'The white tiger' as an axe and x-ray

Assignment Paper 13

The New Literatures

By: Ajit A. Kaliya

M.A. Sem. 4

Roll No.1

Enrollment No. 2069108420170013

Batch: 2016-18

Email- kaliyaajitbhai@gmail.com
Department Of English, MKBU

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What would be your answer if you are asked what the duty of literature is? Or why literature is for? One may say literature is for arising feelings, one may say literature should show reality, one can say literature is just for entertainment. Well, there is no certain answer. Literature has no specific functions. Literature can be just for entertainment also or it can put you in deep philosophical questions. It can be totally real or total fantasy. Now how far is it right to criticize a book by its representation of reality of a nation? Isn’t it foolishness to expect only good things from literature or any kind of art? This happened when Aravind Adiga’s debut novel ‘The White Tiger’ won 40th man booker prize in 2008. Some people criticized it because it portrays dark side of India. Here are some negative reviews I gathered from The telegraph. 

• "I felt the book took us back three decades," said folk art expert Ritu Sethi. "It had every stereotype going in it. The BBC used to show nothing but cows on the roads for years. We're back to that with this book." 

• Others criticised the novel for being dull and demeaning. Author and playwright Manjula Padmanabhan dismissed it as "a tedious, unfunny slog". 

• She agreed that much of the recent hype about India as an emerging superpower was dishonest and complacent but asked: "Is this schoolboyish sneering the best that we can do?" 

• Having bought the book, affluent Indians may shift uncomfortably in their seats. The daily inhumanity shown by the rich towards their domestic staff in The White Tiger is something of which many will realise they too are guilty. 

• "I used to hate Naipaul for talking contemptuously about India, about how cleaners mop the floor in restaurants by crouching and moving like crabs and all that talk about Indians defecating in the open," said a freelance editor, Anjali Kapoor. "Adiga is the same, focusing on everything that is bad and disgusting." (Dhillon) 

The reason behind criticizing this book is very simple. Because they are not rooster coops. I don’t think any of them have experienced poverty or even seen poverty. We see what happens when political leaders of other country visit India. Political leaders hide poverty and slums and let others see only richness and light. But reality does not change by hiding it. Those who criticize The White Tiger on the basis of portraying bad picture of India are like the politicians who try to hide reality. Politician can do it but how can one expect that from an author? Or maybe it is just matter of experience. They don’t know what the problem is? Living in big houses , moving in car, dining in five star hotels and then thinking all are happy and wealthy is lack of seeing around and observing. They cannot see reality hidden behind curtains. There is more literary answer by Frantz Kafka to those who except only praising from literature. 

Kafka says, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” (Aleph) 

Quite striking definition of literature. Isn’t it? That is what Kafka wanted from literature. Shock, pain, unrest. Aravind Adiga did the same. You see reviews above. They are shocked. So, ‘The white tiger’ is great literature as per definition of Kafka. 

But what has Adiga written that stabs readers like an axe. What Aravind Adiga did is he inspects the Indian society. Not just by looking outside only but looking deep inside. Like x-ray. He finds lot many diseases and tells about them. Let us see some examples. 

• And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. (Adiga) 

• Which black river am I talking of—which river of Death, whose banks are full of rich, dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it? Why, I am talking of 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. 

• And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras—this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and 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. 

• Inside, you will find an image of a saffron-colored creature, half man half monkey: this is Hanuman, everyone's favorite god in the Darkness. Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion. These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India. 

• What traditional Indian village is complete without its blue-movie theater, sir? 

• Government program gave every boy three rotis, yellow daal, and pickles at lunchtime. But we never ever saw rotis, or yellow daal, or pickles, and everyone knew why: the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money. 

• Once, a truck came into the school with uniforms that the government had sent for us; we never saw them, but a week later they turned up for sale in the neighboring village. 

• Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop—men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties or fifties but still "boys." But that is your fate if you do your job well—with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt. 

• The judges? Wouldn't they see through this obviously forced confession? But they are in the racket too. They take their bribe, they ignore the discrepancies in the case. And life goes on. 

• The greatest thing to come out of this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the Rooster Coop. 

• A school where you won't be allowed to corrupt anyone's head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi (Adiga) 

I think these are enough examples to find out why many people do not like this book. But the question is doesn’t it reality? Of course it is. Every morning we open newspaper, all news of corruption, scams, murder, rape, dowry, suicide, and all. Don’t we see children dying in government hospitals and government doing nothing? Don’t we see in police stations instead of arresting criminal victim is harassed? And there is much behind newspapers. Real dark side of India. They don’t get chance to speak. Only few people speak whose bellies are full and all start to believe that all are happy now. The novel like this is mouth piece of those who never get the chance to speak. 

Aravind Adiga succeeds to get x-ray image of India. Here is what Aeavind Adiga says why he wrote this novel. 

This is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. In somewhere like Bihar there will be no doctors in the hospital. In northern India politics is so corrupt that it makes a mockery of democracy. This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day, but people like me - middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better than England's - don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the poor of India endure. 

I would like to end this assignment with quote of Aravind Adiga himself. 

"At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination." (Jeffries) 

Works Cited

Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. New York: Free press, 2008.

Aleph, Faena. FRANZ KAFKA ON READING: AN AXE THAT BREAKS THE FROZEN SEA INSIDE US. 23 August 2016. 21 March 2018 <http://www.faena.com/aleph/articles/franz-kafka-on-reading-an-axe-that-breaks-the-frozen-sea-inside-us/>.

Dhillon, Amrit. Indians fear Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' says too much about them. 18 October 2008. 21 March 2018 <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3222136/Indians-fear-Aravind-Adigas-The-White-Tiger-says-too-much-about-them.html>.

Jeffries, Stuart. Roars of anger. 16 October 2008. 21 March 2018 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/oct/16/booker-prize>.

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