative frame compiled, as stated before, by the
authority of the West – is furthermore opposed to Western master-narratives. The
very obvious biblical connotations and the rich symbolism of the magic number
seven call to memory the well-known passage from the Old Testament:
And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the
seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day,
and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created
and made. (Gen ii: 2–3, emphasis added)
However, this apparent act of acknowledgment24 and confirmation of the perpetu-
ation of Christian founding myths, internalized as they seem to be by the formerly
colonized (I am referring here to both the author and his protagonist) have a different
24 The Christian God created the world in seven days, not seven nights… Literary
pun-intended, I believe, on Adiga’s part.
28 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonfunction in The White Tiger. Balram’s world, as revealed through his confessions25
is one of murder and destruction, and the security he appears to have gained through
his pathological deeds is not even remotely similar to the Christian God’s self-satis-
faction at the end of His toils. Therefore, by employing taboo Christian symbolism,
related to the acts of God as all good and omnipotent, the author purposely distorts
the very image of God as supreme, benign and life-giving and ironically substitutes
Him with a self-appointed Indian entrepreneur. Adiga, in an authentic Gothic man-
ner subverts and deconstructs colonial power narratives by rendering them as evil in
a postcolonial context. This subversion becomes even more an act of “writing back”
to the grand master-narratives, since Balram’s act of self-construction and defiance
of authority – designed by masters for the use of servants – reminds the readers of
the more spectacular defiance addressed to the Christian God by the fallen angel, the
superb hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost. At the end of his toils, carried out in an India
depicted as Land of Darkness, Balram triumphantly announces: “I’ll say it was all
worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means
not to be a servant. I think I am ready to have children, Mr. Premier. Ha!” (The White
Tiger: 321, emphasis added). Interestingly then, this self-made Indian entrepreneur
shares a deep spiritual kinship with the being who defiantly called to rebellion in
the prophetic words: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven!” (Milton: 263)
25 Confession is one of the most well-known Gothic tropes, and also one that will later
on inform postcolonial novels. See James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner,
Thomas DeQuincey’s The Private Memories of an English Opium Eater, Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. More recently, Co-
etzee embraced the same mode in his Age of Iron (1990) and The Master of Petersburg
(1994). According to Dominic Head, Coetzee’s “development of the mode fashions a
postcolonial equivalent to Hogg’s agonized Romanticism” and seeks “to extract from it
a secular equivalent of absolution” (Head: 233). Adiga’s Balram is very far from aspiring
to absolution; quite the opposite, his confessions are provocative and ever-defiant, witty
and sarcastic, but never self-apologetic. Apart from constituting the substance of the nar-
rative and the modality for Balram to introduce himself and reveal all his entrepreneur-
ial hideousness to the readers, The White Tiger is also Adiga’s journalistic confession.
As Brouillet remarks: “Adiga additionally claims that his treatment of Balram’s labour
stems from a distinction he was forced to draw, in his own career, between his “official
reporter’s diary” and “another, secret diary”, that contained what he was meant to leave
out of his journalism, when his responsibility was to that “middle-class Indian”, rather
than to his or her servants. Thus, the novel, a fictional reading of the contexts of Adiga’s
“secret diary” is meant to right this discursive imbalance. Stated precisely, it is meant to
correct what the author came to perceive as mainstream journalism’s elision of the reality
of exploited service labour from images of India’s economic boom” (Brouillet: 42).
29
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of WellingtonThe confession mode, apart from inspiring authenticity and demanding par-
ticipation both rational and emotional from the reader, is employed by Adiga to
introduce a very ambiguous type of protagonist, the anti-hero. Balram, in the
present reading a typical Gothic character, inhabits the liminal space of human
emotions, and can be alternatively approached in sympathy and rejected in horror.
Peter Robbins, in The Telegraph review on Adiga’s novel, subtly links the am-
biguous substance of the protagonist and what may be called the ‘present state of
affairs’ in modern India: “A sign, for the people who notice that sort of thing, of
just how thrusting India’s economy has become: it can now be embodied in fiction
by a desperate killer, […] by a satirical murderer … Balram Halwai” (Robins: 1,
emphasis added). This very interesting appraisal, presumably but not necessarily
voicing the views of The Telegraph as a major leader of opinion, reveals the dou-
ble and dangerous significance of the protagonist. In Balram, the private and the
public overlap, in an image evoking violence and peril on both levels. Not only is
Balram a murderer, a personal menace to those close to him, but – if one agrees
with Robbins’ pertinent observation – he can also be read as a symbol for a poten-
tial “murderer” economy, like India’s, vigorous, relentless, “thrusting” and hence
the major Other to the Self of the economies of the Western world. Moreover, the
very fact that Balram calls himself an “entrepreneur”, a “businessman”, speaks for
a rather distorted perception of the concept, when compared to its equivalent in
the West (at least theoretically), but all the more dangerous if grasped as the model
to be emulated.
