Aravind Adiga Research Articles

Editor’s Preface

Editor’s Preface Anita Mannur In 2016 something rather remarkable happened in the literary world. Vietnamese American Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel, The Sympathizer. Around the same time, The Vegetarian, a novel written by the South Korean Han Kang and translated by Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International Prize. The latter prize, not to be confused with the Man Booker Prize, was established in 2005 and biennially rewards an author for a body of work originally written in any language as long as it is widely available in English. Though Asians and Asian Americans have won these awards, as well as the Booker Prize, in years past (recall the success of Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, Aravind Adiga), something markedly different was at play in 2016 when these books were announced as winners. Their successes, though an evolving phenomenon, were not exclusively national phenomena. Media outlets and bloggers from around the world have reviewed both novels. In London, where I spent six weeks this summer, bookstore employees at Waterstones, London Review of Books, and Foyles all told me that these two titles were flying of the shelves. I myself got so caught up in “Vegetarian Sympathizer” fever, I purchased British editions of the books for my own collection. But most intriguingly, people are talking about these novels. Literature in translation, narratives about the refugee experience, a war story, stories about embodiment and violence by people of color are being read by the lay public. At a political and social moment when xenophobia seems at an all-time high, there is some solace one can take in knowing that fiction is providing alternative worldviews and that readers are hungry for more works like this. I am not so naïve as to extrapolate this as a sign [End Page v] of improving race relations or better transnational understanding; rather I wish to begin with this to think about the possible links across nations and borders that these works foreground. In particular, if we think of the art of collaboration as a driving force, what might our versions of Asian American studies at the end of eight years of an Obama presidency look like? The articles gathered in this issue are among the first under my editorship to decenter the United States within Asian American studies. Like the aforementioned novels and their networks of collaboration and circulation, the subjects of study in each article rest uneasily within narrow visions of any kind of national space. Robert Diaz considers queer Filipino cultural production in Canada, examining how queer diasporic migrants subtend the hierarchizing practices of Canadian multiculturalism and settler colonialism. He argues that artists like Julius Manapul and events like Miss Gay Philippines Canada enact utopic pursuits through cultural practices that create new possibilities for imagining collectivity, community, and belonging in Canada, beyond the pluralist narratives of diversity often maintained by the state. Sanae Nakatani considers how Nisei architects participated in major building projects in the mid-twentieth century. Noting that in the 1950s, Nisei architect Minoru Yamasaki designed a new U.S. consulate building in Kobe, and Isamu Noguchi created the Japanese garden for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, these Nisei cultural producers combined Japanese visual elements with modernist aesthetics in their works to signal their capability as a translator between the East and the West. Kareem Khubchandani considers the indie film Loins of Punjab as an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, Khubchandani asserts that the film deploys a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems. Kristina Vassil’s article contributes to the burgeoning study of transnational texts written in languages other than English by providing a case study of Hosaka Ki’ichi’s The America That I See (1913–14), written as a sequel to Natsume Sōseki’s famous I Am a Cat (1905–6). Finally, Stephen Suh examines representations of Koreatown provided by three contemporary television/web programs: Ktown Cowboys (2009), K-Town (2012–13), and Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown (2013). In so doing he considers how a...

The translation of proper nouns into Arabic

This paper aims to explore the strategies that translators adopt when rendering English proper nouns into Arabic and, consequently, offer both qualitative and quantitative insights into this process. It is a case study of proper nouns in professional Arabic translation based on one English novel (The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008); translated into Arabic by Taiba Sadeq (2011). Proper nouns are categorized and analyzed in terms of internal syntactic structure (Central, Converted and Extended proper nouns), as well as thematically (e.g. personal names, names of institutions, bodies of water, etc.), with an eye to establishing correlations between the type of proper noun and the translation strategy opted for. The results indicate that the translator’s choice between different strategies is governed by two main factors. Firstly, the translator needs to check whether the proper noun individualizes entities by means of ordinary language predicates (e.g. common nouns), proper nouns proper, or a combination of both, as each type usually requires a different strategy. Secondly, the translator needs to pay attention to the degree of comprehensibility and naturalness of his/her rendering, which may necessitate consolidating the single strategies of transliteration and translation with addition in the form of a generic word or even substitution in the case of idiomatic proper nouns. The paper concludes that proper nouns cannot be treated uniformly in translation between English and Arabic because they belong to different categories and, consequently, they may require different translation strategies including transliteration, complete translation, partial translation, transliteration plus addition, and translation plus addition.

Globalization and the Question of Servitude in Aravind Adiga's the White Tiger

ومسالة العبودية في رواية أرا فيند النمر : تحاول هذه الورقة فحص ودراسة كيف أن رواية أرافيند أديغا النمر الأبيض تقدم نقدا قاسيا لمفهوم الهند الجديدة التي لا تزال تعاني من العبودية والفساد السياسي والاقتصادي والاجتماعي المستشري. كما تلقي الضوء على الأثر الاجتماعي والاقتصادي والثقافي للعولمة على الفقراء في الهند، ودورها في اتساع الفجوة بين الطبقات العليا والطبقات الدنيا. ويرى الباحث أيضا أن كلا من العولمة ونظام العبودية قد ساهما في خلق دولتين في الهند، هند الأنوار وهند الظلام التي يتم تهميش الفقراء فيها وإبقائهم بعيدا عن مراكز السلطة. وتخلص الدراسة في النهاية إلى أن أديغا في روايته النمر يوجه تحذيرا شديد اللهجة من تقسيم المجتمع الهندي إلى دولتين سوف يؤدي حتما إلى العنف والدمار والفوضى. لكي نتجنب هذا يجب إصلاح الفوارق الاقتصادية والاجتماعية التي يعاني منها الملايين من الهنود الذين يعيشون في فقر مدقع، وتفكيك نظام العبودية والتمييز الطبقي وضمان المساواة الاقتصادية والسياسية والاجتماعية للجميع، حيث يمكن للبشر العيش بعدل و كرامة. Abstract : This paper examines the way in which Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger acts as a harsh critique of the notion of the “New India,” which is still plagued with a system of servitude and rampant political, economic, and social corruption. It also sheds light on the social, economic, and cultural impact of globalization on the poor of India, particularly in terms of its role in widening the gap between the upper and lower classes. It argues that both globalization and the system of servitude have contributed to creating two facets in India: the India of Light and the India of Darkness, where the poor are marginalized and kept at the periphery, far from the center. The study concludes that The White Tiger issues a stern warning that the division of Indian society will inevitably lead to violence, destruction, and anarchy. To avert this, the economic and social disparities that keep millions of Indians living in extreme poverty should be addressed, the system of servitude and discrimination should be dismantled, and it should be ensured that all human beings in India are able to live with dignity and in equality.

Like "Any Muslim Family That Has Moved to Finland": The Fallacy of Realistic Reading Practices in the Reception of Parvekejumalat by Anja Snellman

