On May 16, 2008, the 14-year-old daughter of a dentist was found murdered at her home in a middle-class New Delhi suburb. The police blamed a missing servant and India’s affluent citizens nervously awaited his arrest. The crime had given substance to their fear that as the wealth of modern India fails to drip down the social ladder, the hordes languishing at the bottom will turn hostile. Specifically, as Aravind Adiga observed in this case, they fear “that their servants will not be able to resist the temptation to steal from or even murder them”.
The servant was later found killed, apparently by the same hand, and the crime remains unsolved — but for many Indians, his innocence does not diminish the fear.
Adiga’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, published two months before these murders, explores the simmering threat that India’s servile class could embody.
The narrative consists of letters from Balram Halwai, aka the White Tiger, a self-made Indian businessman, to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Premier, about Asia’s potential: “The future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage and drug abuse.”
But Halwai’s sinister past looms over the story. It seems unlikely that the son of a rural rickshaw driver could have clawed his way out of the gutter without sinking his claws into those above him. Through Halwai, Adiga skilfully explores the corrupting nature of poverty.
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“A brash, savagely funny exposure of a ‘new’ India built on corruption and murder.” The Times
“Quick, entertaining and full of vividly drawn types.” The Times Literary Supplement