So what is the life story of this dark character and how can he be read through
the lens of postcolonial Gothic? According to Khair: “The Gothic and the postco-
lonial are obviously linked by a common preoccupation with the Other and aspects
of Otherness” (Khair: 3). The analysis of the case of Otherness as it is depicted
in The White Tiger expands the limits of the concept and refers not only to the di-
chotomy Self versus Other, in terms of West versus East, but mainly to what may
be called Internal Otherness26, which refers to demarcations within the category
of either Self, or Other. The protagonist of The White Tiger enters the narrative
nameless (he is known as “Munna” which means “boy”) and thus a character
who is apart, different from others in his native village. Although not literally an
26 Internal Otherness (or Internal Orientalism) in the sense I use it here, is an attempt at
a psychological adaptation of a concept derived from the works of various scholars
who focus on divisions within regions and within nations. A proper explanation of
Internal Orientalism, with references to the text of The White Tiger will be offered in
the following pages.
30 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonorphan, Munna is placed outside the comforting boundaries of a caring family
structure, since his mother’s illness, and his father’s overwhelming, ultimately
unrewarding attempts at making a living practically render him an orphan.
‘Didn’t your mother name you?’
‘She’s very ill, sir. She lies in bed and spews blood: She’s got no time to name me.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’s a rickshaw-puller, sir: He’s got no time to name me.’
‘Don’t you have a granny? Aunts? Uncles?’
‘They’ve got no time either.’(The White Tiger: 15)
The above lines, the literary birth-certificate of a complex hero/anti-hero like Bal-
ram, suggest a future life-trajectory of displacement and alienation, originating in
both extreme poverty and neglect and confirming from incipient stages the status
of the Other. Ironically, the name chosen for him by his teacher, a character from
outside his family circle, ‘consolidates’ his position of subaltern to subaltern au-
thorities.27 “Balram” is ironically translated as “the sidekick of the God Krishna”
(The White Tiger: 14), a poignant ‘coincidence’ meant to subject him, as the
bearer of the name “Balram” to someone (his teacher), whose name ‘happens’ to
be “Krishna”. The implications of the act of naming, which ostensibly erect walls
of servitude around the character and render him as permanent victim, scapegoat
and kickback to a system and a world that ‘does not have time’ for its dispossessed
are particularly relevant from a postcolonial Gothic perspective. Nevertheless, a
character like Balram’s is always at odds with the attempt to label him; hence, his
very ‘ascension’ may be read as a reversal of Spivak’s postcolonial conclusion, a
critique of her assumptions and generalizations.28 This problematic hero is able
to change identities29 and fabricate potentialities at each and every step. From
“Munna” to “Balram Halwai” to “White Tiger” and finally to “Ashok Sharma”,
27 The half-comic, half-despotic figure of the teacher, the disdain and scorn characteriz-
ing his dealings with his pupils, has its own explanations, if not quite justifications. He
is, Adiga tells us, but a poor person among the poor, who “hadn’t been paid his salary
in six months”, considering “a Gandhian protest to retrieve his missing wages”, yet
“terrified of losing his job, because through the pay of any government job in India is
poor, the accidental advantages are numerous” (The White Tiger: 33).
28 I am referring here to the seminal Can the Subaltern Speak? and Spivak’s negative
answer to the rhetorical question that frames her analysis. Not only does Balram not
need any intermediaries to express his views, but he purposely renders them as shock-
ing and subversive for both East and West.
29 The character Balram and his ability to ‘shape-shift’ in terms of the names that seem-
ingly delineate a unitary identity construction process, but actually preserve a state of
31
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonreaders are drawn into stories of unlawful deeds, opportunism, prostitution, drink-
ing, gambling, culminating in murder. These are the stories which may shape the
destiny of a potentially outspoken underclass, determined to alter its historical
predicament at the hands of both external and internal ruthless masters and reclaim
the right to become an individual, however evil, extreme and pathological. Balram
and his tales of ‘becoming’ have obvious similarities with the typical Gothic plots
which, in Botting’s word, focus on “usurpation, intrigue, betrayal, and murder”,
appearing “to celebrate criminal behavior, violent executions of selfish ambitions
and voracious passion and licentious enactments of carnal desire” (Botting: 6).
