Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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
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