Representation Of The Subaltern In Arvind Adiga’s-‘The White Tiger.’

Name:-Hitaxi H Bhatt.

Roll No:- 03.

Email Id:- hitaxidave81@gmail.com

Enrolment No:- PG15101004

Paper No:- 13 ( The New Literature.)

Submitted to:- Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.

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Topic-  Representation Of   The Subaltern In Arvind Adiga’s-‘The  White Tiger.’

First of all let’s understand the term subaltern because it’s very important to know the meaning of it to understand the connection between the term and text. And then we can clearly understand that how this subaltern term Arvind Adiga’s has used in his text ‘The White Tiger’.

‘Subaltern’:-

The term "subaltern" refers to any person or group of inferior rank and station whether in terms of race, class, caste, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion. Not only this it also refers to lower strata people of illiterate peasantry, non-elite cultural groups who are under- represented, under-taught, non canonical and the subordinated group and they are always directly or indirectly influenced by ideologies of dominant class. 

Plot Overview-

Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw puller is born in a village called Laxmangarh. He is a smart lad and the fact was even recognized by a school inspector, who praises him as a ‘white tiger’, the rarest of animal, and the culture that only comes along once in a generation. The school inspector promises to arrange scholarship and proper schooling for the young boy. But his family takes him out of school and puts him to work at a teashop after the death of his father, he nurses a dream of escape of breaking away from the banks of mother Ganga into whose murky depths have escaped the remains of a hundred generation.

 Balram manages to escape his village and moves to Delhi after being hired as a chauffeur for a rich landlord’s son, daughter in law and their two Pomeranian dogs. Balram is not first a driver, it turns out his expected, to cook, clean and do whatever else his master needs him to do. Balram thus comes in the whirlpool of suppression and subordination. After he begins to work for Ashok Sharma he completely loses his freedom. All the time, he has to serve for the good of his master. Balram’s master is different from the average landlord, a wealthy man but also considerate to his faithful employee.

However, he is forced to reassess his position when asked to carry the care after his master’s wife pinky madam, accidentally knocks down and kills a street urchin dummy a drunken escapade that our subject has little control over. Balram doesn’t want to spend the rest of the days at the money of his employer and starts to think how easy it would be to kill him and start a new life for himself. ` Finally, he kills his master, Ashok Sharma takes his bag full of riches and starts his only company white Tigers Drives. Next, he makes a plan to start a real estate business in Bangalore because it will be much demanded in 2010.

Subaltern Consciousness in ‘ The White Tiger’.

Balaram Halwai , the protagonist of the novel, a young man was born and brought up in a remote village named Laxmangarh in Bihar who narrates his story of his life in an epistolary manner to the Chinese Prime Minister who visits India in an official job . In his letters he unlocks his heart and gives full description of his life story from childhood to adulthood and finally as a man of wealthy businessman. Like a true realistic narrator he introduced his rural village, the rural Bihar, the feudal system of the village, extreme poverty of the same village, finally the shining India.

Balram is born and raised in darkness which is far away from Bangalore. The earlier writes used to write of good Bangalore starts but Arvind Adiga chooses to write more about darkness as setting. The setting is completely in a rustic place so it is a subaltern setting. It is in the sense that Adiga does not choose to write about cleanliness. Laxmangarh, the unknown village of India is nearly The Ganga which is full of dirty things straw, saggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion and several different kinds of industrial acids. Not only has the setting, the characterization itself speaks the concept  of subalternity. The body of the mother of Balram only gets the chance to wear new clothes in its funeral ceremony. It clearly state that she has spent her whole life in a miserable and poor condition.

The novel is replete with the description of Zamandari system, corrupt political system, exploitation, rise of local insurgency, prostitution, degraded family structure and poor health services etc. At the outset of the novel we came to know that the epithet ‘white tiger’ was given by his school teacher to Balaram for his extraordinary merit and intellect who was a son of a rickshaw puller. But he was taken out of the school and forced to work in a teashop and afterwards who had to crush coal and clean the dirty tables of the teashop for his livelihood. His ambition to be a driver and becoming a well-trained driver leads the novel to the crisis moment of his life, who in the course of the time raises his voice and proves that the subaltern can / will speak. Adiga made Balaram a counterpart of the subaltern who of course speaks through the crime which he did in a way which is apparently as an act of psychological disorder. Balaram wants to be rich like his master Mr. Ashok, when he sees the Delhi city after migrating into the capital of India.