Therefore, Balram can be read as an Indian figure of horror, embodying the caste
and class fears related to a potentially monstrous rise of the lower caste, roughly
the Indian equivalent of the proletariat. As such, he transgresses boundaries of
parenthood, is self-forged and thus different from Shelley’s monstrous creature, in
that he appears to discard the need for paternal guidance, which renders him all the
more terrifying and threatening to the established order.
Gothic as a genre indulges in a play of dualities and oppositions, and thrives
on transgressing boundaries of space, gender, and class. Adiga divides the setting
of his novel into an India of Darkness and an India of Light, with the first repre-
senting the village world where Balram was born and the second one the urban
space to which he aspires30. Thus, the author employs space and the village versus
city distinctions as a background for exposing and criticizing the binary nature
of Indian culture31, and the caste system which he sardonically reduces to “men
with big bellies” and “men with small bellies”. In Adiga’s India of Darkness, all
liminality, and fragmentariness makes him into a literary brother to Jasmine from the
eponymous novel by Bharati Mukherjee, among others.
30 It is at this point that Gothic converges with Post-colonialism and Orientalism. Turner
(2000), Wolff (1994), Todorova (1997), and Paulgaard (2008) draw heavily on Said’s
Orientalism (1978) in discussing the relevance of the division within regions and
within the nations. Lawson (2007) mentions gender, place and class differences as the
basis for Othering. However, it is Jansson (2003, 2005) who achieves a remarkable
merging of Hechter’s pioneering theory of Internal Colonialism and Said’s Oriental-
ism; in Jansson’s view Internal Orientalism can be summarized as a fixed practice and
tradition of projecting different vices and lacks onto a subaltern region, with the aim
of fabricating a ‘superior’, ‘exalted’ national identity, free from human and geograph-
ical inadequacies. Balram’s aims can thus be said to be focused toward fostering an
identity divorced from the ‘vices’ and ‘lacks’ automatically projected onto his inferior
geography.
31 This, as explained above, can be read as an Indian counterpart for the Western Internal
Orientalism.
32 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtontraditional values that have supported like divisions, such as solid family structures,
hierarchical acts of obedience, mostly based on feudal pecuniary dependencies
merge into a stifling, and oppressive atmosphere, characterizing a topos of dread
and despair. Even ancient beliefs that had been shaped into forceful myths are
mercilessly anatomized and exposed in their hideousness. Hence, Balram asserts
his own geography and delights in what he perceives to be its authentic character-
istics, which contradict all general beliefs; almost with glee, he explains that the
axis mundi of the India of Darkness, responsible for its decay is the much cele-
brated River Ganga, “Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination,
protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere this river
flows, that area is the Darkness” (The White Tiger: 15). Implicitly, the inhabitants
of the India of Darkness seem to be trapped in the implacability of Internal Ori-
entalism, which suggests the impossibility of escape from essential geographic
identities (Jansson 2003, 2005). The rural India of Darkness and the urban India
of Light testify for a division of the world in terms of both time and space; in
Massey’s words “space turns into time and geography into history” (Massey: 5).32
For Balram the image of Ganga and the image of his witch-like grandmother
Kusum, with “teeth all gone”, that only “made her grin more cunning” and who
somehow facilitated “her way into control of the house” (The White Tiger: 15–6)
overlap and preside over history itself, converted into a distorted and distorting
mythology of childhood, where the body of his dead mother will be ritually con-
sumed by fire. In a poignant Gothic scene, meant to play on the readers’ emotions
and break a possible state of complacency, horror is shown as accompanying the
funerary rites, with mud covering their ‘poetry’ and with the Indian childhood
sucked into a state of oblivion:
I looked at the ooze, and I looked at my mother’s flexed foot, and I understood. This
mud was holding her back: this big swelling mound of black ooze. She was trying to
fight the black mood; her toes were flexed and resisting; but the mud was sucking her
in, sucking her in. It was so thick, and more of it was being created every moment
as the river washed into the ghat…And then I understood: this was the real god of
Benaras – this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed,
32 Adiga is not alone in his attempt to portray the “India of Darkness”. There are many
other remarkable depictions of a Dark India, among the best known: A Suitable Boy
(Vikram Seth, 1994), A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry, 1995), The God of Small
Things (Arundhati Roy, 1997), Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra, 2006), The Glass
Palace, Sea of Poppies, (Amitav Gosh, 2000 and 2008 respectively). Careful readings
of these works seems to sustain the argument that the younger generation of Indian
authors writing in English have all gone ‘Gothic’.
33
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonand was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died
and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here. I stopped breathing.
