From The Shadows To The Spotlight: The Subaltern In Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

Aravind Adiga, one of the most important voices of our time in India, is a literary luminary whose incandescent prose illuminates the complexities of human condition with a stunning clarity and incisiveness. Through his Man Booker Prize winning The White Tiger, he has proven himself to be a literary titan, a master craftsman, who weaves together the threads of various themes with skill and finesse. In this novel he raises subaltern issues and unfurls that the subalterns do speak though through crime. The subalterns are those who are oppressed at the hand of upper-class because of their caste, class, age, religion, race, or gender. There are some critics and theorists like Antonio Gramsci, Ranjit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee and many others who talked about subalterns in their work. Adiga presents Balram Halwai, the protagonist of the novel The White Tiger, who moves from village to city and transforms from a simple village boy to a city entrepreneur and proves that the subaltern can speak. He is a powerful representative of the underprivileged who fight to liquidate old-age slavery and exploitation. The paper underlines how Balram undergoes great trials, troubles and tribulations, which push him towards becoming a business tycoon; how he resolves not to be a rooster in a coop; how he aspires to pull down the cruel walls of class system. The novelist through various characters and incidents demonstrates that the subaltern can also have strong voices and they can be heard.