Prospero | Burning bright

“The White Tiger” explores ambition and anger in India’s underclass

Adapted from a prizewinning novel, the film depicts a searing new anti-hero for a new India

By A.T. | DELHI

ARAVIND ADIGA won the Booker prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, for “The White Tiger” in 2008. For all India’s transformations since then—its fitful economic progress, the emergence of charismatic Hindu nationalism—the story is no less trenchant in early 2021. It seems to have prefigured the sight on January 26th of hundreds of thousands of angry farmers driving their tractors into Delhi, coming to the centre of power to claim their due. What took them so long? An ingeniously faithful adaptation of the novel, now streaming on Netflix, takes on this question of passivity and patience, and what happens when they run out.

“The White Tiger” is a bildungsroman as told by Balram Halwai, a self-styled “entrepreneur” in Bangalore. It is written as a letter to the Chinese premier of the time, Wen Jiabao, on the occasion of his first trip to India. The country’s resurgence in the world, on the heels of China’s rise, and the decline of the West are the explicit themes chosen by this semi-educated storyteller.

Balram begins as a poor orphan on the outskirts of the city of Dhanbad, where caste is everything and the landlord its enforcer (this part of the country has encouraged the flowering of a gritty, true-crime-inspired Hindi-language cinema in the past decade). The protagonist’s circumstances are not extraordinary, though early on a schoolteacher glimpses in him a “white tiger”, a rare freak of nature that comes along once in a generation. Still, his schooling is cut short. Hungry, unloved and all but invisible, the boy seems destined for a nasty and brutish life.

Years into this disappointment, however, he discovers a gift for cunning. He starts by sniffing out the strong—the feudal types who dominate—and the soft among them, in this case the landlord’s glamorous younger son, recently returned from America. Through a mix of sycophancy for his betters and cruelty to his equals, young Balram climbs the rungs of a ladder. However high he ascends, though, it is a life of servitude he has chosen, a fact that moulds him even as it embitters him. Balram is taken into his master’s home as a driver on the understanding that if he were disloyal, his whole extended family would be annihilated. A sense of stifled violence builds.

The film adroitly captures the novel’s tone. Ramin Bahrani, an accomplished Iranian-American director, and Paolo Carnera, an Italian cinematographer, establish a visual style that is fast and fluent, conjuring an Indian landscape without undue gawking. Two established Bollywood stars, Rajkummar Rao and Priyanka Chopra, hold nothing back in their portrayal of a privileged, Westernised Indian couple, oblivious to the fact that their good fortune in life was bought by the corruption in Dhanbad. Alternately sympathetic and loathsome, they lament the system that keeps down a poor boy like Balram, yet cannot resist treating him as a trusty lapdog. But the show-stealing turn comes from Adarsh Gaurav, the actor playing Balram. A relative newcomer brought up not far from the real Dhanbad, his performance is the best on-screen depiction of life on India’s margins in recent memory.

Those who admired Mr Adiga’s book will find much to like in the film. Yet despite its prizewinning credentials, the novel tends to divide Indian readers—and so it will on the screen. “The White Tiger” is not intended as a work of realism, despite its interest in poverty and social power: the epistolary structure guarantees that. The pressures of small-town life may be oversimplified and the switching between English and Hindi is bizarre. But for every one such misstep, there are half a dozen small moments in which this film puts its finger right on the pressure point, such as taxi drivers’ slanging banter or the sharing of gutka (chewing tobacco) between the bars of a gate.

“The White Tiger” does not condemn Balram’s aspirations, even as he pursues a terrible path. When he sees the beast of the title pacing in a zoo, the protagonist reflects on tradition and the networks of human feeling and family that keep the oppressed in their place. If the first white tiger—the diligent student in the village—demonstrates the promise of a new India, a different kind of animal can also exist in the same country. He is a creature shorn of compunctions, ready to seize what he has been denied by any means necessary.

The phrase “the new India” is often used to mean either a country that is already resplendent and on the move, or a monstrous place, full of latent violence and ready to pounce. Which kind of tiger is the country to which Balram wishes to introduce Mr Wen? Any answer to the question, in fiction or non-fiction, is bound to be complicated and disquieting.

“The White Tiger” is streaming on Netflix now

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