The White Tiger, How to make a successful ‘crossover’ film and a personal recommendation
We haven’t spoken much about Arvind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’ on PFC pages. Adiga’s debut novel won the Man Booker prize with what critics have termed as its unapologetic expose on the reality of modern India. It’s been variously called dark and humorous in its ability to tell the story of its protagonist who straddles across the class divide in modern day India through means fair and foul and always enterprising.
The novel has its merits. A lot of us, Indians, start believing in the story that’s peddled about India in global fora. That it is our time now – our manifest destiny. These sobriquets – the world’s largest democracy, the global ‘soft’ superpower, the back office of the world – have become our calling card. Adiga’s novel puts up a mirror to this India and shows us its ugly face. The protagonist, Balram Halwai, a semi-literate, though enterprising, young man from the ‘Darkness’ of India articulates what millions of similarly placed Indians might be going through as they take in the sights and sounds of urban India – the glitzy software parks, the ‘landscaped’ lawns of Gurgaon condominiums and the birthday parties hosted at the local pizzerias with strange food and smells. It’s a voice that we need to listen to as the chasm between the India that we like to imagine and the India that’s real widens around us.
It’s an important voice, undoubtedly, and it would have had a huge impact on the Indians living in the ‘Light’ had it not been so inauthentic in parts. So, while I applaud the literary prowess that Adiga displays in a debut novel, the interesting structure, the gimmickry that he employs in terms of letters written to the Chinese Premiere to set the story up, I am deeply suspicious of how much Adiga cares about his character or the ‘Darkness’ that he has sought to bring to our notice. And that’s a failing I find hard to forgive. There’s an essentially third-person narrative feel to it, an outsider’s perspective writ large all over while you read a first person account of a taxi driver becoming a ‘social’ entrepreneur.
Having got that bit of personal opinion off my chest, let me also state that the first time I read it I instantly recognized that this is exactly the kind of template that is needed for the first truly ‘global’ Indian film. Ironically, the success of The White Tiger lies in that its central deceit doesn’t take away from the reality of what it is relating. That it is able to do so with witticisms and half-baked world views of its central protagonist makes it a very entertaining read. Its first person narrative (fake as it may be) is what makes it a compelling story which makes the readers root for the villainous underdog. The third-person narrative would have made it ‘real’ but taken away the immediacy. And, I think this is the template that can be transplanted for the successful Indian ‘crossover’ film (whatever that term means).
So here’s the template – a first person narrative about an Indian underdog confronting ‘India Shining’, dark humor and an ending steeped in irony. Build a first class team around this, bring on some globally salable names, add some quintessentially Indian elements like the background score and you have a potential winner.
Wait, based on what I have read about ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ till now (and Vikas Swarup’s Q & A), it seems like this template has already been used.
For those looking for a completely different template, may I recommend the criminally neglected Rajorshi Chakraborti’s ‘Derangements’. It’s a novel waiting to be adapted on screen by a really competent director. And, it’s novel that deserves many more readers than it has found till now. There, I have done my good deed for the day.
Tags: Arvind Adiga, Derangements, Rajorshi Chakraborti, The White Tiger, Tigers Se Bach Ke Rahiyo
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
@subrat – The White Tiger can be adapted. But the plotline, don’t you think, is too vast to be used effectively in two hours?
Very honestly, Subrat, this whole business of “author not caring for his character” criticism comes up every time a book is published in English about people from the lower middle class strata. And I don’t really get this – I mean, there are people and there are tones and there are demeanours – so varied and diverse. Just because the author’s bio data suggests that he has not lived in the milieu of the story, we make these assumptions. Personally, Balram’s tenor actually struck a chord of recognition in me – to me, it was very real. Technique and gimmicks are all incidental – the letters angle is just to make the book more chatty, which I thought worked very nicely (just like the monologue device did in The Reluctant Fundamentalist). I would be very interested to know why you found it inauthentic and disinterested.
Jaideep – You articulate my point. Balram’s view struck a chord with you and with me because it’s “our” view. It’s exactly how you and I would think if we detach ourselves from this India story business.
Adiga, I think started this book as his view of what he saw a the Time correspondent in India. But then he transplanted that view on to Balram Halwai’s. Balram Halwais of the world don’t think that way. And there just numerous examples in the book where Balram Halwai is actually articulating an outsider’s view (the most talked about example being the passage where he takes the Honda City with Ashok and Pinky back to his village (and Ashok’s place of birth). He writes as if he is seeing the village for the first time in his life. It is actually Ashok’s view of the village but it is Balram who is narrating it.
I have championed the book, recommended it and gifted it as well since I think it’s a very good debut. But I would always hold the above against it. As I said the central deceit of the book should not hold us back from appreciating what it is relating.
But Subrat – how do you know Balram Halwais of the world don’t feel like that? How many Balram Halwais are there? Even if one out of five hundred Balram Halwais feels like this, isn’t that enough to validate this particular story? That’s all I’m saying. It’s interesting what you say about the village trip (and I’ll take a look at again) but couldn’t the logic there be that he was also looking at it with fresh eyes since he had been away? I mean, that could be valid too, right?
I don’t know, it didn’t feel false to me – and I guess one reacts instinctively to a false note somewhere. Perhaps you felt it. But I would ask again – do all the Balram Halwais feel the same way? That is the key to all my arguments on this – would it surprise you if a Balram Halwai thought like you and me despite our different sets of circumstances?
