New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a “condition-of-India novel”

Abstract

Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) deals with the changing status of the highly disputed, so-called “subaltern self”. As a socio-historically entrenched notion, one may contend, the “subaltern self” is as much prescribed as inscribed in, and transcribed by, human and urban geographies, which have been currently dubbed the “New India” and the “New Metropolis”. This essay focuses on Adiga’s fresh attempt to aesthetically represent an alternative concept of ethnic identity formation. The following analysis will thus proceed on the assumption that the novel’s conflicted urban domains primarily function as contested imaginary and/or imagined sites for the fashioning of the entrepreneur as a new, precarious key figure, shaping what has been felicitously labelled the “condition-of-India novel”.