Major Themes in Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’

Abstract

‘The White Tiger’ is an epistolary novel written by Aravind Adiga. ‘The White tiger’ is his debut novel and he won the 40^th Man Booker Prize for this novel in 2008. This novel provides a dark aspect of ‘new’ India. Balram Halwai, the narrator of the novel, has expressed the lives of poor people of India in a very rational manner. Adiga has shown how poverty has usurped the Indian society where the poor people are dispossessed of their basic rights. The novel also presents the suppression of lower social class/caste by the upper social class/caste. It also depicts man’s quest for freedom. Through this novel, the novelist has shown how the marginalized people are usually discriminated on the basis of caste, gender, culture, religion, ethnicity and economy. Balram, the narrator of the story, wishes to leave the ‘darkness’ so that he could experience the life in the ‘light’. Balram represents the voice of lower class/caste which is symbolically depicted as ‘rooster coop’. The novelist has also shown how the globalized world has a great impact on India. Throughout the novel, Aravind Adiga has repeatedly laid stress on the fact that in Indian society there is not just an unequal distribution of wealth but of human rights also. This paper attempts to explore the major themes that are presented in the Man Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger.