The White Tiger: Thinking Task

Respected sir,

1) How far do you agree with the India represented in the novel The White Tiger?

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was praised for highlighting the injustices and poverty present in the rapidly changing India. The White Tiger marks a new departure in India by portraying the emotions, sorrows, and aspirations of the hitherto invisible poor. For Adiga, his achievement is capturing "something new" in India, a stirring, a glimmer of a refusal by the poor to accept the fate ordained for them by their masters. The author looks at India with the perspective both of an insider, having grown up in India, and as outsider, having emigrated for years and then returned.
Balram is poor Indian village boy in this Novel. Balram was born and raised in the India of darkness in the Novel. Arvind Adiga explores the reality of the Indian caste system with a character that was able to break through it. The White Tiger is in India. The protagonists. Balram Halwai is born in Laxmagarh, a rural village in "the darkness". In this Novel while working in the tea shop he begins to learn about India's government and economy from the customer's conversation. He is slowly rising up in India's society throughout the Novel. So, by that we can say that India is presented in this Novel.

2) Do you believe that Balram's story is the archetype of all stories of 'rags to riches'?

Yes, Balram’s story is the archetype of all stories of ‘rags to riches’ because it is all about the dream or in the words of Balram how big can you think? He also gives the example of Rooster Coop- perpetual servitude. He believes that if someone wants to be rich there wasn’t any hard work for them.
The Rooster Coop and God Hanuman these are the things that he doesn’t like whereas he wants to be like Buddha, imagine himself as a Krishna and desire to ride the Honda city car and chandeliers make him more affection towards to become the rich.

3) "Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique, deconstructive criticism aims to show that any text inevitably undermines its own claims to have a determinate meaning, and licences the reader to produce his own meanings out of it by an activity of semantic 'freeplay' (Derrida, 1978, in Lodge, 1988, p. 108). Is it possible to do deconstructive reading of The White Tiger? How?

Yes, there are probability of deconstructive reading of The White Tiger. help of some of the words like, in this text author himself uses this word like, “This book is Auto-Biography of half-baked Indians”. So how can we rely on the narrator who himself is half baked. It deconstructs the entire narrative.