In Delhi Balaram experiences two kinds of India with those who are eaten and on the other side with those who ate. Balaram wants to be a counterpart of eater, someone with a big belly and being a white tiger desires to break out the cage of the freedom. Balaram decides to kill his master to fulfill the great expectation becoming a big bellied man. Having witnessed of all kinds of corruption, loot and murder and the gambling of money to buy politicians by Ashok, his master, Balaram decides to steal and kill Ashok. Adiga creates an extraordinary picture of the subaltern protagonist .Here the theory of the Spivak had been applied through the character of the hero in a different way. In Spivak’s theory silence is the most important trope and the positive replica to the question “Can the subaltern speak???”   Propounded in the novel of Adiga.  So Balaram takes the way of murdering his master Ashok and proves that subaltern can speak.

According to Spivak subaltern is the counterpart of the society whose voice and the activities and other expression of power had been muted, whose voice had been snatched away and whose indomitable force had been lost or swept away because in respect of the power of voice, representation and above all the question of identity play a vital part in their survival. Silence, pain and oppression are the fundamental parts of the subaltern classes who always try to fight for their survival but their noiselessness became obstacle for their survival from the daily to daily life. Hence they cannot represent themselves in the society.

Balaram is a typical figure who kills his master in order to get a life which is full of gentlemanliness, to get back his long cherished desire be a part of the glamorized world. He is the eyewitness of the rampant corruption of the life of his master Ashok who possesses a degraded moral quality. But in respect of justice he cannot break all the boundaries of cruelty, injustice and humiliation. Everywhere Balaram is the victim of the utter humiliation and exploitation. Balaram does not want to be a ‘rooster’ in a ‘coop’, he does not want to be ‘eaten’ rather desperately wait to be part ‘eaters’. Balaram gradually loses the sense of patience, justice and humanity and chooses the beaten track just to gain materialistic prosperity.

Marginalized class is tangled in sub-human social subsistence, utter deficiency, economic exploitation, representing a subculture of compliance and political subjection. Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger brilliantly unravels the voice of subaltern in which marginal farmers, landless labors, jobless youths, poor, auto and taxi drivers, servants, prostitutes, beggars, and underprivileged figure. At the heart of the novel, Balram Halwai, the protagonist, truly represents the voice of subaltern people who intensely suffer from the lack and deprivation, the resignation and silence, loneliness and alienation, and subjugation and subordination. By showing the protagonist growing from rages to riches through the Machiavellian tricks of trade and his aspiration to do something good for the underclass people, Adiga is projecting the emerging subaltern consciousness in the novel. When the unspeakability of subaltern has been given frontal focus on postcolonial studies quite contrarily, Adiga projects his protagonist having immense potentiality to speak through different agencies and power in favor of the subaltern thereby showing that at times subaltern can go beyond the sever unspeakability.

Conclusion:-

The novel can be taken as articulation of rebellious consciousness of the subaltern people. The protagonist of novel Balram Halwai in the novel represents the severe voice of minority class that is subjected to be out of league of the society. And journey of protagonist is goes like from Munna—Balram Halwai—White—Ashok Sharma, is the blue print for the rise of underclass. Through the character of Balram, Adiga is trying to make the the government of India aware of the fact that unless the voice of subaltern is unheard, more Balram will be produced in the society, who being conscious of the existing gap between rich and poor, can take foul means to counterattack the system itself. When trial, trouble and tribulation of subaltern people cross the limit, Balram like subaltern subject can take recourse to foul means to take revenge with the existing system as Balram has done in the novel.

Reference:-

DHAKAL, LEKHA NATH. "SUBALTERN CONSCIOUSNESS IN ARVIND ADIGA’S THE WHITE TIGER." INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE, LITERATURE (Vol. 3. Issue.4.,2016 (Oct.-Dec.): 14.

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