UNMASKING THE NEOLIBERAL PROMISE IN INDIA: BALRAM’S PARADOXICAL REPRESENTATIVE STATUS — AND THE CLASH BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE AGENCY — IN THE WHITE TIGER

Abstract

This article reexamines Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) as a literary critique of the neoliberal promise that widespread prosperity will result from globalized, market-driven reforms. It demonstrates how the novel exposes a social order in post-liberalization India where material upward mobility for a rare few is based on increased exploitation of the majority. Balram Halwai’s status as a representative character, who is portrayed in the text as both an “atypical” entrepreneurial prodigy and a “typical” working-class everyman, is at the center of this argument. The novel stages and then resolves this representational paradox through two recurrent animal metaphors: the taxonomy that designates Balram as a single “White Tiger” and the frequently self-imposed boundary that restricts his class, the “Rooster Coop”. This article closely reads these two metaphors and synthesizes them to arrive at what message the novel provides through Balram’s paradoxical representative status. By situating his status within the larger global economic context presented in the novel, unfolding in India through transnationally operating forces, this article argues that the amalgamation of old and new power structures in globalizing India means an inevitable collision between individual and collective agency. In order to succeed under this economic system, one must actively reproduce the systemic inequalities. Thus, this article proposes that far from being a celebration of self-made enterprise, The White Tiger is best read as challenging readers to consider whose agency is facilitated, and whose is sacrificed in a global setting that is sometimes uncritically celebrated.

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