The White Tiger: Systemic Truths Revealed

I recently finished the award-winning novel, The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. The book is comprised of a series of letters written by an Indian entrepreneur, Balram Halwai (aka the white tiger), to the prime minister of China, about his rise from poverty to riches. Balram, a chauffeur to Ashok, confesses to murdering his employer, stealing his money, evading capture, and launching a successful taxi service. The book is clever, engaging, and although replete with stereotypes, quite thought-provoking.

I also found it deeply disturbing. There’s a way in which Ashok’s murder, ghastly and evil though it is, is understandable in the context of the story. Although Ashok treats Balram comparatively well, the master-servant relationship, played out over generations within their families, can be understood to inevitably lead to evil, as its oppressive and exploitative nature unwinds over time and through circumstances. Balram sees an opportunity to escape servitude and the bonds that have tied his poor family to Ashok’s rich family for generations in an often cruel and persistently miserable and seemingly inescapable culture, and he seizes it, even though it means murdering his relatively humane employer.

This I could somehow “handle” in the context of the story, but Balram’s future entrepreneurial success is predicated not only on this one instant of revenge and evil, but also on persistent corruption. There is no possibility of redemptive good. Balram is only able to build his successful taxi business by perpetually bribing the police and ruining others’ businesses and opportunities.

And this is what was so distressing to me. Even if the protagonist were to have become financially solvent initially by way of education, or luck, or wits, or "Slumdog Millionaire" genius rather than murder, he would have ultimately failed without becoming fully corrupt. The system that Adiga revealed in his novel necessitated corruption.

This is a dystopian novel masked in apparent reality. Unlike some famous dystopian novels (e.g., Brave New World, 1984, We), Adiga had no need to fabricate a future world unlike our own. Rather, he uncovered all-too-real systemic truths that pervade economic globalization and many societies.

My hope is that this novel engages systems-changers rather than simply entertaining its fiction-reading audience.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm

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