October –
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess

November –
The White Tiger

January –
To the Lighthouse

February –
A Brief History of the Human Race

March –
The Maltese Falcon

April –
Bel Canto

Summer –
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

November DukeReads Selection with Ranjana Khanna

November 11, 2009, 7:00 pm

The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga

reason chosen | discussion points | comments

Set in a raw and unromanticized India, The White Tiger---the first-person confession of a murderer---is as compelling for its subject matter as it is for the voice of its narrator: amoral, cynical, unrepentant, yet deeply endearing.

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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I chose this book because it won the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and received much attention. It has been reviewed in very different ways around the world. I became interested in the way in which India is currently imagined, with the prizes awarded to The White Tiger and also the Oscar success of Slumdog Millionaire. Both that film and this novel address the recent profile of India as successful or "shining," as a 2003 political slogan concerning economic optimism would put it.

In the context of successful India and its urban elite, then, what does it mean to have stories of slum dwellers, rural populations, and servants taking center stage in this Anglophone novel? And why have their been such different global responses to the thematization of poverty and struggle? I'm also curious about the forms of masculinity and femininity, and adulthood and childhood that go along with this.

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1. Why have India and Indian novels been so important for the history of the Booker Prize, which is perhaps the most significant annual literary prize awarded to one novel in the English language? What is India in Anglophone fiction, and how does The White Tiger contribute to that history? What, if anything, is Indian about this novel?
2. The question of voice, accent, and Indian English has always been important in literature in English about India, whether in the colonial era (in texts like Kipling's Kim), in commonwealth literature (in the early writing of Naipaul), in postcolonial works like Salman Rushdie's, or in the era of globalization. How can we characterize the use of Indian English, the discussion of English, and the ideas of class that inform the English used in the novel?
3. The White Tiger uses a combination of epistolary (or letter) form, alongside nocturnal storytelling. What is the implied audience of these forms of address, and how do these formal elements shape our understanding of the novel?
4. The idea of the global enters the novel through different kinds of technology – books, the radio, the car, and the airplane. The world of the novel is engaged through different technological media. How is space imagined and negotiated through bodies and technological entities that mark the distinctions between the local, the national, and the global in the novel?
5. How is the role of the everyday, common-sense, charismatic philosopher gendered in this novel?

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