Even I got the impression that he was seeing the village through new eyes.
That said, I’m glad Subrat decided to write about The White Tiger. I read it just a few days ago.
My personal view of the book as a book is that it’s a very fine piece of work. I read it at one go. It made me pretty angry at a lot of places, and being an escapist, I’d rather forget the truths that the book’s based on, but I can’t.
During the Jet Airways layoffs crisis, some random girl was being interviewed by a TV reporter. This girl said that for her, air hostesses and stewardesses were nothing more than waiters. What kind of high-and-mighty-snob attitude is that?
Then there was this Chinese restaurant somewhere in Mumbai which refused to serve food to the ayah who was accompanying a family. If anyone remembers which restaurant it was, please let me know, ’cause I’m never going there.
Many of us bitch about our bosses when they don’t give us leave but are ever ready to cut the kaamwali bai’s pay if she skips a day.
I guess what I’m saying is that our general attitude is, if you don’t have a high-and-mighty job description or business or whatever, you’re a nobody. Not even worth treating as a human being.
I did have a point to make somewhere in here, but it’s 2 AM and I’ve just returned from a dinner with PFC folk, so my thinking’s a little foggy.
heehehhehe…just read jaideep’s post n now urs. pfc wil never change. was expecting this one! so is that the halwai or is it mr adiga ? thought u will mention mr ghosh too.
@kenny – sone ja tu! what if i say the restaurant was masala mantra!! just joking.
subrat- I will read this whenever I can get my hands on this. But I am a little tired of these hardly lived in India authors writing about the ‘real India and Indians’. What did you think about Kiran Desai’s novel? I thought her mother wrote her novels about India and Indians with much more empathy. That doesn’t feed a westerners appetite for what they want to hear about India- being backward, exotic and dirty.
I just hope there are not too many mentions in this book about any Indian’s toilet practices.
And Kenny- I share your indignation but what’s wrong wih being a waiter? We have all been that same boat at some point in time if you have grown up in time.
sorry for the typos-
Also read the last line above as-
We have all been that same boat at some point in time if you have grown up in India.
Kenny, the restaurant is China Garden in Khar or Santa Cruz (West), just down the road from Danai. The White Tiger is not an exotica book, Dazedand Confused, no toilet habits described. It is pretty damn unpretentious, I thought, much more about characters than atmospherics for starters. And it touches upon an aspect of India which is a HUUUUGE festering issue, which is a welcome relief from what gets published usually. In fact, I am very very surprised it won the Booker, very pleasantly so, precisely because it is not an exotica book.
Jaideep @ 4: I agree that there could be Balram Halwais reacting to things like you and me. Yes, you could even convince me that the whole story was set with a fictional protagonist (a pyschological construct) who could make all of us uncomfortable in the India we live. I am willing to accept that reasoning despite some obvious passages in the book which instinctively feel false.
I agree with you that this isn’t the usual exotica peddled nor is it written in the “chutnified” manner. In fact everyone who I have met who’s read the book has finished it in a single sitting. That coupled with the Booker means the book is set for publishing records.
Coming back to the premise of my post, Jaideep, I am not surprised that it won the Man Booker. I mean this was the year where they actually didn’t shortlist O’Neill’s Netherlands and ditched Ghosh at the last moment. The only reason was because Adiga created a new template for selling India. A ‘parda-faash’ of a novel. In fact, a close Irish friend wrote to me that he found the novel interesting because he now understood how an India can hold two exactly opposite views on a topic and argue cogently on both without thinking he is contradicting himself. I can see how that kind of a thing would have fascinated the jury.
Kenny, Phoenix – I agree with you. Kenny, your kaamwaali bai observation is so spot on. I think it was Naipaul who once wrote about why there’s never going to be a revolution between the haves and have-nots in India. This is because of our belief in karma. I am not talking about its religious subtext. I am speaking about its central thesis which cuts across communities in India. We accept our lot in this life and we hope that by being right in this life, we’ll be better off in the next. SO the unquestioning acceptance among a lot of people about what’s ahppening to them. That’s the reason we have not had social unrest of the scale we should have had because of the inequity that surrounds. In fact the Naxalite movement (and its literature) actually first destroys this notion to make people revolt in teh countryside. Naxalism might not reach urban India but I guess there’s some reason to believe we might have an urban guerilla movement.
@D&C
I was pointing out that TV girl’s attitude. I see nothing wrong in being a waiter.
@Subrat
Yes dada, you have a very valid point about people accepting their karma.
On many occasions, when I enter a petrol pump, I think about the attendants and the owner. The attendants stand there the whole day, probably get one day off, and probably get paid a few thousand bucks. Whereas the owner makes that amount in how long…a couple of hours? I’m surprised I haven’t yet heard of a petrol pump attendant making off with all the day’s cash.
Nice weekend gyaan column :-)
Subrat, if the template of Indian fiction has changed for Western eyes, that can only be a very positive thing. I’m still a little cynical about that; we’ll wait and see.
This review gives a complete different picture of book.
http://ibnlive.in.com/blogs/dpsatish/237/52797/aravind-adiga–the-white-tiger-or-just-a-paper-tiger.html