How does The White Tiger show the notion of the Old Morality versus New Morality?

• Name              : Dodiya Mehul Maheshbhai
• Roll No           : 23
• Enrollment No: 206910840120011
• Class               : M.A. Sem 2
• Paper Name    : The New Literatures
• Question      : How does The White Tiger show the notion of the Old Morality versus New Morality?
• Words            : 2000
• Percentage     :
• Year                : 2017/19
• Submitted to   : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

• Introduction

            The White Tiger, by Arvind Adiga, is an unpleasant but unique novel. It presents an uncomfortable study on Indian culture and Society. The novel teach us much about the effect of economic power on its social febric. The White Tiger is the story of Balram. Halwai’s life as a selfdeclared “self-made entreprneur”: a rickshaw driver’s son who skillfully climbs India’s social ladder to become a chauffer and later a successful businessman. The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India's class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy. In detailing Balram's journey first to Delhi, where he works as a chuffeur to a rich landlord, and then to Bangalore, the place to which he flees after killed his master and stealing his money, the novel examines issues of religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India. Ultimately, Balram trenscends his sweet-maker caste and becomes a successful entrepraneur, establishing his own taxi service. In a nation proudly shedding a history of poverty and underdevelopment, he represents, as he himself says, "tomorrow."

The White Tiger portrays an India that has not only lost its traditional social structure, but also outgrown a conventional morality framework. Balram’s description of the of the Light India versus the Dark India in the novel, which subvets usual association of “Light” with virtus, and “Darkness” with immorality, reflected this upset of moral values. Light India is not virtuous all. Rather, its members do whatever necessary to preserve their own wealth and power on acting morally only when it is convenient for them. They are “Light” primarily in the sense that they can actual see the “light” of wealth and luxury, much as a plant might grow tall enough to saw the light of day and further its own growth. So, the Rooster Coop logic prevail over Dark India: men duteifully behave according to familial and religious values, but they do so because they are terrified into submission, not out of genuine desire to lead a good life. In both cases, people sacrifice morality as they fight for surviveval within India’s cut-throat social landscape. In the midst of India’s moral upset, Balram develops his own personal moral framework founded on his sense of himself as a “white tiger”: a rare creature with superior intelligence who lives in the jungle but is came from its rules. His embrace of this notion that he is special and therefor deserved to exist  legal and moral codes allows him to justify murdering his master Ashok, knowingly and exposing his own family to likely fatal vengeance, so that he can begin his first business—White Tiger Drivers—with Ashok’s money. Balram jokes, “The devil was once God’s sidekick until he went freelance.” He believes that the struggle to escape social and economic subjugation in Indian society, to go “freelance” and achieve control over one’s future, trumps traditional notions of good vs. evil, God vs. the devil, rendering actions the reader might consider immoral understandable, and yet also depicting the society that could make such actions understandable as brutally lost and corrupt.

Balram Halwai narrat his life in a letter, written in seven consecutive nights and addressed to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao. In his letter, Balram explains how he, the son of a puller, escaped a life of servitude to become a successful bisenessman, describing himself as an enterpreneur. Balram was born in village of Laxmangarh, where he lived with his grandmother, parents, brothers and extended family. He is a smart child but is forced to leave school in order to help pay for his cousin's dowry and begins to work in a teashop with his brother in Dhanbad. While working there he begins to learn about India's government and economy from the customer converzation. Balram described himself as a bad servant After learning how to drive, Balram finds a job driving Ashok, the son of one of Laxmangarh's landlords. He takes over the job of the main driver, from a small car to a heavy-luxury described Honda City. He stops sending money back to his family and disrespects his grandmother during a trip back to his village. Balram moves to New Delhi with Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam. Throughout their time in Delhi, Balram is exposed to extensive corruption, especially in the government. In Delhi, the contrast between the poor and the wealthy is made even more evident by their proximity to one another.

One night Pinky Madam takes the wheel from Balram, while drunk, hits something in the road and drives away; we are left to assume that she has killed a child. Ashok's family puts pressure on Balram to confess that he had been driving alone. Ashok becomes increasingly involved in bribing government officials for the benefit of the family coal business. Balram then decides that killing Ashok will be the only way to escape India's Rooster Coop. After bludgeoning Ashok with a bottle and stealing a large bribe, Balram going to Bangalore, where he bribed the police in order to help start his own taxi business. Ashok too is portrayed to be trapped in the metaphorical Rooster Coop: his family controls what he do and society dictates how he acts. Just like Ashok, Balram pays off a family whose son one of his taxi drivers hit and killed. Balram explains that his own family was almost certainly killed by Ashok's relatives as retribution for his murder. At the end of the novel, Balram rationalizes his actions and considers that his freedom is worth the lives of his family and of Ashok. And thus ends the letter to Jiabao, letting the reader think of the dark humour of the tale, as well as the idea of life as a trap introduced by the writer.