This was the first time in my life I fainted. I haven’t been back to see the Ganga since
then: I am leaving that river for the American tourists! (The White Tiger: 18–9)
The very last sentence of the above quotation demonstrates Adiga’s insightful per-
spective rendered through his powerful hero/anti-hero into the devastating effects
of succumbing to mythologies that had long lost their relevance. Far from preserv-
ing the image of Indian belief in Ganga as embodying peace, hope and the con-
tentment of performed familial duties to the deceased, the only way for the river
to retain its mystique is its spiritual appropriation by anonymous American tourists
who might long for a glimpse of it, as either counterpart to an existence centered on
material values only, or as an opportunity for experiencing cheap death thrills from
the comfortable position of witnesses.33 Either way, in a very sharp and concise
form, Adiga achieves both the deconstruction of cherished symbols of Indian-ness,
and their ‘selling’ to naïve Westerners, in an act of reversed Orientalism.34
33 In his obvious display of the actual ‘de-sacredness’ of the Ganges, Goh notices, Bal-
ram “essentially refutes the whole notion of India as Hindu nation, and “Hindutva” as
its way of life, which is propagated by Hindu Right parties like the BJP and Shiv Sena,
and endorsed by like-minded individuals and organizations throughout the Indian di-
aspora” (Goh: 334).
34 For his depiction of India, perceived as the result of what is mostly a perpetuation
of Orientalist attitudes, Adiga was heavily criticized by some Indian critics, such as
Shobhan Saxena who claims that “…Adiga’s story may remain the view of a pro-
fessional observer, who failed to see anything good about the country he travelled
through as a journalist, always recording and never experiencing anything real. It
could be mere suspicion, but it takes care of our guilt” (qtd. in Singh: 101). In my
opinion, such a comment is due to an overwhelming national need, that of ‘protecting’
the ‘real India’ from the critical eyes of Westerners. In reality, far from celebrating the
Westerners as objective, rational, and scientific observers or classifiers, Adiga through
his character Balram suggests that only an insufficiently developed intellect, a child-
ish, naïve and even morbid spirit (well-known attributes of the natives, as depicted
by Orientalists) like that of American tourists could possibly long for the thrill of
witnessing the spectacle of death and horror which is the true essence of a Ganga ex-
perience. This passage in The White Tiger can be also referred to in Adiga’s interview
‘Dangers of Ignoring India’s Poor Are Greater’, in which the author comments on the
Western reception of his book: “I don’t think that many people in the West will take
comfort from this figure, the main character in the book. It is not a figure they can
patronize or condescend to. This character is very entrepreneurial and smart and he
has a very negative view of Westerners and of white people. He is quite happy to take
on the West. He is quite an aggressive, confident character” (Adiga 2008: 1).
34 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of WellingtonAlong with dismembering national mythologies long converted into hostile
geographical realities, Adiga through Balram, his fictional mouth-piece, is also
harshly critical of human geographies. The masters of the India of Darkness are
rendered as local adaptations of Orwellian nature. The four Zamindars (feudal
lords) who rule Balram’s rural world of birth are called ‘the Buffalo’, ‘the Stork’,
‘the Wild Boar’ and ‘the Raven’, with physical characteristics moulded to fit the
animals after which they are nicknamed. For example, “the Stork was a fat man
with a fat moustache, thick and curved and pointy at the tips”, who “owned the
river that flowed outside the village”, and “took a cut of every catch of fish caught
by every fisherman in the river”, the Wild Boar – his brother, was the proud owner
of “all the good agricultural land around Laxmangarh” and a pair of teeth, “on ei-
ther side of his nose”, “long and curved, like little tusks” (The White Tiger: 24–5).
The four ‘social’ animals in Adiga’s novel preside over a sub-world of people
reduced to the condition of animals and insects, composite creatures that squirm
and crawl for a meagre income, who, while attempting to act from within the
conceptual boundaries of hard-work that will ‘pay off’, and bravely struggling in
the face of abject poverty, in fact are grotesque distortions of humanity. Balram’s
father is depicted as wearing a symbolic band around his neck, since the “clavicle
is curved…in high relief, like a dog’s collar”, with a body on which the story of
a life is written in a Kafkaesque manner, “in a sharp pen” so that he resembles a
“human beast of burden” (The White Tiger: 27). The men working in tea-shops
along the Ganga are but “human spiders that go crawling in between and under
the tables”, “crushed humans in crushed uniforms”, yet perform their jobs with
“honesty, dedication and sincerity”. (The White Tiger: 51).35 Arguably the most
35 The Orwellian nature of names is something familiar to the Western readers. Fanon
adds a postcolonial touch to it, via the analogy he establishes between oppressed sub-
jects and animals: “When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms
he constantly refers to the bestiary. The European rarely hits on a picturesque style;
but the native, who knows what is in the mind of the settler, guesses at once what he
is thinking of. Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces
bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies which are like nothing on earth, that
mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that
laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetable rhythm of life – all this forms part of
the colonial vocabulary” (Fanon: 42–43). However, it should be noted that in a place
like Kashmir, for example, surnames are usually nicknames, some denoting an animal
and usually emphasizing the similarities with that particular animal. Therefore, what
appears grotesque from a Western perspective is, in fact, a social/cultural practice in
some Eastern territories.
