'Being Indian made this easier. I was an outsider and an insider too.'
Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga, political journalist and debut novelist, talks to Rebecca Yolland about rewriting India; forgoing the silk, saris and spices for corruption, sleaze and the rising middle classes.
'Because I'm from India I can't see the exotic; the spices and the cooking or the yoga.'
'Journalism is leaving [an issue] as a dish, and a novel is taking it up and shoving it in the reader's face.' Aravind Adiga should know. Previously a TIME correspondent and now a new novelist, he is a man who seems to be itching with a desire to lob the first pie. In a mildly challenging tone he confesses to exhausting everyone with his beliefs: 'I've scared away so many people at parties talking about them,' he says. Yet his first novel, The White Tiger, is an entertaining and apparently immoral romp where the tough underlying messages sit lightly and where an ill-educated murderer makes for very entertaining company.
Adiga's narrator, Balram Halwai, is a chauffeur born in 'the Darkness' of rural India; a place where poverty and child labour are part of family life. In some ways a 'what if' story, Adiga tried to imagine how he would manage if he had been denied an education and grown up with daily brutality. 'What if I were stuck here and I was someone like me,' he panics, someone with a 'capacity to admire what is beautiful.' Balram turns on the existing hierarchical caste-based system, murdering his employer and establishing his own business in a very modern India, and Adiga too has turned; questioning the class structure of India, and evidently furious at the vast discrepancy between rich and poor.
Adiga himself was born and educated in India until, aged fifteen, he moved to Australia. Later he studied at Columbia University in New York and then in Oxford, before embarking on a career in journalism. Such international hopscotching has clearly affected him. He remembers his first impressions of Australia and 'the sheer nastiness of life in the city,' just as Balram is overwhelmed by New Delhi. Indeed, The White Tiger shows forcefully the dangers of mass migration as villagers are drawn to the city and then struggle to find work. More importantly, Adiga's return to India, as a TIME correspondent in 2003, prompted him to re-evaluate his notions of the country. He talks of the writing of The White Tiger as a quest to understand 'my looking at India again.'
Journalistic habits are hard to break and Adiga peppers his conversation with statistics, many of them grim listening. His novel however leaves such facts for the curious reader to discover for themselves. Economic discrimination against Muslims, the Naxal rebels in central India, changing relations with China, and unsettling illiteracy levels - Adiga hints at all these but leaves the reader questing for more. In part, this is a conscious decision: his narrator's ignorance and prejudices fuel our frustration and effectively reveal his limitations. 'My narrator is a composite of many, many men that I spoke to as I travelled,' he tells me, and clearly he relished those conversations on trains and street corners. 'Being Indian made this easier. I was an outsider and an insider too.'
'To depict someone is to depict them in all their ambiguity and all their moral complexities,' claims Adiga, although he only seems keen to apply this reasoning to Balram. I mention the lack of sympathetic female characters, even of fully rounded ones, but he has a swift answer. That is exactly as Balram would see them, he believes, 'you can't change his attitudes entirely'.
He is however quick to disassociate himself from his narrator's attitudes. 'The narrator is not me... I don't agree with a lot or most of what he says.' Indeed the choice to use a narrative voice came in play in the second draft. 'I wrote this in the first person initially,' he explains, 'It was a very serious, earnest work.' Then he came up with the idea of the letters and narrative voice. The narrator is untrustworthy and Balram 'being aware of his nastiness is part of the con'. The resulting novel is full of energy and laughter. 'Humour is not something you associate with the books that come out of India,' Adiga suggests and he is obviously keen to create a voice of his own. Critics have made much of Adiga's departure from the more common literature of India, with its colonial relish and excesses of colour and smell. 'Because I'm from India I can't see the exotic; the spices and the cooking or the yoga', he asserts, dismissing it all as 'absolute crap'. In fact it is the seedier side of India he so successfully depicts; a sensual world, absolutely, but one of sex and sweat and disease. In spite of (or perhaps because of) Adiga's enthusiasm for beauty, it's the ugliness and inequalities he focuses on. So while he gives us water buffaloes and paan and markets, these images are often twisted: the water buffalo speaks of rape, the paan discolours servants' teeth, and the markets are full of prostitutes. We are whipped through luxury hotels and busy streets in a limousine but the most powerful scene in Delhi is when Balram shits in the slum.
Many of his scenes are rich with comedy. The image of a fat master running while his thin servant provides him with water on his jog is quite brilliant. 'Everything I've put in this book is based on things I've seen,' claims Adiga, begging the question of the fat master's identity. 'Some of my friends in India have been upset because they think the portrayal of the rich is not flattering,' he comments indignantly before adding with a laugh, 'They pointed out to me that I wasn't exactly poor to begin with.'
Adiga's awareness of his awkward position within Indian society is a very large part of his appeal. At times hugely practical, he acknowledges he has more in common with Balram's employer than with the driver himself and when quizzed about the hypocrisies of writing in English he looks at me with bewilderment. 'It's the only language I could really write in,' he states.
What is important for Adiga is that the stories are told. Having the advantages of education and financial security is merely 'an extra obligation to write about people without those benefits'. Repeatedly described as angry by the press, he counters 'there is a lot to be angry about.' He returns again and again to the big questions of education, healthcare (hospitals are 'mind-bogglingly bad') and legal protection, and he has been accused of betraying his country by focusing on India's corruption and problems. 'I can't see what could be more patriotic than making a passionate plea for the better treatment of two thirds of my countrymen,' he retorts. His anxiety to protect his country is palpable and his great fear is that crime and social unrest will explode to South African proportions unless reforms are carried out.
The White Tiger is his cautionary tale. An ordinary tiger is a potent symbol of India but the white tiger is a freak; a genetic anomaly thrown up once every few generations. Balram is that anomaly - the man in the line who chooses to step out of it -and so too is Adiga, whose passion is infectious whether or not all his opinions bear up under close questioning. 'Balram is still the white tiger but he could end up being a very ordinary tiger in twenty years' is his final warning.
Adiga is currently working on his second novel but is bashful about it. 'Most people only have one, right,' he tells me laughingly. But Adiga is not most people, and while he continues to upset polite dinner parties with angry rants about prostitution and poverty, his novel finds a lighter way to voice these issues.
Thursday, 24 April, 2008
In Interviews
- Dave Eggers
- Richard Flanagan
- John Banville
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Amit Chaudhuri
- Rana Dasgupta
- Edmund White
- Tobias Hill
- Christmas Books
- Russell Hoban
- Will Self
- Aleksandar Hemon
- Kate Summerscale
- Philip Gourevitch
- Simon Gray
- Aravind Adiga
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