Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

278 Journal of Commonwealth Literature
black river” (p.14), a reference to the most revered river of India, the
Ganges. Whereas the Darkness, where Balram is born and bred, flows
from the Ganges into rural India, the Light, on the opposite side of
the spectrum, surges inward from the coast. Balram holds the river
responsible for “bring[ing] darkness” to the country (p.14) and describes
it in its materiality as “full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies,
buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids” (p.15). This
representation of the Ganges undermines the feeling that, as Anis Shivani
cuttingly remarks in relation to a recent strand of Indian Writing in English
(IWE), “you [the western reader] can safely dip your toes into the exotic
mystical waters of the East”. 11 After deconstructing the touristy image
of the Ganges (and also the argument that all IWE represents India in
ways likely to please western tourist urges), the narrator states that he
is definitely “leaving that river for the American tourists” (p.18), who
come in their hundreds “each year to take photographs of naked sadhus”
(p.15). The narrator also undermines the spiritual reputation of his home
village Laxmangarh which is just a few miles from the Bodhi Tree under
which Lord Buddha obtained enlightenment. While it is reported that
the Buddha walked through Laxmangarh, in the protagonist’s version,
“he ran through it – as fast as he could – and got to the other side – and
never looked back!” (p.18).
The White Tiger is a first-person Bildungsroman, recounting the ascent
of its protagonist from servant to “self-taught entrepreneur” (p.6). The
plot of the novel centres on Balram’s character formation, or rather on
his long and arduous fight for survival in a way which attests to “the
Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration”. 12 Against all odds, he sheds
the venomous mud of the Ganges, “the rich, dark, sticky mud whose
grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and
stunting it” (p.15). Defying the expectations of his caste of sweetmakers
(pp.56, 63), and the destiny into which he has been born as the child of
a rickshaw-puller in the Darkness, he is hired as a driver by a rich local
landlord for his son, Mr Ashok, and his spoiled daughter-in-law, Pinky
Madam, who have returned from the US. Balram moves with the couple
to Gurgaon, an affluent Delhi suburb, where new shopping centres selling
luxury brand names conceal in their interior run-down markets for the
staff, and luxurious high-rise apartment complexes, such as the kitsch
Buckingham Towers where Mr Ashok and Pinky Madam live, coexist
with the cockroaches and mosquitoes in the servants’ cramped quarters.
In the India of Light, he witnesses the rampant consumerism of one of
India’s booming cities.
Somewhat unaccountably, Balram conspires to murder his corrupt
master. He cuts Mr Ashok’s throat with a broken bottle of Johnny Walker
Black Label, escapes with his dirty money, the product of landlordism
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