Aravind Adiga’s bestselling novel “The White Tiger” bagged the 2008 Man Booker Prize in a year that has been very eventful and fruitful for the Indian publishing industry. The Mumbai based author was born of an Australian father and Indian mother in Chennai, partially brought up in Australia and was educated at Columbia and Oxford. He worked as a journalist for the Time magazine in Delhi for a while but writing being his passion gave up his day job to concentrate more on his book. And the hard work has paid off. There were time Adiga says when he had to fight for survival, without a job and staying in a rented flat in Mumbai. But now he is richer by ₤50000 and is sure to forget his days of penury in the coming times.
He is the second youngest ever to win the prestigious award which is considered the Nobel of literature. Earlier this year Salman Rushdie another prolific Indian writer was awarded the Booker of Bookers for his controversial book “The Midnight’s Children”. The special award marked the 40th anniversary of the prestigious award. Aravind joins a celebrated list of Indian authors as he became the fifth Indian origin writer to win the Booker. The other four being VS Naipaul for “In A Free State” (1971), Salman Rushdie for “Midnight’s Children” (1981), Arundhati Roy for “The God of Small Things” (1997) and Kiran Desai who won it for “The Inheritance of Loss” (2006).
The Booker Prize Awardee is considered to be a gold mine by the behemoths of the publishing industry. Sales rise exponentially once a title has been recognized by the Booker. Awards such as the one by the Sahitya Academy could lead to an increase in sales of say 10 copies but if the book has been critically acclaimed by the Booker sales could increase by up to 10000 copies a month. This is certainly a sign of good things to come for the Indian publishing industry. When Arundhati Roy became the first Indian to win the Booker in 1997 the ripples of her win was felt throughout the industry. Many young authors were encouraged to write and express themselves and represent the so called third world Diaspora to the world.
The White Tiger had another Indian competitor in the form of Amitav Ghosh’s “Sea of Poppies” which is an equally captivating novel. The White Tiger explores the growing disparity between the materialistic urban elite and the underprivileged rural poor. It beautifully shows how things can change when people of the two classes meet and exchange fortunes. The main protagonist of the novel Balram Halwai is a self styled Bangalore businessman who is representative of the rags to riches entrepreneur of new India. The novel is in the form of a series of letters Halwai writes to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who wishes to give something special and exquisitely Indian to Jiabao on the eve of his visit to the Silicon Valley of India. He believed in the resurgence of the East and says that he wants to do something “out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that 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”.
Aravind dedicates the book to the people of Delhi as he believes that is the place where everyone comes for a solution to their problems. It is according to him the most viscerally connected part of the country to all the other parts. He states that Delhi is India’s city of the 21st century. The title of the book is taken from a white tiger in the Delhi zoo which is supposed to be a very rare kind of animal bred only through genetic mutation once in a generation. Aravind says that the main protagonist is also a White Tiger in his own right for the way he stands out among all the other people and what he does. It is based on the idea of a chauffeur of a rich man’s car and how they can change things with what they get to hear in the car. Many important deals are struck in their presence and they are expected to be mute spectators. But what if some breaks this norm and uses the information that he gets. The book according to him relocates India in the new political and economic context in literature. It is a story of the resurgent India where almost 400 million people are still underprivileged and whose voices are not heard. The White Tiger is an attempt to bring their voices to the forefront, an attempt to give vent to the voices of the unknown fellow travellers you meet during those endless train journeys and thus capturing the essence of what is truly Indian and how it is changing.