The Protogonist is Balram Halwai, who describe himself as servant, philosopher, Entrepreneur, Murderer. This sums up about everything Adiga wants to tell you about India’s society: it is tense and chaotic, torn between beloved tradition and new found economic prosperity. Adiga portrayed an India struggling to find it is national identity: Halwai represents this confusion, both with his vague social role and uncertain morals. Morally he is corrupt, but he also condemns India’s often unjust legal and political system. In ‘The White Tiger’, morality speaks of a system of behavior in regards to standardise of right or wrong behavior: The word carries the concept of

1) Moral standards with regard to behavior;

2) Moral responsibility, Reffering to our conscience;

3) A moral identity or one who is capable of right or wrong action.

Common synonyms include ethics, principle, virtue and goodness. Morality has become a complicated issue in the multicultural world we live in today. The writer has the ability to expose his readers to the harsh realities of the world. Most of the writers indirectly or sometimes directly mention the effects of Globalization. Interesting some writers considered Globalization as a God’s gift to the country; others presented it as a pretentious. Some called it supernatural boon which has changed the face of the protagonist in The White Tiger, explains in a very ironical manner the present’s situation of Indian corporate scenario:

“Sir, you Chinese far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water electricity, Sewage system, public transportation, Sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneur’s have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.”

Adiga is ruthless on the subject of India politics using heavy satire to condemn them. ‘One fact about that India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and the you will have truth’.

Politics are completely unaccountable to the population. Adiga emotionally blames India’s poverty on them: children too lean and short for their age and with over sized heads from which with over sized heads from which vivid eyes shine like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

Arvind Adiga explores the reality of life in India and Bharat in his much discuss and criticized novel ‘The White Tiger’, the writer presents the darkness of Bharat. The main theme of the novel is the contrast between India’s rise as a modern global economy and its working class. People who live in crushing poverty and to survive any how they neglect all the set up values and morals in the society. Poverty, its cause and effects which makes the man to fight and achieve the higher goals in one’s life is the theme of the novel.

The protagonist Balram Halwai alias Ashok Sharma is an unfortunate lad born in extremely poor family of peasants in Bihar, where the land-lords exploits the poor people and controls the whole economy of the town. He predicts his life in future in the form of a weak, skinny shrunken and infected figure in the village men, but he is a white tiger who finds an opportunity to escape from this dungeon a like village. He becomes a driver leaving behind his parents and relatives, goes to Delhi to serve his land lord. 

As he reaches Delhi he becomes aware of harsh realities of life at Delhi. His enlarged vision teaches him the new way of living. His attitude changes according to his interactions with the urbanites of Delhi. The people around him and teach him a new way of life. His interactions with fellow drivers, his reading of books, and the experience with changing, masters like Ashok and then Pinkie madam, their affaires, the corrupt practices played by his master of bribing the ministers, his experience of accepting responsibility of an accident which he himself has never committed, Ashok’s extra marital affaires, changes Balram from an innocent, polite and obedient illiterate man from a mild person into a very hardcore criminal. He neglects all the set values and morals. Balram explains how the morals and values in the society are trampled down by citing the example.   Arvind Adiga says, that the greatest thing to get out of this country in the ten thousand year of its history is the Rooster Coop. Go to Delhi, behind the Jama Msjid, and look at the way they keep chickens there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored, stuffed tightly into wire mesh cages packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space; the whole cage giving off a horrible stench the stench of  terrified, feathered  flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher, showing off the flesh and organs of a recently chopped up chicken, still oleaginous with a coating of dark blood. The Rooster in the coop smells the blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out of the coop. The very same thing is done with human beings in this country.

• Conclusion

The White Tiger should make ever eight thinking citizen to read the signs of the times and be socially conscious of the rights and duties of each one, irrespective of caste, creed or economic status, to prevent create the types of Ashok and Balram in our society. The White Tiger have interesting implications, for India’s future. Balram Halwai expresses Adiga’s frustration and socio political argument. In this book Halwai implies the young will fight for reform, to be free from the constraints of poverty and justice in India. The novel leaves you feelings, not just that Adiga has described one of these fighters, but that he is one.

Works Cited

contributors, Wikipedia. "The White Tiger." Wikipedia. 26 March 2019. 6 April 2019 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Tiger>.

Lenin, Vladimir. "Comparative Analysis." Shodhganga (2016): 265-284.

Scopa, Sally. "The White Tiger Themes: Morality and Indian Society.". 17 Jun 2015. 6 April 2019 <https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-white-tiger/themes/morality-and-indian-society>.

Stedman, Ray C. NEW MORALITY OR ANCIENT FOOLISHNESS? 6 April 2019 <http://www.ldolphin.org/newmorals.html>.