His master’s voice
Writing about The White Tiger, several readers both below and via email have mentioned that they didn’t find the voice authentic:
… The White Tiger, despite its topicality and its readability, is somehow fundamentally fake… it’s quite common for Indian authors to be accused of composing narratives about India’s poor primarily for non-poor, non-Indian readers. It’s a ubiquitous complaint — almost a critical cliché — which doesn’t make it any less true. [SM]
Would a man like Balram, who calls himself a “half-baked man” because he was never allowed to complete his schooling, be able to declare, as Balram does, that “Only three nations have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners: China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia”? [MiddleStage -- thanks, Suresh]
The author was too apparent as being separate from the character who was supposed to be writing, I realise it’s a tough task, but he didn’t convince me that he was giving the genuine perspective of someone from the ‘other’ India. [Rohan]
I’m going to tease apart two separate kinds of complaints about authenticity. One kind is whether the author successfully executes what he’s attempting, whether you’re pulled jarringly out of the narrative. The other is whether the very endeavor of a highly-educated proxy tackling the voice of the underclass is plausible.
The first question is valid. I’ll have no quibble with those who say Aravind Adiga did not achieve what he set out to do. The suspension of disbelief needed to make a story work has to be paired with some level of authorial skill, and whether readers felt pulled out of the story midstream is highly subjective. I’ll simply say that I was not challenged thus. The story has great velocity, and its corrosive sarcasm and dark humor kept me engaged until three-quarters of the way through. But it had built up enough goodwill that I was willing to overlook minor bumps along the way.
To some extent, a first person lit fic novel ought to get wide latitude on voice. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle also took on the troubles of the underclass, but did so in the third person. Their choice was fraught with less risk than Adiga’s, who’s doing something akin to a musical where the artifice is integral. The first-person literary novel is always going to be exaggerated if the author’s style is at all baroque and the narrator is anyone less than a cultural elite. You know that going in. It’s not like a third-person novel with dialogue so literary, it’s rendered unbelievable. With first person, the entire novel is the author’s voice. Philip Roth escapes the dilemma, but confining your writing to the immediate surrounds of Lincoln Center is limiting.
To demand absolute verisimilitude is like filming movies about life in real time, bathroom breaks and all. You could end up with the Brick Lane stunt of tens of pages written in pidgin English. It may be accurate, but it’s hardly entertaining.
The second complaint goes against the whole grain of literary fiction and, for that matter, arthouse film. Were this book written by an actual Delhi servant, it would read more like a diary, like Baby Halder’s A Life Less Ordinary – still enjoyable, but entirely a different beast. It’s the difference between a documentary and a movie with the best actors of your generation chewing scenery. It’s the difference between Fahrenheit 9/11 and W.
Indian arthouse filmmakers, of course, are famous for tackling poverty and exploitation, and they were largely rich in education even if not in pocket. Mrinal Sen’s Kharij documented the exploitation of servants by their employers (thanks, anonandon). Even Bollywood gets into the act with movies like Krantiveer. Yet few today say they were unconvincing in expressing the plight of the rural poor.
The White Tiger is primarily a novel of ideas over plot. It goes down more smoothly as a parable, an argument, an exposé rather than purely as a telling of events. Tell me Adiga didn’t hit his mark and I’ll have no quarrel. Tell me the mark is illegitimate in the first place, that an Oxbridge-walla has no business writing in a driver’s voice, and we’ll be forced to part ways faster than a Delhi three-wheeler spotting its prey.
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