Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 287
readership. Whereas for the chauffeur-turned-entrepreneur the murder
of his employer might be interpreted as functioning as an emancipatory
tool, critics posit that Adiga’s apparently subversive narrative does not
empower the poor and uneducated. The novelist’s endeavour to grant
visibility to the rage of the Indian underclass is seen as inadequate by
a number of commentators who fault the writer for aping the voice of
an imaginary subaltern. For example, Somak Ghoshal, in a rather literal
critique of the “readability” of The White Tiger, notes that “Adiga tries to
do a clever first-person voice, spoken by Balram, in a choppy, Indianized
English; but his effort, alas, is a huge flop”. 51 Overlooking Adiga’s ironic
character development, Sanjay Subrahmanyam foregrounds what he
reads as the “dissonance” and the “falsity” of the subaltern’s voice:
What does [Balram] sound like [...] whose vocabulary and whose
expressions are these On page after page, one is brought up short by
the jangling dissonance of the language and the falsity of the expressions.
This is a posh English-educated voice trying to talk dirty, without being
able to pull it off. 52
“It may have won the Booker, but it rings false and flat”, writes Salil
Tripathi in a review of the novel, 53 which contends that the inauthenticity
of the narrator’s voice is disconcerting:
[It] shifts inexplicably, now revealing erudition an unlettered man cannot
possess (such as knowing that a country called Abyssinia once existed),
now assuming the pithy timbre of a suave, urbane journalist interpreting
India for the unfamiliar (such as readers of Time magazine, where Adiga
worked as reporter), now adopting a pedestrian voice with a limited
vocabulary. 54
Even though Adiga might be prey to the “anxiety of Indianness” and,
furthermore, the lead character of The White Tiger does promise to “tell
the truth about Bangalore”, this article argues that the novel does not
attempt to comply with the strictures of authenticity. Rather, as K. R. Usha
suggests, Adiga’s narrative bypasses the view that it was construed as a
real-life portrait of the Indian underclass. “I’m no philosopher or poet, how
would I know the truth” (p.8), Balram asks rhetorically at the beginning.
According to Usha, the protagonist “is very obviously ventriloquizing for
the author who is refracting Balram’s sensibility through his own lens”;
despite finding this representational strategy tenable, the critic considers
that it results in extreme essentialization to the point that “every nuance
is beaten out”. 55 However, Adiga seems to be quite explicitly mocking
the longing for the ideal of authenticity through the construction of an
overtly essentialized main character. Besides, like Rushdie in Midnight’s
Children, Adiga disavows any attempt to legitimize his depiction of India
as “real” by setting The White Tiger against a deliberately inauthentic
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