Road Kill

“From the way the wheels crunched it completely, and from how there was no noise when she stopped the car , not even a whimpering or a barking, I knew what had happened to the thing we had hit” (Adiga 138). This excerpt exemplifies the monotonous truth that struggles but soldiers through Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’: the progress of a developing nation sacrifices the sensitivities of a Western world made comfortable by its superior quality of life. From the armchair of a six story air-conditioned library the passive insensitivity towards human life exhibited in ‘White Tiger’ elevates our own esteemed understanding of morality and even justice. The clever, enigmatic narrator—satirical and blasphemous in a way that plays into our ideas of intellectual worthiness—kills his ‘master’. But because we value wit, thoughtfulness, and criticism (and perhaps because we retrace our own less than perfect records) we must wonder if the notions of piety, justice, and goodness are irreparably damaged by a character born into the troubled India we have surveyed this semester and understand to be blighted by poverty and desperation.

In America, we run over cats and dogs, mostly by accident. In India, wandering children, described as black things, are reduced analogously to stray pets, that may or may not be worthy of preservation. “Will anyone miss her? … No, probably not” (Adiga 140). It wasn’t a white tiger, so it wasn’t worth saving.

Philo--Kill Your Employer to be Free

Balram says about Ashok’s murder:

“I’m losing him, I thought, and this forced me to do something I knew I would hate myself for, even years later. I really didn’t want to do this—I really didn’t want to think, even in the two or three minutes he had left to live, that I was that kind of driver—the one that resorts to blackmailing his master—but he left me no options.” (pg. 243)

In this passage, Balram explains his ‘rationale’ for killing Ashok. Looking at this climactic excerpt, we clearly see that Adiga weaves some fundamental philosophic issues into his novel— free will, responsibility, morality, etc. For brevity’s sake, I will, of course, ignore the issue of Balram’s second person narration. Credibility and narrative indirection are not my current concerns.

Consider this passage from a linguistic/grammatical perspective. “I’m losing him, I thought, and this forced me to do something…” Balram’s thought about Ashok’s escape (from death) ‘forces him to do something…’ Let’s play with agency and rewrite that sentence. Balram is forced (by the thought of Ashok’s escape) to do something. With Balram as the subject, the sentence is passive. Passivity becomes a pattern in relation to his character. For a lack of a better phrase, things ‘are done’ to Balram. He says, “I really didn’t want to do this... but he left me no option.” The notion of passivity translates to philosophy. Balram’s explains his motivation by NOT having any motivational explanation. Apparently his only option is to blackmail and kill his master. Balram makes no ‘choice.’ He is a passive observer of the universe—just a thing among other things—being acted upon, but himself not acting. Before he stabs his master with the glass bottle, Balram says, "There is a problem, sir. You should have got a replacement a long time ago."--not the best 'hasta la vista, baby.'

Inherent to the general notion of free will is one’s ability ‘to choose.’ Presently, I am writing this blog. Concerning my future, I can either choose to (A) keep writing, or (B) stop writing. My ability to choose either A or B makes me free with regard to writing this blog. (I’ll choose “A,” of course, because I want to pass, but it is still my option to do “B.”) Analogously, Balram can either kill his master, or, not kill his master. But he protests about ‘wanting to do otherwise’ and having no other option. Balram says, in so many words, that he does not have free will. And without free will—without the ability to choose—a man has no control over his life. He has no options. He is a ‘thing,’ not a person.

Adiga knows this. These concepts are basic. The way he uses them is, however, technical and more complex. By denying his free will, Balram avoids responsibility. For how can he be responsible for doing something without volition? With no other options, he was forced (passive construction) to blackmail and murder his master. Doing otherwise, he claims, is beyond his power. And therefore we, as readers, as people with some sense of ethics or morality, have no way of holding Balram responsible for this offense. Without his free will, he was forced like a slave. And here is the great irony. Right after Ashok dies, Balram says, “I was a free man.” He denies his individual free will, thereby becoming a slave, in order to feel an inauthentic, even illusory perhaps, social sense of freedom. Balram defends himself against the adverse moral judgment for the murder of his master while, at the same time, makes sure to take credit for any moral commendation. Not to mention the red bag of cash. The situation is ironically absurd. He becomes a slave to free himself. He leaves the Darkness as a good person and comes to the Light as a murderer. You, you American bloggers, you want the moral of Balram’s story? Here it is: Money over Morality.

Please excuse my sloppiness. It’s getting late now—12:37 a.m.—and I am no poet or philosopher. I do, however, have four favorite philosophers. They’re all German, and are known as the greatest in history. They are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Liebnitz, and I forget the last. Hitler? Does that sound right? You can laugh now—it’s a fucking joke.

India needs to know?