In the past two decades, transcultural or cross-cultural literary texts have sparked several public controversies in various Scandinavian countries. Bokhandleren i Kabul (2002; The Bookseller of Kabul, 2003), by Asne Seierstad, in Norway; Gomda (1995; Buried Alive) and Asyl (2004; Asylum Granted), by Liza Marklund and Maria Eriksson, in Sweden; the poems of Yahya Hassan (Tahya Hassan: Digte, 2013) in Denmark; and Layla (2011), by Jari Tervo, in Finland are among these controversial texts that are located between cultures. All of these texts have induced arguments between those who write them and those whom they are written about (or who perceive themselves to be the object of the writing). The reasons for these controversies are manifold, but one almost always has to do with the question of realism: that is, to what extent have these texts been written, presented, or read as realistic and generalizing or as generalizable depictions of the texts' respective cultures and people? In recent decades, this problem has been particularly topical in Scandinavia; however, the issue is larger. Similar questions have touched cross-cultural literary texts all the way from The Satanic Verses (1988), by Salman Rushdie, to The White Tiger (2008), by Aravind Adiga (on Rushdie, see Pipes 1990). Are these texts offered to readers as realistic descriptions of alien cultures? Or, alternatively, to what extent are they read as true representations, regardless of their genre? The current article approaches this cross-cultural problem by examining the reception of the Finnish novel Parvekejumalat (2010; Balcony Gods), by Anja Snellman. As one of the first novels written in Finnish to deal with Somali immigration, Parvekejumalat narrates the story of a girl with a Somali background and a Finn who has converted to Islam. In the spring of 2010, several newspaper critiques of Parvekejumalat included a strange and, perhaps, worrying feature. More than one critic seemed to have read this novel, which describes cultural contact zones (Pratt 1992), as a truthful, realistic period piece, revealing aspects of society that had previously gone unnoticed. They read Parvekejumalat as a kind of expose of the taboos of contemporary Finland. As such, the reception of Parvekejumalat seemed to repeat the starting points for many literary conflicts located on the borders of cultures. This article focuses on this question of a realistic reading of Parvekejumalat. Even if Snellman's novel did not ignite an actual public controversy, by examining its reception, we can better understand why narratives located in cultural crossroads so often evoke strong emotions and determine the role of realistic reading practices in the controversies that follow. The article approaches this question by analyzing two sets of data in the reception of Parvekejumalat. newspaper reviews of the novel and entrance exam answers about the novel produced at the University of Turku. The first part of the article examines nine newspaper and magazine critiques of Parvekejumalat and the inclination of these critics to read the novel as a plausible and realistic story. It focuses particularly on critics' tendency to read and interpret the patriarchal violence of the novel in a larger culturalist frame. The second part of the article analyzes entrance exam results concerning Parvekejumalat, which were produced in the Department of Finnish Literature at the University of Turku. (In the Finnish educational system, access to universities is gained through participation in an entrance exam, for which material must always be read beforehand. In 2011, this material included Snellman's Parvekejumalat.) The second part of the article discusses how the examinees perceived the novel as a depiction of the clash between cultures, and tended to confuse the categories of fact and fiction. With the aid of these two source categories, reviews and examinations, I will discuss how Parvekejumalat was interpreted in relation to contemporary reality, which many consider to be plagued by a conflict between the values of Islam and Somali culture, on one hand, and Finnish and Western values, on the other. …

Tagore in the Diaspora: Presence, Ritual, Nostalgia

Abstract The hype around the sesquicentenary of Rabindranath Tagore’s birth in 2011 and the centenary of his Nobel Laureateship in 2013 for some time outshone the overall trajectory of the sage’s reputation in South Asia’s public spheres. While Tagore has been firmly inscribed into India’s and Bangladesh’s cultural memory, it rests on a shifting basis. Since Tagore’s death, the focus of reactions to his work across his wide productive range has moved from a real presence into a ritualised one which in turn has progressed into commemorative nostalgia. This gradual movement can be traced most clearly in the South Asian diaspora, expressed by writers from Nirad Chaudhuri through Anita Desai, Salman Rushdie, Sunetra Gupta, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Monica Ali and Arvind Adiga. It is being continued most reflexively in Amit Chaudhuri’s attempts at negotiating Tagore’s legacy for the present time.

A Tiger in the “Rooster Coop”: Techno-capitalism, Narrative Ambiguity, and Gandhian Traditionalism in The White Tiger

This article analyzes Aravind Adiga's 2008 novel The White Tiger through the rubric of “techno-capitalism,” the confluence of capitalist values (individualism, perpetual economic growth) and an increasingly technologized civilization. The central argument—that Adiga's narrator, Balram, is a morally ambiguous protagonist who is at once dubious and sympathetic—unfolds through three interlocking theses: 1) techno-capitalism provides the only clear route to self- empowerment for Balram, 2) the path to wealth and status, via techno- capitalism, requires a rejection of Gandhian traditionalism and involves an all-but-inevitable engagement with criminal and immoral activity, and 3) that Adiga does not unequivocally condemn Balram's choice of personal advancement at the expense of others.

