Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 277
cultural difference” as a “general mechanics of exoticist representation/
consumption within an increasingly globalized culture industry”. 7 Within
this “alterity industry”, 8 one of the agents involved in the mediation of the
“aesthetic value of cultural difference” 9 is the literary marketplace. It is my
contention here that Adiga’s novel contributes (even if unintentionally) to
sustain this alterity industry. The marketing potential of The White Tiger
lies in two distinct but nevertheless related ideas – that of “the exotic”
and that of “dark” – which are in turn associated with cultural difference.
In this sense, the novel’s revamped spectacle of India is achieved through
representational strategies that conflate an Exotic India with a Dark India.
To demonstrate that Adiga’s Dark (Exotic) India is staged, this article
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. This reading was inspired by the (self-ironic)
confession on the part of Adiga’s narrator that his knowledge of the history
of India’s booming neighbour, China, came from a book – significantly
entitled Exciting Tales of the Exotic East – he found when browsing
at a secondhand book market in Delhi (p.5). This account of how the
image of China in the protagonist’s mind was built around a book with
that clichéd title might be interpreted both as a satire of exoticizing
western notions about the East and as an exposure of the metropolitan
consumer-reader’s complicitous desire for such alluring tales. Specifically,
while taking the measure of the appraisals 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,
hence the awarding of the Booker in 2008; on the other hand, that the
characterization strategies followed by the novelist result in what critics
have perceived as class ventriloquism and, accordingly, in a construction
of a re-Orientalized “cardboard cut-out” title character 10 equipped with
an “inauthentic” voice that ultimately undermines issues of class politics.
Rottenness and Corruption, Inc.
In a nutshell, The White Tiger is about an India that is “two countries in
one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness” (p.14). The India of
Light is that of wealth, technology and knowledge, while the India of
Darkness (where the majority of Indians live) is that of misery, destitution
and illiteracy. The novel describes how its protagonist/narrator Balram
Halwai manages to claw his way into the Light of Delhi and Bangalore,
out of the Darkness of Laxmangarh, a small remote village in the poor
state of Bihar, in eastern India, on the banks of what he calls the “the
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