Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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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 Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
288 Journal of Commonwealth Literature historical background. Indeed, the writer warps the purpose of Wen Jiabao’s Delhi visit in April 2005, the stated aim of which was not to discover the “truth” about Indian entrepreneurship, but rather to contribute to resolving the longstanding border dispute between India and China. Adiga thus destabilizes historical facts in his retelling of an event from recent Indian history. If Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Midnight’s Children, is an unreliable narrator in the sense that he subverts the official version of modern Indian history, Adiga’s Balram is an unreliable, because “unreal”, Indian subaltern subject. While the critical rhetoric of “Real India” seems to imply a discarding of impurity and hybridity, The White Tiger strategically stages its inauthentic Dark India. Attesting to the pervasiveness of the “anxiety of Indianness”, Adiga himself seems to have – maybe unwittingly – succumbed to such angst. In an interview published on the Man Booker Prize website shortly after The White Tiger was included on the 2008 longlist, Adiga’s claiming, or rather reclaiming, of a “real” Indianness echoes Chandra’s parodic description quoted earlier: It’s a great thrill to be longlisted for the Booker. Especially alongside Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie. But I live in Mumbai, where not many people know of the Man Booker Prize; I’m still standing in long queues and standing in over-packed local trains in the morning and worrying about falling ill from unsafe drinking water. Life goes on as before. 56 The writer’s assertions of authenticity are based on his groundedness in a “Real India” where speakers of English only amount to a meagre percentage of its inhabitants: Balram clarifies that he does not speak English from the outset (p.3). The “realities” of Adiga’s India, that is, the specific material circumstances under which The White Tiger was produced, are made obvious by the adversative conjunction “But” that clearly distances his artistic predicament from Ghosh and Rushdie’s. These diasporic writers, besides being part of the Indian English-speaking elites, share an additional commonality with Adiga in that they have also authored novels longlisted for the Booker in 2008. Nevertheless, unlike Adiga who currently lives in Mumbai (after spending many years abroad), Ghosh and Rushdie are mainly domiciled in New York and are hence removed, at least physically, from the actuality of the country. Adiga here seems to partake of the recurrent criticism according to which commercial success for Indian English writers depends on their voluntary expatriation to countries in the West or, as Chandra put it, to “faraway air-conditioned regions of vilayat”. 57 In opposition to the western-located NRIs Ghosh and Rushdie, Adiga seems to suggest in this interview his intimate knowledge of India provided by an unfiltered, first-hand access Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
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Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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