Water, White Tigers and Corrupt Neoliberalism: Controversial Entrepreneurs in Recent Fiction from the Subcontinent

Water has traditionally held a variety of metaphorical meanings in literature. Mostly, however, it has been deployed as a purifying element, endowed with the virtues of cleansing and renewing both persons and situations. Such perception of the substantiating role of water finds an echo in the main Indian cultures, both Hinduism and Islam. This article argues that the traditional metaphorical use of water as connected to renovation is very present in contemporary fiction of South Asian origin, yet its main argument is that this idea of renovation, which has traditionally been perceived as positive, is not necessarily ridden with celebratory aspects in the novels under discussion. Rather, water plays in these works controversial if not highly problematic roles. The works discussed are Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Chetan Baghat’s Revolution 2020 (2011) , and Moshin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), novels whose main characters are fictional representations of the pioneers of their generation, in all cases moving from rags to riches at the expense of surrendering to immorality or corruption. Besides entailing a sharp criticism of the indiscriminate neoliberal practices which are enriching certain sectors of Asian societies, these novels denounce the severe misuse of water sources, essential for the daily routines of millions of people who, with the changes brought about by rather abrupt processes of modernization, are deprived of access to their traditional means of subsistence.

Realist Hieroglyphics: Aravind Adiga and the New Social Novel

In what many consider to be a postrealist age, what are the new modes emerging that reflect a continued investment in representing contemporary life? This essay outlines the contours of a new social realism through the works of contemporary novelist Aravind Adiga. Against the grain of recent Indian writing, Adiga constructs a virulent critique of contemporary social issues. Adiga’s realism is not transparent, but instead raises a set of open-ended questions about the nature of interpretation, elaborating a “realist hieroglyphics”—the presentation of realism as a mode founded on indecipherability—as an aesthetics central to the political novel.

Bringing ‘India of Darkness’ into Light: A Socio-political Study of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This study has investigated how Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize winner debut novel The White Tiger (2008) has protested against the popular image of a shiny India. This inquiry is important because it has identified how the politicians have deceived the people of India by creating a false sense of development and advancement. The focus of this study is to demonstrate Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a socio-political critic of modern India. It has contributed in interpreting the life and culture of the people both in rural and urban India through analyzing some of the most powerful metaphors of the text. The paper has identified a number of ways how the rich has been exploiting the poor over centuries and how the basic needs of the poor have been ignored by the politicians in power. It is hoped from the current study that the writers, journalists, columnist and literary critics will raise the issues of the socio-politically suppressed people to bring justice to them.

Literature and the Creative Economy by Sarah Brouillette (review)

