I could easily see myself teaching The White Tiger in introductory courses on Indian literature to undergraduates. It is likely to appeal to my students, while also giving me good reasons to talk about the social issues and cultural phenomena Adiga invokes in his book.

You wouldn’t (hopefully) use Tom Wolfe’s Man in Full to discuss American social issues. Why would you use White Tiger for Indian ones? Both are superficial and poorly written. You and many other critics raise good points re: authorial voice. I’m even willing to give a free pass there, but it’s just such a hammy, formulaic book, I lost all interest midway. Darkness and Light? Seriously? It’s not like there’s a dearth of books that touch on social issues and are fun to read (say Ravan and Eddie). I was really excited about White Tiger (nerd, I know) after reading his interview. Too bad his ideas didn’t translate so well in his book.

“…There was no conscious attempt to write a counter-narrative to India Shining. I can’t imagine any good novel would come of such a polemical enterprise…” “…The fact about India that struck me most forcefully was this – that despite there being such an appalling (and growing) gulf between the rich and the poor, and the fact that the poor came into regular, close, and sometimes intimate contact with the rich, there was so little crime in India. Think of South Africa, or south America, or even the poorer parts of an American city – there is such a link between economic deprivation and social unrest. But why not in India?…”

The same people – Gioenkar etc. who think Ghosh’s book was more “radical” than Adiga’s (what a laughable idea) – would get teary eyed about Gandhi being thrown off a train in South Africa, and get angry if you mentioned some of the extraordinarily racist things Gandhi said about Africans in South Africa. They are the same people who probably hopped up and down in fury when casteism was brought up at the Durban conference. Ghosh, like goenkar and the others is descended from mainstream Indian nationalism – which was dominated by Hindu upper caste men who wanted the sole privilege of speaking for the country. Colonialism challenged their power – so obviously they were against it – until they could garner the revenues from agricultural labour themselves and colonise their “own” country. Naturally, Ghosh and his ilk would rather write thousands of pages about 19th century colonialism than about the barbaric inhumanity with which Indians treated Indians then and now! It isn’t the “neocons” getting people burnt and thrown off their land in Orissa, Gujarat, Chattisgarh, Singur – its our very own Indian babus.

Thank you Aravind Adiga for touching this raw nerve in the psyche of the Indian elite.

He’s not an NRI. He is from, and he lives, in India.

Joolz, NRI–newly returned to India!

I’ve read the reviews and the excerpts and now I’m going to hurry off and buy this book for my LIFO pile. I agree with Amardeep that perhaps a third person narrator would be more believable. Or a combination of first person rage and third person social commentary. Still, if the excerpts are any indication, I think I’m going to thoroughly enjoy the book.

specifically cites the subject matter of the book as the reason it stood out:

A prize about a book awarded in part based on what the book is on? Surely, the sinister machinations of the Bilderberg conspiracy must be behind this!

I don’t say anything. Only in the mildly paranoid and victimised imagination could Aravind Adiga be viewed as the hand maiden of a ‘neo-con’ conspiracy to slander modern India and deny the evils of colonial history. Your theory justifies itself as all simplistic strawmen paranoias justify themselves. At the end of the day, they just preferred his novel to every other one. They being a panel of judges who each had one vote.

Now I’m going to sulk because the novel I believe should have won by the novelist Linda Grant obvisouly shows latent and hidden anti-semitism on behalf of the judges. Adiga’s book is good in its own way, but it’s not the best work published in English this year, not by a long shot.

The neocon chairman of the jury specifically cites the subject matter of the book as the reason it stood out:

“Portillo… praised the work’s attention to “important social issues: the division between rich and poor, and issues on a global scale.”

Portillo said…”here was a book on the cutting edge, dealing with a different aspect of India, unfamiliar perhaps to many readers. What set it apart was its originality. The feeling was that this was new territory.”

Adiga accepts the award on behalf of the downtrodden:

“the 33-year-old former journalist said his book – the story of Balram Halwai, a village boy who becomes an entrepreneur through villainous means – aimed to highlight the needs of India’s poor.

“It is a fact that for most of the poor people in India there are only two ways to go up – either through crime or through politics, which can be a variant of crime,� Adiga, the fifth Indian-origin writer to win the prize, told the BBC.”

““India and China have come into their own and the fiction that comes from these countries should reflect the fact.

“What that means is writers from those countries need to be more critical in looking at those countries because they no longer need protection. As they step out into the world stage and potentially rule the world, it is even more important.�

And the Guardian among others reports that the fight was between two books, and the debate so heated that “all the males” on the jury were “in tears.” Within days, you will surely find that the other book in the fight was Ghosh’s, and – as predicted here weeks ago – it came down to an emotive case made by Portillo, who should never have been chairman for a book prize if you ask me.

To reprise my brief argument made quite a long time ago now, there was never any way that Portillo was going to be pleased by, or strongly back, Sea of Poppies, which appears to be just the opening arguments in a devastating and highly original indictment of the British colonial activities in the Indian Ocean area. The fact that Adiga’s book was in the running is just gravy – sure, what could be better than a book that self-consciously attacks and subverts the India Shining narrative.

By the way, I’m convinced now that the wrong upstart desi got the award if it indeed had to be given to an upstart desi. Just finished A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif, it’s considerably better literature than Adiga’s book (which, for the record, I really enjoyed and have been giving as default gift for months) besides being totally hilarious. It’s amazing that it was left off the list in the first place, and points to why these contests are crapshoots which vary their results wildly each year due to the prejudices of the judges.

I liked exactly two things in the novel: (a) The unique and clever voice of the main character, and (b) The accurate description of servants, drivers, etc., in India.

What I didn’t like (which I didn’t mention in the review) is that the characters don’t sound or act natural (which supports your point about self-awareness in such a shallow individual), so the far-fetched plot doesn’t feel realistic. The characters also aren’t developed well and don’t change at all throughout the novel. As a reader, I didn’t feel like I learned anything new or met new people. And the letter-writing device was lame and pointless, I thought.

Since the Apu Trilogy (of which Pather Panchali was part) was written by Bibhuti Bhushan Bandopadhyay, the narrative was not really composed by Satyajit Ray (unless you mean the screen play).