Asian Tiger: Aravind Adiga
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 While there were a number of first time novels on this year’s shortlist, Adiga’s took top honours, because ‘the judges felt that it entertained and shocked in equal measure’ |
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34-year-old Aravind Adiga is the second youngest ever winner of the Man Booker Prize for his controversial debut novel The White Tiger.
Balram Halwai, narrator of The White Tiger, escapes life in a poor North Indian village to work as a chauffeur in crowded New Delhi. From there, he murders his way to the top. What sparked his story?
In India it always used to be that if you were poor and someone else was incredibly rich, that was just a fact of life. In fact, even though much of India has always been poor, there was very little crime. N ow the bonds of community, caste and family are fraying. The temptations before a poor person are greater, which can lead to frustration and anger. But Balram’s anger is not my anger — he’s not my spokesman. I’m disturbed by him as well.
You depict an India gridlocked in corruption, greed and inequality — but while your portrayal is harsh, it’s also bitterly funny.
The White Tiger is not a political treatise: it’s a novel, meant to provoke and entertain. I’m increasingly convinced that the servant-master system, the bedrock of middle-class Indian life, is coming apart; its unravelling will lead to greater crime and instability. The novel is a portrait of a society on the brink of unrest.
It’s also a novel that ventriloquises the Indian underclass. For a writer who’s the son of a surgeon and an Oxford-educated intellectual, surely that takes some nerve?
But to me it’s a bizarre attitude, the idea that you should stick to writing about your own class. I think the whole point of imaginative fiction is to get under the skin of someone else, and to speak their voice. Literature can force readers to be alive to what’s happening around them, and that’s urgent in India now, where tumultuous changes are overturning the traditional hierarchies and yet so much of that is not being written about. Anyway, my own life is so boring that there’s really not much to say about it.
Did any particular writers influence this book?
It’s indebted to three black American writers — Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. They wrote about class and race in a way which intrigued me; so many things they talked about could be applied to India. This idea that, as a black man, you were invisible to other people, you were not a full human being. It occurred to me that India is full of invisible men and women — the working poor.
What do you see as the role of literary prizes? How do you think they impact on the literary culture?
They’re a good thing because it’s always hard to sell serious fiction. The Booker is huge in India, a country with few literary prizes. With luck, the hype surrounding it gets non-readers of serious fiction interested in buying books.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on my second novel. And trying to find a safe bank in which to deposit my winnings! — Melissa De Villiers
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