Neither here nor there

When Aravind Adiga was awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize, for The White Tiger, it wasn’t the fact that it was his debut novel, or that he was one the youngest writers to receive the prestigious prize, or that he is Indian that was noteworthy.

Who he is and what he represents is more interesting: since Salman Rushdie got an entire subcontinent of writers noticed with his magic realism and ability to win multiple Bookers, others have followed suit.

While Rushdie and the exalted authors Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai are noted for their fantastic prose and equally rich imagination, Adiga takes an approach closer to social commentary. He has looked at India’s social ills with a disaffected eye and penned an irreverent portrait of the economic gap between the haves and have notes. In doing so, he has put a sizeable dent in arguments about India’s growing prosperity.

Poverty still exits, and its ugliness blights the lives of those who live it. Adiga does not pity his characters. Instead, he designs the sort of robust, shrewd protagonist that few authors dare create for fear of being criticised about their lack of empathy for the poor.

The White Tiger is about a man who will use any means necessary to fulfil his dream of escaping an impoverished village life for success in the big city. The means involve the stuff of the middle class’ worst nightmares: the murder of a boss, building antireligious sentiment, and other such social and ethical mischief that regularly fills the crime sections of Indian newspapers.

The author’s discerning eye allows him to achieve such adventures. Adiga is a product of neither here nor there. He is the face of a growing generation of Indians who study and live abroad (he studied at Columbia University and Oxford and lived in Australia) before returning to work in India (Adiga worked as a correspondent for Time magazine and lived in Delhi; he currently resides in Mumbai).

And he proves that to best observe one’s surroundings, one can travel the world and return. It is no longer the case that where you belong is a place on a map as much as an idea in your head. It is from this place that Adiga has written his stunning first novel.