Sarah Brouillette. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2014. Pp. x, 238. US$45. For all its problems as a descriptive term, neoliberalism can usefully point to a historically unprecedented convergence of culture, capital, and state governance arguably articulated most comprehensively the economy. According to Sarah Brouillette's Literature and the Creative Economy, literature has been central to the implementation of economy frameworks, both because ideas about the literary and the author figure inform discourses of the economy and because authors express a characteristic ambivalence towards art's instrumentalization their work, lending an air of authenticity to economy policies. Brouillette argues that, while literature can critique the detrimental effects of the neoliberal and expose the negative affects experienced by cultural workers, in its criticality, literature can also exemplify and internalize some of the most foundational aspects of the creative-economy turn (13). Her book considers the role that the literary arts have come to play neoliberal governance, from gentrification and multiculturalism to the fostering of a society of self-managing cultural workers, as well as the impact of economy policies on literary treatments of pathology, authenticity, and autonomy. Literature and the Creative Economy traces the discursive histories that inform the economy and the figure of the subject at its centre, beginning with an analysis of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). Following dwindling levels of agricultural and industrial production, a new group of workers has, according to Florida, moved to the forefront of the economy--the creative class. As entrepreneurial bearers of human capital, Florida claims, members of the class prefer flexibility and diversity to stability and tradition, which he argues policymakers and urban planners should take into account. This leads Brouillette to draw compelling parallels between the figure of the culture worker at the centre of economy discourse and the subject of Italian autonomist Marxism. For both Florida and the autonomists, self-expression undergirds contemporary labour, and although their perspectives diverge drastically terms of what this means for human freedom they nevertheless agree that freedom and creativity are fundamentally linked. While autonomists like Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri decry rather than celebrate the convergence of human creativity and capital, their theories of immaterial labour take for granted the idea of a naturally subject whose capacity for innovation provides the means for realizing their autonomy from restrictive social forces. Building on her critique of Florida, Brouillette discusses how, the discourse of the economy, the social comes to figure as a constraining force against which the spirit struggles to express itself, echoing the foundational gesture of neoliberalism. Informed by psychologists like Abraham Maslow, whose work underlies the neoliberal to self-management, economy discourse picks up the idea of authentic self-realization through labour. For Maslow and the many management theorists for whom his work has been influential, the figure of the artist--here understood as spontaneous, driven by intrinsic passions, thriving amidst insecurity, and balking at tradition--provides the model subject for the economy, since Maslow sees self-expression as the means to produce a society of dedicated workers able to effectively navigate the chaotic instabilities of late capitalism. Shifting her focus the second part of the book to relationships between the economy and the literary arts, Brouillette argues that Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008) and Monica Ali's In the Kitchen (2009) include protagonists for whom social and political adversities arising from their racialized positions within neoliberal capitalism figure as temporary problems of the psyche that they might remedy through a renewed commitment to work. …

The English Language and the Indian State: Raag Darbari to The White Tiger

Through a study of the history of language legislation in India and through critical analyses of key textual moments in Shrilal Shukla's Hindi novel, Raag Darbari (1968) and Aravind Adiga's English novel, The White Tiger (2008), I demonstrate that the English language occupies an unexpectedly critical role with respect to the nation-state where it is at once foundational and detrimental to its logic. In its willful appropriation, English in India signals a triumphant detachment from India's colonial history even as it seeks to forge global affiliations elsewhere. It is the constant slippage of English between the world and the nation that variously consolidates and critiques the idea of the nation-state.

Theory, Literature, and Dialogue: Bakhtinian Consciousness in New Indian Literature

Emerging new literature has facilitated a dialogue among the alternative aesthetics created by new literature with an interpolation of central theoretical discourses. It opens an avenue for theories travelling across cultures to decipher intricacies involved into contemporary world. Today we live with a global consciousness that illustrates the formulation of a new postcolonial-postmodernist ‘I’. Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogic consciousness, the unfinalizable self and the idea of the relationship between the ‘self’ and ‘others’ lead us to understand this postcolonial-postmodernist framework as reflected in many Indian literary and cultural discourses. It throws light on how we perceive an individual entity in relation to the specific socio-cultural code which inhere multiple intercessions. Present article attempts to discover the fundamentals of the ‘postcolonial-postmodernist liberation’ through the case study of two selected Indian literary texts by Arvind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh. Both the texts explain the psychology behind the working of dialogic consciousness and the intercession involved in the formulation of postcolonial-postmodernist subject. It may be elucidated through the understanding of mechanism that always strives to attain a point of equilibrium. Representing the postcolonial-postmodernist psychology which questions various cultural norms, it initiates a dialogue between freedom and restrictions, individual and social, and real versus virtual. It turns out an everlasting quest for refined version of the metamorphic ‘self’ shaped by the dialogic consciousness of the postcolonial and postmodernist world.

