Tigers of an-other jungle: Adiga’s tryst with subaltern politics

Abstract

Critical responses to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger reveal two conflicting trends: one set of critics argues that the novel feeds into an orientalist fantasy of India as an underdeveloped and impoverished third world postcolony. Criticism at the other end of the spectrum celebrates Adiga’s novel for rupturing the myth of a “New India”. This article explores the multiple underlying anxieties that shape the responses of Adiga’s detractors, and argues that thus far the novel has been critiqued for the wrong reasons. The essay goes onto extricate The White Tiger from this dichotomous framework and assess the text in terms of its internal slippages, to suggest that the real, although subtle, conservatism of the novel lies elsewhere. By presenting a searingly dystopic vision of individualized subaltern violence, Adiga invokes a fear response, such that the English-speaking bourgeois readership is galvanized into taking corrective measures that will only strengthen an exploitative market-driven society.