35
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonpoignant animal imagery that Adiga employs in order to summarize the essence
of a system which survives because of the passivity of those who constitute its
lowest layers, is the metaphor of the “Rooster Coop”. In this terrifying description,
millions of human beings bond in lifetime servitude, incessantly working for the
fortification of the power relations which characterize the rapport between classes
and castes, so that any attempt to ‘break free’ is refuted as sacrilege. The servitude
is so strong that, “you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands, he
will throw it back at you, with a curse” (The White Tiger: 175–6). The above sub-
stitutions between humans and animals call to mind Bakhtin’s discussion of the
grotesque in Rabelais and his World. However, while for Bakhtin, “the lowering
of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” “to the material level” (Bakhtin: 19)
is both grotesque and strangely vital, Adiga’s representation of the grotesque is
closely linked to degradation, and a perspective of the human body only as object,
thing, rather than subject. Thus, in The White Tiger Adiga adds a new dimension
to Bakhtin’s discourse; his transgression of the abject limits of the human body as
human body nevertheless blurs the boundaries between animal and human to the
almost extinction of the latter. The suggestion is also supported by the comments
made by The White Tiger protagonist related to what distinguishes free individuals
– as subjects, from slaves – as objects:
Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world – the others being Rumi, Mirza
Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten – has written
a poem where he says this about slaves: They remain slaves because they can’t see
what is beautiful in the world. (The White Tiger: 40, emphasis added)
Beauty cannot be perceived by either master-animals, or servant-animals. Its
ineffable qualities escape those who make the power-poles of Adiga’s India of
Darkness and leave unattended the human potential to go beyond the sordid mun-
dane; beauty as freedom, as time for contemplation of the world and Self is impla-
cably and eternally overthrown by its opposites: grotesque and abject. Even more
powerfully, the use of the grotesque as degrading strategy is not only limited to
human characters. Balram starts his journey under the flag of hubris and deliber-
ately abases the many divinities of the Muslim, Christian and Hindu pantheon put
together, reducing them to a laughable corporeality, and converting sanctity into
satire, in another Bakhtinian image:36
36 There is a difference, though, between Bakhtin’s perspective on the grotesque body
as comic body and Adiga’s use of the grotesque. While Bakhtin liberates and sees
gross materiality, abject corporeality as source of regeneration and energy, Adiga de-
nounces the degradation of the human/divine body as matter only and claims that
36 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of WellingtonIt is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by
praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency that I too should start off by
kissing some god’s arse. Which god’s arse, though? […] Bear with me, Mr. Jiabao.
This could take a while. How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004 arses?
(The White Tiger: 8–9)
Ironically, Balram’s escape from the rural India of Darkness into the urban India
of Light does not signify his escape from the overpowering force of the grotesque.
In the city, Balram becomes the driver of Mr. Ashok, who is one of the sons of
the ‘Stork’ and nephews of the “Wild Boar.” The animal print labelling Balram,
as well as those around him, regardless of their caste and financial status thus
survives, only in a different disguise. He earns the nickname “Country-Mouse”,
given by the other drivers and thus confirms his status as subject of the ‘animal
kingdom’, the jungle that marks both the rural as well as the urban existence.
Moreover, together with his fellow-servants, he is still part of the ‘underground’
life, a dark mirror of the world above, the masters’ world:
I don’t know how buildings are designed in your country, but in India every apartment
block, every house, every hotel is built with a servants’ quarters – sometimes at the
back, and sometimes (as in the case of Buckingham Towers B Block) underground
– a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids
and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep, and wait. (The White Tiger: 130,
emphasis added)
The spatial antidote to the labyrinthine structure inhabited by the mass of undiffer-
entiated servants is also a site labelled by its abject and grotesque features; Balram
chooses for himself the only ‘private’ space, a small room with walls “covered
with cockroaches” whose “chewing made a continuous noise”, which get crushed
but not deterred from landing on the net and meeting the same fate, in an unend-
ing cycle of unnecessary deaths (The White Tiger: 131). Thus, the rural India of
Darkness and the urban India of Light mockingly overlap and testify to a hostile
and alienating place, inhabited by composite creatures, half-human, half-animal,
forced to keep company with other species and reduced to squirming, chewing,
defecating masses.
