Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 279
and corruption, and then finds a place in Bangalore’s entrepreneurial
class. As in an archetypal Bildungsroman, he re-integrates into society
as Ashok Sharma, the upper-caste owner of a prosperous taxi service
in the India of Light. So, from one point of view, the criminal anti-hero
murders his boss and uses his money to finance his way into the India of
Light and does not seem too perplexed by his nefarious actions. From
another point of view, the entrepreneurial hero breaks with his past
in the India of Darkness and triumphs, despite his unpromising initial
station in life. Again, as in a Bildungsroman, Balram is paradoxically an
anti-hero and, in keeping with India’s new-fangled economic strength,
“a modern Indian hero” who features in “a parable of the new India”. 13
In the narrator’s own phrasing, his life’s story should be entitled “The
Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian” (p.10):
Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked,
because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our
skulls, look in with a penlight, and you’ll find an odd museum of ideas
[...] – all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up
with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed
ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is
what you act on and live with. (pp.10-11)
When Balram is still at school, an inspector points his cane straight
at him and says: “You, young man, are an intelligent, honest, vivacious
fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots. In any jungle, what is the rarest
of animals – the creature that comes along only once in a generation”
In reply to this, he answers “[t]he white tiger”, and the school inspector
retorts “That’s what you are, in this jungle” (p.35). Balram, the White
Tiger, struggles to survive in the post-independence Indian wilderness,
because, as he notes, “on the fifteenth of August, 1947 – the day the British
left – the cages had been let open; and the animals had attacked and
ripped each other apart and jungle law replaced zoo law” (pp.63-4). To
Balram, pre-independence India, “in its days of greatness, when it was the
richest nation on earth, was like a zoo. Everyone in his place, everyone
happy” (p.63). Along similar lines, Rushdie draws a satirical portrayal
of the end of the “roseate age of England’s precedence”:
[h]ow fine was the manner of its [the imperial sun’s] setting; in what good
order the British withdrew. Union Jacks fluttered down their poles all
round the world, to be replaced by other flags, in all manner of outlandish
colours. The pink conquerors crept home, the boxwallahs and memsahibs
and bwanas, leaving behind them parliaments, schools, Grand Trunk Roads
and the rules of cricket. 14
The British imperial project incorporated the “exotic” space of India into
colonized territory, partly by classifying its inhabitants as exotic animals
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