In terms of audience, I’d like to know who Adiga is speaking to in his letters. There is a great deal of effort in devising a dialogue that identifies the disruption of the caste system in India since British colonization and civil wars. For instance, Adiga’s description of the orderly zoo prior to British colonization and the cage doors being left open after the British withdrawal and civil war describes the beginnings of caste disruption and corruption of the few over the many. Additionally, the novel states that 99.9% of the country is the poverty-stricken, “half-baked” class (stuck in the rooster coop) and the remaining 0.01% are the corrupt landlords and politicians running the country, collecting wealth, and burdening the poor with all the debt. Balram, the entrepreneur/assassin/white tiger (“one born per generation”) is the exception; or the example of how the lower classes can improve conditions and defeat prejudices? Maybe not so much the example of success, but the example of the types of oppressive barriers still in place in a country that has evolved into a global economic power. I’m not going so far as to suggest that Adiga tries to incite the lower-class to civil war. But Balram’s “education” continues throughout the text. His ability to “see” and the actions of the poor and the rich results in these connections that allow him to understand the ingrained servitude that supports the condescension of the rich.

Family ties

The importance of the family and loyalty to the family in Indian can not be stressed enough as an individuals test of morality. But as Adiga depicts the family, they are actually a catalyst to immorality. In Balram's case it is the women in the family, especially the grandmother, that I found to be particularly disabling Balram, his father, and brother. The hope may have been gone for Balram's father to achieve a better life but Balram was the smartest boy in school and could have been offered a scholarship somewhere if he had been allowed to stay. Yet, he gets pulled out of school because the women thought one of his cousins "needed" to get married and so they had to take out a huge loan form the stork. I do not know if such lavish weddings are required for anyone to get married in a small village, but this seems ridiculous and selfish to me. It seems that the women in the family payed no attention to Balram's ability and his potential to become educated and perhaps move out of a life of poverty and expected him to exist in servitude and relinquish all of his earnings to them. Perhaps if Balram's family gave him the chance to escape poverty through honorable means he would have. Perhaps if they had given him love and support he would have not let them go in the end.

Is it tradition?

Adiga does a great job of showing Balram's transition from servant to entrepreneur by showing the precise moments when his world perspective starts to change. The irony of it all is that the people that let him to change his perspective are his masters.
Mr. Ashok is the one that makes Balram aware that his room is falling apart and not fit for most people. Balram was blind to this fact before this incident just like he was blind to his appearance before Pinky Madam made him aware of how horrible he looked. They helped Balram take the first steps out of servitude. He was even successful in changing his appearance and making it into the mall where drivers were not allowed. Although he was still cognitively aware that he was not supposed to be in there. The mental process takes longer than the physical process. The most interesting part about this is that he blames his father for not raising him to see these things that have kept him a servant. He now knows that it was not impossible to transcend these social labels, but if families kept raising their children to not know otherwise then how were they to overcome their caste. It wasn't the people holding themselves down, it was tradition and it took Balram a trip to Delhi, where the caste lines are blurred, to see past them. I guess if they are not as clearly visible as in the villages it is easier to cross them because there are no referees to call you out of bounds. (not many sports references so far so i thought i might add one)

Form

The epistolary form of Adiga's White Tiger is significant in the way we have to interpret Balram's arguments. I've slipped up several times and thought his prose was directed at me and even forgot he was ostensibly writing in letters. While yes, this is true to the extent that a novel is directed at its audience/reader, Balram is speaking to the Premier of China, initially somewhat formally and easing into a familiarity fairly quickly. I press on this because of his intentions to describe entrepreneurship in India by discussing the forming of one of its own, namely himself. What a fucking joke. Leagues are described about the character in the way he speaks Man to Man towards the Premier. In breaking out of the metaphorical chicken coop he has won the ability to address those classically above his station on an even level as well as to share inside (and of course more truthful) information about his country that the Premier will certainly not find with the smiling, upwardly mobile India, the tourist face, the governmental face that he will encounter. Now we have no way of knowing, and we assume to the contrary, whether these correspondence were sent in the world of the fiction. I'd imagine not personally as they are fairly incriminating. It is significant only in that they were written and in the form of their writing. Balram claimed his manhood and passed into a higher lifestyle at the expense of his former life and relations. That is the price of the coop. A man who has escaped however can now speak levelly with Premiers and world-movers.

Servants Vs. Servants

To me one of the most interesting aspects of Adiga's The White Tiger is the relationships between servants. Although we know life is a power struggle, to see each caste with its own competition is very important in Adiga's novel. It helps emphasize the fact that everyone is a servant to someone. Even Ashok is a servant to his father as well as the government that he continually has to pay off. The key is to be the "rich" servant. We see this even among servants in the same business, such as with the drivers. Balram is constantly trying to be seen as better than Vitiligo Lips and the others. This is partly why he dons the look of a rich man and goes through the doors of the mall. Everyone is trying to prove that they are not on the very bottom. This is also illustrated through the envy of the uniform. To most of us, it seems odd to want to wear a uniform everyday. This is not the case in this novel, though. The minute Balram recieves his uniform, the respect he receives in his village skyrockets. In a world that focuses on upward mobility, even the smallest step up is significant.