India's Native Son: Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger'
Aravind Adiga's auspicious debut novel, "The White Tiger" (Free Press, 288 pages, $24), is at once a fascinating glimpse beneath the surface of an Indian economic "miracle," a heart-stopping psychological tale of a premeditated murder and its aftermath, and a meticulously conceived allegory of the creative destruction that's driving globalization.
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Vehicles stop at a red light, on April 13, 2008 in Bangalore, India. Many residents work for multi-national cooperations and the economy is booming.
That may sound like a lot to take in, but "The White Tiger" is unpretentious and compulsively readable to boot.
Its hero, Balram Harwai, tells the story of his own journey from a hopelessly impoverished youth in India's "dark" interior to entrepreneurial success in Bangalore, the center of his country's IT boom. His narrative is framed as a series of long e-mails, presumably unacknowledged, to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in anticipation of that official's fact-finding trip to learn "the truth" about Indian entrepreneurship. The truth, as Balram portrays it, turns out to be quite a bit darker than anything you may have read in the business pages about the subcontinent's boulevards of gleaming new office towers. And while his against-all-odds rise owes much to hard work, courage, and determination, Balram most decidedly lacks the selfless virtue of the bootstrapping Horatio Alger character: He claws his way from indentured servitude to economic empowerment via acts of ruthlessness and, as he confesses in the first chapter, murder.
Along with the events that lead up to the crime, we catch glimpses of the sort of indignities and injustices endemic to a country that's still emerging from decades of political, economic, and social dysfunction — teachers who don't teach, hospitals without doctors. The top student in his pathetic village school, the young Balram is promised a scholarship by a visiting dignitary, only to have his education cut woefully short when he's forced into servitude by the loan shark who financed a relative's wedding. Later, he begs his way into a job as the second-string chauffeur to a family that feeds off public resources by bribing government officials.
These new employers are "better than nine in ten," Balram admits, and he soon falls under the protectorship of Ashok, the milder, more kindhearted son. Ashok has spent time in America, and won't abide the most extreme forms of caste-based discrimination; unlike the rest of his family, he acknowledges Balram's basic humanity. This tenderness goes by the wayside, however, when Balram is needed to take the fall for Ashok's wife, who has carelessly killed a small child behind the wheel. Still, Ashok's relative decency ensures that we are suitably appalled as Balram tells of plotting and carrying out the brutal killing of his trusting, if flawed, employer.
Try as one might, however, it's awfully hard not to read his crime as the triumph of plucky entrepreneurship over crony capitalism: Balram kills for a bag of cash Ashok was using to grease a public official, and the blood money becomes the start-up capital for Balram's soon-booming business. Like Humbert Humbert — or Tony Soprano, for that matter — Balram proves to be a seriously charming sociopath. Far less self-deceiving than Nabokov's narrator, his tone is witty, even playful, but also guileless and matter-of-fact. When he tells us that in India there are "only two destinies: eat, or get eaten up," we don't hear it as an excuse for his actions, but simply as a description of the conditions in which he lives.
"To break the law of the land — to turn bad news into good news — is the entrepreneur's prerogative," declares Balram, like some irrepressible, Ayn Rand-obsessed business guru. Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to study entrepreneurship, famously popularized "creative destruction" as shorthand for the way innovation periodically kills off the business establishment and prepares the soil for new economic growth. But the term had its roots in Nietzsche. In "The White Tiger," Mr. Adiga brilliantly invokes the original.
Mr. Medintz is the editor of Upstart, a magazine about young entrepreneurs.
