New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a “condition-of-India novel”

Abstract

Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) deals with the changing status of the highly disputed, so-called “subaltern self”. As a socio-historically entrenched notion, one may contend, the “subaltern self” is as much prescribed as inscribed in, and transcribed by, human and urban geographies, which have been currently dubbed the “New India” and the “New Metropolis”. This essay focuses on Adiga’s fresh attempt to aesthetically represent an alternative concept of ethnic identity formation. The following analysis will thus proceed on the assumption that the novel’s conflicted urban domains primarily function as contested imaginary and/or imagined sites for the fashioning of the entrepreneur as a new, precarious key figure, shaping what has been felicitously labelled the “condition-of-India novel”.

Keywords:

• New India
• New Metropolis
• subaltern self
• genre theory
• condition-of-India novel

Notes

1. I owe the information concerning this issue to Pavan Malreddy. I would like to thank Pavan Malreddy and Birte Heidemann for their careful readings of various draft versions of this article.

2. The White Tiger conforms to the Anglo-European tradition of what may be called “fictions of pathologic confession”, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), Fyodor Dostoyesky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and more recently published examples, such as John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989), and Der Kameramörder (2001) by the Austrian writer Thomas Galvinic. For the sake of space, and as this contribution is mainly concerned with the implications of genre and urbanism, this is not the place to elaborate on these intertextual echoes in detail.