(You either eat or get eaten up : The Image of the Rooster Coop in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008

Abstract

This paper is a study of the image of the rooster coop in the age of post-globalization through delineating poverty, servitude and corruption in Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (2008). The image of the ‘rooster coop’ symbolizes the India of darkness, and represents a mental and psychological coop in which the poor live. This study is done in terms of the Theory of Social Identity and Self-Categorization by Henri Tajfel and John Turner. This theory started in Social Psychology according to which there are three psychological processes in evaluating people as ‘we’ or ‘they’: categorization, identification and comparison. The central narrative of The White Tiger focuses on Balram Halwai’s journey from being a poor villager to a rich businessman. Adiga depicts two Indias: India of darkness and India of light. This classification results in the system of servitude which is depicted in the metaphor of the ‘rooster coop’. Roosters in a coop at market watch one another slaughtered one by one but they are unable or unwilling to rebel and break out of the coop.