It is my contention here that Adiga’s sensibility in tackling spatial, cultural and
human realities has a Gothic flavour to it, as it blurs boundaries and thrives on
liminality as the very condition of existence. Hence, far from ascribing darkness to
there is no regeneration involved, no expected salvation, and no escape from the de-
structive earthiness. The discussion of the gods’ many ‘arses’ and the de-sanctification
of Mother Ganga into repulsive mud are thus kindred strategies.
37
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonthe regions of Hell and damnation (raised in the novel, but not authentic matters of
concern), it is the dark and the night when Balram tells his stories, remembers his
past and plans for his future that give birth to a new life and consciousness. From
this point of view, Adiga’s novel calls to mind Edward Young’s Night Thoughts,
in which, as stated by Botting “the contemplation of death and decay serves to
encourage speculations on the life to come” and “darkness enables a person to
perceive the soul within, it expands the mind by producing a consciousness of its
own potential for divinity” (Botting: 33–34). In Young’s words, Balram could very
well declaim:
Darkness has more Divinity for me,
It strikes Thought inward, it drives back the Soul
To settle on Herself, our Point supreme! (qtd. in Botting: 34)
The only character who initially escapes inclusion into and absorption by India’s
“animal world” and is singled out as a higher being, in spite of his family ties, is
Mr. Ashok. This Westernized Indian shares with Balram an ancestral place of or-
igin, but is depicted as inhabiting a different sphere altogether. His physical char-
acteristics (tall and handsome), his gentleness, and generally tolerant views are in
rigid conflict with everyone else’s, so that he appears as an authentic divine figure
to Balram, who dotes on him and his wife Pinky Madam, in a similar manner to
Hanuman unconditionally serving Ram and Sita (The White Tiger: 38). As pointed
out by Hansen:
Years abroad have inflicted a benign amnesia upon Mr. Ashok. He has forgotten
about paan and the need for spittoons; he is oblivious to Hindu bias against Muslims;
he is startled at the intricacies of caste and his driver’s ersatz religiosity. Mr. Ashok’s
innocence and naiveté makes him an ideal boss to work for, and Balram quickly
attaches himself to his new patron. (Hansen: 303)
A further expansion of Hansen’s argument regarding the special bond between
Balram and Ashok suggests an initial reading of their characters as a brotherhood
of Others. Ashok, having returned to India after spending years in New York, is
forced to get re-acquainted with an intricate network of family ties, led by a cor-
rupted and corrupting father and brother. Having married a woman of a different
caste, in a different country (USA), he has to suffer the consequences of his choice,
at home, facing his wife’s unwillingness and inability to adapt to Indian realities.
His wife’s rejection of India is mirrored by his male relatives’ inertia, translated
into a system of patriarchal gender relations that impose obedience on the fe-
male and a firm hand on the male. Ashok, influenced by his “American ways”
(The White Tiger: 139), apparently more liberal and inclined towards a lenient
38 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonbehaviour in the domestic sphere, commits many acts of personal and cultural
insubordination. Through varying degrees of rebellion, Ashok’s character is a
reflection which reinforces Balram’s Otherness. Unsurprisingly then, Balram’s
fascination with his master’s ways turns into a desire to emulate Ashok and be-
come the mimic man. From buying the same type of clothes so as to be granted
access to one of the flashy urban malls, to learning how to see the world through
Ashok’s eyes, Balram’s attempts at copying and reproducing the master’s image
call to mind the many acts of adoration performed by Frankenstein’s monster in
the attempt to become like his creator: “And so I saw the room with his eyes;
smelt it with his nose; poked it with his fingers – I had already begun to digest my
master” (The White Tiger: 79, emphasis added). The verb to digest here and its
cannibalistic and vampiric connotations can be interpreted not only as an undying
colonial desire to form an identity based on faithful replication of the master race,
but it also suggests one of the best known Gothic tropes, the double. Although the
general understanding of the double or the doppelgänger refers to the danger of
extinction should this dark part of the Self be allowed to manifest itself freely, The
White Tiger renders it a different function altogether. By ‘incorporating’ the master
through numerous acts of imitation, by initially seeing him as a better, beneficent
double, Balram will avoid annihilation, erase his status of ‘invisible man’, and
finally reclaim the right to live.
