Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 275 Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger Ana Cristina Mendes University of Lisbon, Portugal Abstract A revamped portrayal of a Dark India garnered an unparalleled visibility in 2008 with the award of the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction to Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger. This article examines Adiga’s staging of a Dark India as a new-fangled object of exoticist discourses. It begins by considering The White Tiger as an ironic uncovering of the subsumption of a Dark India into the global literary marketplace at a time of a perceived shift in re-Orientalist representational practices and their western reception. Specifically, while taking the measure of the appraisal The White Tiger has received, this article questions the premises that underpin the most vehement critiques directed at the novel: on the one hand, that Adiga’s work offers a purportedly long-awaited creative departure from Salman Rushdie’s; on the other hand, that the characterization strategies followed by the novelist result in what critics have perceived as class ventriloquism and, accordingly, a re-Orientalized title character equipped with an “inauthentic” voice. Keywords Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, Salman Rushdie, exoticism, darkness, authenticity Staging Dark India Stories about rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they Aravind Adiga 1 Copyright © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Vol 45(2): 275–293. DOI: 10.1177/0021989410366896 Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
276 Journal of Commonwealth Literature After decades of cashing in on the fascination with a mystical Eternal India, the idea of an ostensible Dark India has been acquiring of late a significant exotic cachet in the cultural industries. The representation of a Dark India is admittedly not new – it can be traced back to Mulk Raj Anand’s groundbreaking novels Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). 2 Nonetheless, a revamped portrayal of a Dark India garnered an unparalleled visibility in 2008 with the award of the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction to Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger. 3 The then Chair of the Booker judging panel, former British Cabinet Minister and Conservative MP Michael Portillo, celebrated the novel as “an intensely original book about an India that is new to many of us”. He further hailed it as “in many ways perfect” and added that the novel had “knocked [his] socks off”. 4 Looking at The White Tiger from a parallel, but opposite angle, Somak Ghoshal wrote that Adiga’s narrative “turns out to be the ideal rough guide to Dark India: a series of extensive footnotes for the benefit of Western readers”. “As Adiga shows”, the Indian critic contended, “the best bet for all those closeted novelists lurking in this country of a billion, is to write about the Darkness, the rural hinterland that lies stashed far away from the dazzling India of the big cities.” 5 Judging from the title of the novel, the reader might reasonably expect to encounter a tale about a rare and exotic character; furthermore, given that the tiger is a symbol of power and might, the title The White Tiger also alludes to India’s rise as a tiger economy, and thus conflates ideas of exoticism and unstoppable economic growth. This article joins in the ongoing critical debate as to whether Adiga’s metaphorical construct of a Dark India undermines previous stereotypes associated with the representation of a magical Eternal India and at the same time offers a corrective portrait of the “progress” resulting from the Indian IT and business outsourcing boom, or whether his novel is yet another covert way – through the use of extremely effective self-reflexive representational strategies – of selling a refurbished exotic idea of the subcontinent to western readers. In this respect, a critical approach to the impact of The White Tiger in the western literary marketplace might well be induced by a question that the Indian writer K. R. Usha poses in her review of the novel: “To whom is Adiga addressing this unleavened story, in his faultless prose” The answer is seemingly quite obvious for the author, considering that “[a]ny Indian who reads the newspaper knows that India isn’t shining.” 6 Against this backdrop, the broad purpose of this article is to examine Adiga’s staging of a Dark India as a new-fangled object of exoticist discourses. In The Post-Colonial Exotic (2001), one of the main points Graham Huggan makes is that India as exotic spectacle has progressively become available for global consumption. Through his formulation of “the postcolonial exotic”, Huggan critiques “the global commodification of 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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