Postcolonial World Literature: Forster-Roy-Morrison

In the last fifty years or so, we have seen the emergence of discursive formations, among them, certain new literatures, some even finding homes in programs like African American Studies, Women's Studies, and others. During the same time, we have also seen the emergence of theory, literary theory, as continuous but also discontinuous to literary criticism. Among these discursive formations is postcolonial and postcolonial theory, which are, however, fortunately or unfortunately, unhoused in any particular department or program. It is at least partially in response to this last that there has, more recently, been a (mainly) Western articulation of literature which can be seen as the cultural, and more specifically, literary or artistic organ of Western (economic and political) globalization. The emergence of world literature, spurred by the publication of Pascale Casanova's World Republic of Letters, has produced an interesting discussion, sympathetic or otherwise. These discussions have offered alternative methods for reading literature, or perhaps developed and foregrounded methods that were previously not as prominent, alternative, for example, to close reading or close textual analysis, a method well established in literary study and perhaps to some extent even fetishized. These methods for the study of world include a careful consideration of publication sites, distribution networks, circulation rates. They pay attention to the intricacies of translation, already problematized in postcolonial studies. And quite predictably, they direct our attention to the matter of influence, often in the vocabulary of derivation and appropriation, in a context of invariably asymmetrical power relations. As useful and interesting as the category of world has been, as a sort of cultural superstructure to the base of globalization, some critics, like Mohanty for example who speaks of the globalization of feminist studies, find the exploration and discussion of globalization to be peculiarly ungendered and deracialized-peculiar particularly given the fairly recent history of colonialism and slavery. (1) What I find attractive in these articulations of a world literature, however, is the possibility of a metrics for literary study, with its computations of sites, networks, rates, and so on in a system of cultures. In the interest of such a computational syntax, I will offer an algorithm of sorts, marking the spatio-temporal coordinates for a reading of world but without removing it from the historical realities of race, gender, and other markers of differential power relations. My reading is also a close reading, a close textual analysis that reinstates the literariness of as one of its important qualities. I focus on Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and some of Toni Morrison's novels, particularly The Bluest Eye and Beloved. To demonstrate that there is a conceptual cohesion in the framework I am using, that of the vertical-lateral/ historical-geographical coordinates embedded in literary texts produced by these Indian writers, I will be citing other Indian writers like Hari Kunzru, Aravind Adiga, and Salman Rushdie, all recent recipients of prestigious literary recognition. These writers also cite other English, American, and Indian writers. Such citational practices, after all, constitute a tradition, in this case, an emergent tradition of world literature, even if these practices are not necessarily motivated by authorial intention or by what Harold Bloom articulates as an anxiety of influence or a map of misreading. The postcolonial text executes a double articulation or a dual spatio-temporality, a vertical and temporal articulation on one hand and a horizontal and spatial articulation on the other. The former maps the text's relation with the past, the Indian, the British, and African American past, although here the primary coordinates are the history of British colonialism in India and specially the literary representations of it, as in Forster and Orwell. …

Fables of the Tiger Economy: Species and Subalternity in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel The White Tiger appropriates an animal perspective in order to represent an animalization of the poor that runs counter to popular narratives of India’s economic growth; the novel uncritically deploys an anthropocentric perspective that is premised on the abjection of the animal and the sanctity of the human. At the same time, the narrative’s pivotal moment turns on the Deleuzo-Guattarian becoming-animal of the protagonist. This instance of mutual exposure transgresses humanist boundaries and infects the spaces of the text with a counter-narrative of contagion that suggests a different ethical potential for postcolonial, and posthumanist, representation.