From a postcolonial perspective, at a first, superficial glance, Balram appears
to idealize the Western culture responsible for his master’s cosmopolitanism, and
attempts to penetrate its boundaries, especially when the liberalism of the West
dissolves barriers and is instrumental for turning Balram into a confidante. Master
and servant enjoy a secret complicity, swift glances in the rear mirror, minor acts
of mutual recognition and acknowledgement. Tastes for foreign liquor, expensive
perfumes, and white, blonde-haired women are copied by the servant who wants
to ‘get Western’. However, gradually, differences of caste, education and financial
status start corroding the unlikely brotherhood of Others or doubles. Trivial but
numerous instances of difference and separation prepare the grounds for the split
of the brotherhood and the return to the ancestral conflict of Self versus Other.
Ashok will deliberately mock Balram’s inability to pronounce foreign words, like
“mall” and “pizza”, cruelly exposing the driver’s lack of general knowledge which
gains him the epithet of “half-baked”37, and will finally agree with Balram playing
37 Hansen suggested that all these acts of humiliation may be read as a ‘projection’ onto
Balram of Ashok’s “self-hatred of the inauthentic migrant.” While supportive of her
argument, I would also like to add that Ashok himself makes a last desperate attempt
39
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonthe scapegoat for a car accident caused by Pinky Madam. All of the above exam-
ples argue for a case of abuse of servant by master. As stated by Punter, “Gothic,
from its inception, has provided a range of images of social violence” with “the
Gothic castle” that “can be seen as a location where such violence can flourish, in
one sense – at least in its earlier manifestations – safely contained by its distancing
in time and place, yet at the same time inextricably entwined with more contem-
porary histories” (Punter 2004: 288). In Adiga’s novel, abuse is re-territorialized in
the urban locus, while Balram as victim is as inexorably trapped by caste, educa-
tion, and subaltern status as the Gothic heroines of Radcliffe and Monk once were
by the menacing patriarchal figures inhabiting the castle’s structure. For Balram,
the possibility of a life in prison, with more abuse and unjust punishments inflicted
on him at the hands of the wardens, seems to be the normal price paid for the ‘priv-
ilege’ of being employed and having an income, however meagre.
As stated by Azam, “postcolonial gothic is less an intertextual ‘writing back’
to empire than it is a form of commentary on the politics of home that asks funda-
mental questions about the relations of family life and the private sphere” (Azam:
32). In The White Tiger, as has already been exemplified, we assist in a fracturing
of family life, a break from normality and a horrible propensity for destroying the
closest. Balram’s own grandmother, the diabolical Kusum, agrees to be the wit-
ness to her grandsons’ ‘confession’; on hearing this, Balram cynically comments
on the ability of the history of abuse to replicate itself even within the domestic
confines: “Doesn’t the driver’s family protest? Far from it. They would actually go
about bragging. Their boy Balram had taken the fall, gone to Tihar Jail for his em-
ployer. He was loyal as a dog. He was the perfect servant” (The White Tiger: 169).
I posit here that loyalty to one’s masters and one’s family is cynically depicted
by Adiga and acknowledged by his dark hero as morality, as the principle sustain-
ing family ties and social hierarchies alike. To be more specific, I suggest a reading
of Balram’s ‘duties’ to his family and society at large and his consequent refusal to
comply with the laws of subordination from Max Stirner’s theoretical perspective
on morality and personal identity. According to Stirner, the very concept of a uni-
versal human is responsible for the absolutization of moral and rational ideas. This
fundamental concept of humanity, of man’s essence is so deeply ingrained that any
transgression would represent man’s forsaking of his own humanity. Nevertheless,
this essential humanity acts as unspeakable burden and is an alien presence inside
to ‘fit in’, to reconstruct his temporarily lost identity as an Indian, by making barriers
between himself and Balram visible. The initial “uncanniness” of the warm rapport
between master and servant thus gives way to a ‘proper’ hierarchy and subordination.
40 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonman; man, it can be stated, by embracing this generally accepted perspective
on humanity, is actually haunted and alienated by his own self, by a specter of
“essence” inside him: “Henceforth man no longer, in typical cases, shudders at
ghosts inside him, but at himself: is terrified at himself” (Stirner: 41). Similarly,
morality is also a “spook”, an abstract ideal and an alienating one, a discursively
closed fiction that denies difference and plurality which has transgressed the in-
dividual and achieved his complete domination. Stirner does not oppose morality
as such but its definition as something sacred, as an unbreakable law; thus, he
exposes it as sustained by the cruelty, the domination and the sheer will-to-power.
Morality is actually based on complete control over individual will and is thus
internalized. Although for Stirner, the individual is paramount, at the same time,
he is plagued by impossible moral standards which impede the affirmation of his
uniqueness. Such uniqueness can only be achieved if one engages in to question
and contest any essentialisms.
