Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

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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 Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
280 Journal of Commonwealth Literature living in the wild and conveniently setting them apart and exhibiting them in a state of near cultural captivity. In its aftermath, according to Balram, formerly colonized subjects had to adjust to “the law of the jungle”; when the British departed, the orderly zoo became a landscape of destitution and inequality, a corrupt jungle where local elections were customarily bought and sold and where villagers from the Darkness prattled about them “like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra” (p.98). “[T]hanks to all those politicians in Delhi” (p.64), independence has resulted in repeated clashes between Balram’s desires to escape casteism and classism and the constraints of a culturally-embedded corruption. In India’s current state of affairs, the cunning and resourceful protagonist posits that there are only two ways that an uneducated and underprivileged individual can rise above the restrictions imposed by caste and class: crime and politics; there are only two destinies in India: either “eat – or get eaten up” (p.64). Presenting himself as “A Thinking Man/ And an entrepreneur/ Living in the world’s centre of technology and outsourcing” (p.3), Balram pens an uninvited series of letters to the Premier of China, Wen Jiabao, to prepare him for his upcoming official visit to India. In the course of seven nights, from “Electronics City Phase 1 (just off Hosur Main Road), / Bangalore, India”, he sets out to introduce to the Chinese leader the “realities” of his country’s recent economic boom: Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore. (pp.5-6) It is from the clichéd location of the bustling city Bangalore, along with Hyderabad, one of India’s fastest-growing high-tech centres, that Balram intends to correct the misconceptions about the country fostered by Indian entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians for their own self-aggrandizement. “One fact about India”, he remarks, “is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing” (p.15). He wants Wen Jiabao to return to China with the “truth” he is revealing because “[i]f anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it’s me” (p.4). Indeed, the trajectory of his life purportedly reflects the actuality of contemporary India which, alongside the IT boom, retains poverty, corruption and inefficiency. Contending Visions, or Niche Marketing Did you make me for the gap in the market Did I make me for the gap in the market […] Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010
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