The Politics of Precarity: Contesting Neoliberalism's Subjects in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

This article focuses on the particular challenge to neoliberalism's self-owning subject found in Judith Butler's notion of precariousness and the shared, bodily vulnerability with the other it suggests, by reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger (2008. London: Atlantic) against neoliberal discourses on globalization and the attendant language on human rights. These discourses operate to produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of the subject, establishing a frame for who can be perceived as a legitimate subject in society and who cannot. This results in a differential exposure to violence either from others in society or directly from the state, whether through persecution or neglect. By staging and thus demonstrating the functioning of a framework that sets capital as the norm for both the performing of social identity, and for the recognition of others by which the poor are rendered invisible,Adiga's novel subverts the rhetoric of freedom and agency surrounding the neoliberal subject. The novel, therefore, engages the reader in identifying the subaltern in ways not governed by neoliberal discourses, contesting their schemes of intelligibility through a narrator who writes himself into being.

Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger: An Exposition of the Neo-imperial India and Subaltern Resistance

Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger has not been received favorably by some Indians, for it seemingly portrays India in shambles. The novel purposefully, however, exemplifies the ramifications of continuation of imperial structures of economy, polity and culture. Adiga, as a true cultural critic, is vividly providing the subaltern subjects an impetus to resist, subvert or idealize the existing democratic structures, otherwise there will be further subjugation of the subaltern denizens. They will be choked by the existing bureaucratic capitalism. The present system will breed further injustice, violence and corruption that will have devastating effects on the seemingly happy, independent nature of India. The present paper aims at scrutinizing the neo-imperial web of the novel, and thereby providing an insight into the sham pretenses of thriving democratic system, which is actually bureaucratic capitalism. The novel's protestant hero is just a question mark on the false glimmer that is projected by the elite agencies of India through media.

Beyond the Nation: the Mobility of Indian Literature

This paper argues that while it is generally accepted that contemporary Indian literature entered a decisive, cosmopolitan and globally popular phase with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, this period actually demonstrated a continuation of deep skepticism about nationalism that had originated with Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. The three decades after 1981 have revealed a literature whose mobility and energy has had perhaps a greater impact on English literature than any other. The argument is that this mobility goes hand in hand with skepticism about nation and nationalism that has had a pronounced impact on the perception of the globalization of literature. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) sketch the trajectory of the contemporary novel’s extension of Midnight Children’s subversion of the grand narrative of nation. Three of these share the status of Rushdie’s novel as a Booker Prize winner and indicating that the impact of India’s nationalist skepticism has been felt globally.

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a Re-inscription of Modern India

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a Re-inscription of Modern India Monir A. Choudhury Abstract The image of modern India hadacquired such media hypeand its success stories started receivingso much massive attention that the sufferings of the vast majority of the poor both in the rural and urban India remained unheard in the din. The economic, scientific and technologicalboom in India had attained the new denomination of the grand narratives of the country. This image of a successful India whitewashes the sufferings of the poor and the socio-economic problems that challenge the growth and development of the nation. Aravind Adiga wrote his Man Booker Prize winning debut novel The White Tiger in 2008 to question such popular image of a modern India. He wanted to re-inscribe the imagination of the present generation about the sordid deprivation of the 99.9 percent of the people so that the research scholars, political leaders and policy makers get new directions to address.This article has explicated how the landlordism, poverty, ill-equipped education system, poor health facilities, corruption in government agencies and moral degeneration have been aggravating the sufferings of the poor and decelerating the development of the nation. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v2n3a10

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

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.

A White Tiger in the Indian Law Jungle: A reading of Aravind Adiga's debut novel

The paper investigates the relationship between human rights and the Laws in contemporary India. Aravind Adiga's debut novel The White Tiger offers an unflattering portrait of a young Hindu from a small village on the banks of the Ganga, where no-one is permitted to improve his miserable living conditions within an ethical realm of dignity. The narrator believes that this is due to the passivity of Indians who uncritically accept their caste-duties, as their only possible way of life. On the contrary, the main character is clearly unafraid of stating his own will and self-determination by first performing a linguistic act and then by killing his master. The Vedas, the Dharmashastras and the Constitution are the three main sources of Right for Hindus, and it is in their misapplication that the conflict between Dharma and civil law, Right and culture emerge in the novel.