His story is told through a letter he writes to the Chinese Premier who will be visiting his country. Balram, when he introduces himself, is a self-made entrepreneur and a murderer. It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India.Īdiga's debut novel gives us on narrator who is, by turns, charming, repugnant, profound, egotistical, insightful, and much more, but always, always fascinating. Balram is a clever and resourceful narrator with a witty and sarcastic edge that endears him to readers, even as he rails about corruption, allows himself to be defiled by his bosses, spews coarse invective and eventually profits from moral ambiguity and outright criminality. His personal fortunes and luck improve dramatically after he kills his boss and decamps for Bangalore. Adiga's existential and crude prose animates the battle between India's wealthy and poor as Balram suffers degrading treatment at the hands of his employers (or, more appropriately, masters). Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India's entrepreneurial underbelly. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Balram Halwai is from the 'Darkness,' born where India's downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation-and a startling, provocative debut.Ī brutal view of India's class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga's debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Recalling The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, The White Tiger is narrative genius with a mischief and personality all its own. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society.

The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. “This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before” (John Burdett, Bangkok 8). The stunning Booker Prize–winning novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day that critics have likened to Richard Wright’s Native Son, The White Tiger follows a darkly comic Bangalore driver through the poverty and corruption of modern India’s caste society.

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