Suryatapa Bhattacharya
There were others who achieved the impossible before Aravind Adiga but he merely cemented it with his win.
Mr Adiga was awarded the Man Booker Prize 2008, for his debut novel, The White Tiger. It wasn’t the fact that it was his debut novel, or that he was one the youngest winners of one of the world’s most prestigious prizes, or for the fact that he is Indian that this is noteworthy.
But what is more interesting is who he is and what he represents: Since Salman Rushdie got an entire subcontinent of writers noticed with his magic realism and ability to win multiple Bookers, others have followed suit, including Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.
While the exalted crowd mentioned above have won for their fantastic prose and equally rich imagination, Mr Adiga moves away and dives right in. He is able to look at India’s social ills with a disaffected eye and pen an irreverent portrait of the economic gap between the haves and have nots and put a sizeable dent in those who cannot stop shouting about India’s growing prosperity.
Poverty still exits, and its ugliness manifests the lives of those live it. He does not pity his characters, instead creating the sort of robust, shrewd protagonist that few authors dare create for being criticised about their lack of empathy for the poor.
The White Tiger is about a man who will use any means necessary to fulfill his dream of escaping an impoverished village life for success in the big city. The means that he uses to do so involve the stuff that the middle class’s worst nightmares are made of: murder of a man who he is a driver of, building anti-religious sentiment against his neighbour and other such social and ethical mischief that regularly fills the crime sections of Indian newspapers.
One of the ways that the author is able to achieve such adventures in his literature is because of his discerning eye. Mr Adiga is a product of neither here nor there. He is the face of a growing generation of Indians who study abroad (Mr Adiga studied at Columbia University and Oxford), and live abroad (in his case, Australia) before returning to work in India (Mr Adiga worked as a correspondent for Time Magazine and lived in Delhi.) And he proves that to best observe one’s surroundings, one can travel the world and return because it is no longer the case that where you belong is a place on a map as much as an idea that exists in your head. And from there he has written this stunning first novel.
Mr Adiga currently resides in Mumbai.