To return to Adiga’s novel, it becomes obvious that Balram, in his refusal to
comply with the general rules of subordination that equate loyalty-family-the rule
of law-social hierarchies is willingly breaking taboos, acknowledging his rejec-
tion of impossible and actually de-humanizing moral standards (“He was loyal
like a dog”). As the narrative proceeds, Balram will question essentialisms of
subordination by ‘giving in’ to the dark demands of his nascent individuality,
at odds with those around him. This is a supreme gesture of replacing loyalty to
others with loyalty to Self, so that, in Stirner’s words, morality can stop acting as
a “spook” and free him from the human contacts that can conjure it. As it turns
out, in Balram’s case that means all human contacts, including the one with his
formerly respected master, Ashok. In a genuine Gothic twist, what should consti-
tute ‘the fall’ of Balram and his incarceration for a deed he had not actually com-
mitted, actually signifies his ‘rise’ from the state of victim to that of victimizer.
It is Ashok, the educated, well-connected, Westernized Indian the one who will
suffer the fatal consequences of his own inability to re-accustom himself with the
‘new state of affairs’ in an India that appears to be struggling to break free from
the overpowering Rooster Coop metaphor, and reverse ancient hierarchies. After
the accident and after Balram’s miraculous escape from playing the scapegoat
(due to some contacts with the police and due to the fact that nobody reported the
gruesome death of an anonymous child, an offspring of the India of Darkness),
Ashok’s wife leaves him in the middle of the night and returns to New York. The
envelope with four thousand and seven hundred rupees that she hands Balram, in
a self-apologetic gesture, opens new paths for the servant and once again alters
the nature of the relationship with this master. Initially overcome by conflicting
41
Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of Wellingtonfeelings, ranging from pity to the instincts of self-preservation, Balram almost
mothers his despondent boss, tends to his daily needs and drives him to places of
facile entertainment at night, thus dangerously changing and challenging the strict
nature of subservience. When dissipation takes over Ashok, and he finds solace
in pick-up bars, and by fondling call-girls in the back seat of the car, Hansen no-
tices, “he tumbles from the pedestal that Balram had placed him on”, stops being
“the proverbial ma-bap”, and becomes “just another lusty male” (Hansen: 303).
Consequently, “the cosmopolitan character becomes the victim of the class-based
rage of the driver” (Hansen: 304). The final blow to the brotherhood of the Others
is unwittingly given by the master himself, who, oblivious to Balram’s attempts to
soothe his hurt feelings of an abandoned husband, celebrates his brother’s unex-
pected arrival to Delhi in a few words which will seal his own fate:
‘When I was in America, I thought family was a burden, I don’t deny it. When you
and Father tried to stop me from marrying Pinky because she wasn’t a Hindu I was
furious with you, I don’t deny it. But without family, a man is nothing. Absolutely
nothing. I had nothing but this driver in front of me for five nights. Now at last I have
someone real by my side: you.’ (The White Tiger: 189, emphasis added)
The above paragraph embodies the entire dynamics of the uncanny urban contact
between Ashok and Balram, possibly a reproduction of Ashok’s own state of in-
visibility in the metropolis of New York that he had left in order to become ‘real’
in India. The shift from the brotherhood of Others (although experienced only by
Balram) towards Self and Other engaged ‘in mortal combat’ is irreversible. It also
demonstrates that mixing is not attainable and that real knowledge of the Other,
even if, or possibly because it seems so reachable, transgresses limitations of race,
caste, class, status. In Punter’s words, such knowledge:
[…] can exist only as an unassimilable foreign body, only according to the logic
of the host and parasite, a logic that can end only in exile or death. Under these
circumstances there can be no real dialogue, no real exchange; only whisperings,
half-understood glances, intimations that can never be allowed to approach intimacy.
(Punter 2000: 120, emphasis added)
Indeed, in The White Tiger the attempts to know the Other, become the Other, and
incorporate the Other, or differently put, to dissolve doubles into a fully-formed
adult identity are doomed to both exile and death. As Ashok has been tragically
unaware of the mutual exchange, which properly carried, might have facilitated
a social and personal growth, as well as a place for his own alienated Self, his
destiny is death, at the hands of the driver who had worshipped him almost to the
point of a god. In a typically Gothic instance, the murder is carried on at night,
in “soggy black mud” (The White Tiger: 283), under the rainwater which seems
42 Adriana Raducanu - 9783631628034
Downloaded from PubFactory at 05/01/2021 09:12:36AM
via Victoria University of WellingtonYou can also read
