Humour, Horror and Story: A Question Of Style in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
--RAJIV RANJAN DWIVEDI
Abstract: Humour as a generic term is used pervasively to signify all that creates laughter
and lends amusement. Both life and literature are marked and enriched by the element of
humour in their own ways. So far as literature is concerned, humour as a means of providing
pleasure has been one of its pre-requisite conditions existing along with its cognitive
objectives. It is with this sense that comedy and other forms of literature with comic element
prevailed. But, when humour is employed as an instrument to portray the ugliest realities of
societies, and hence, the profoundest worries of people thereof, it becomes imperative to
rethink of Aristotelian notion of ‘mimetic art’ which maintains that comedy ‘consists in
some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the
comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.’1 In a contemporary global world
marked as much by technological wonder and the so called development born thereof as the
ever horrendous rich-poor divide of people, this irreverent weapon for the representation of
ironic predicament of life has emerged even more potentially to bring out some of the best
stories ever so. The White Tiger, the prestigious Booker winner debut novel by Aravind
Adiga is one of the best specimens of literary performances in the very first decade of the
twenty first century to have employed humour as style to lend a scathing depiction of
rampant corruption, hilarious beliefs and nasty practices of India as a developing country. It
is with perspective in mind that my paper titled “Humour, Horror and Story: A Question of
Style in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger” is built up for presentation today.
Keywords: Humour, horror, style, dark, black, sardonic, irony, ambivalence, story.
Humour as a generic term is used pervasively to signify all that creates
laughter and lends amusement. Both life and literature are marked and enriched by
the element of humour in their own ways. So far as literature is concerned, humour
as a means of providing pleasure has been one of its pre-requisite conditions existing
along with its cognitive objectives. It is with this sense that comedy and other forms
of literature with comic element prevailed.
But, when humour is employed as an instrument to portray the ugliest
realities of societies, and hence, the profoundest worries of people thereof, it
becomes imperative to rethink of Aristotelian notion of mimetic art which maintains
that the ugliness exposed in the comedy is not painful or destructive. In a
contemporary global world marked as much by technological wonder and the so
called development born thereof as the ever horrendous rich-poor divide of people,
this irreverent weapon for the representation of ironic predicament of life has
emerged even more potentially to bring out some of the best stories ever so. The
White Tiger, the prestigious Booker winner debut novel by Aravind Adiga is one of
the best specimens of literary performances in the very first decade of the twenty
first century to have employed humour as style to lend a scathing depiction of
rampant corruption, hilarious beliefs and nasty practices of India as a developing
country. It is with perspective in mind that my paper titled “Humour, Horror and
Story: A Question of Style in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger” is built up for
presentation today. The prime objective of the paper is to:
i)
underline the apparent ambivalence of humour as a style begetting the story
of the protagonist part corresponding to Nietzche’s concept of ‘ubermensch’, a
superman or overman, part performing as an anti-hero.
ii)
identify humour as a style of representation resulting through subversion and
inversion of established order.
The White Tiger essentially employs humour as a style qualified by horror and
story born of it with an aim to effect black/dark humour rather than any reformation
intended in a satire.
As discussed earlier in the paper, the prime purpose of humour is to trigger
smile and laughter, the degree depending on the nature of the percept taken up. But
that each laughter and smile is or should be an indication of one’s happiness or
amusement is not necessarily true. On the contrary, it could be just attempted to
signify the intensity of pain, anger and frustration released through the external
manifestation of smile or laughter. A Hindi song exemplifies this character of smile.
The lyric is: ‘Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho/Kya gam hai jo mujhse chhupa rahe ho?’2
(‘You are smiling so elaborately! What pains are you trying to hide in your smile?’
trans. Rajiv Ranjan Dwivedi)
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger encapsulates the tremendous pains inflicted
by history upon the poor and the internalization of the wretchedness and misery by
the victims of what he calls ‘rooster coop’3 rendered through a kind of humour that
leaves smile on the lips of the readers but with a sense of regret. This ambivalence
reveals a kind of distancing that aligns with black1/dark humour that
can complicate readers’ relationships with the characters and ideas at
the heart of the texts, so that the readers’ laughter is not always a
sign of emotional identification, but can be grounded in incongruity,
in the gap between how the audience may expect a character to
respond to a given situation and the character’s actual response.4
The novel rendered in epistolary form composed by Balram, the hero/ antihero narrator, self-styled now as an entrepreneur of Bangalore, earlier a sweet maker
from a village called Laxmangarh, reveals the new impressions of India to The
Chinese Premier, Mr.Wen Jiabao who is to visit the country soon. Through his series
of letters to Mr.Jiabao, Balram introduces the realities of developing India
categorically bracketing it into ‘an India of Light and an India of Darkness.’5 He
wants to deliver Mr. Premier the most updated information about the country
forewarning him against any glorious description to be thrusted upon him by the
‘prime minister and his distinguished sidekicks’…‘with garlands, small take-home
sandalwoods statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India’s past,
present, and future’6. The letters running parallel with what Adiga says, ‘The
Autobigraphy of a Half-Baked India’7 also relate the rise of Balram from a povertystricken village chap to a crafty, murderer-entrepreneur of Bangolre, the cyber city
of India. Throughout the narrative, Balram as the first person narrator takes on his
indifferent style of humour exposing the truth of the modern India wherein
Adiga’s The White Tiger redefines India in the twenty first century when the
country and the politicians boast of rapid development taking place there in the field
of science, technology and entrepreneurship. He slams unabashedly the very notion
of democracy as practiced in India as the largest democracy of the world
O,democracy!...
I gather you yellow-skinned men, despite your
triumphs
in sewage, drinking water, and
Olympic gold medals, still don’t have democracy.
Some politicians on the radio was saying that
that’s why we Indians are going to beat you: we
may not have sewage, drinking water, and,
Olympic gold, but we do have democracy…Like
eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters
discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.8
When humour becomes style, it permeates through all contexts—bigger or
smaller, serious or non-serious/light, formal or informal/colloquial. Adiga while
chastising the systemic failure of India is temperate enough to blow up with natural
ease of his humour the superciliousness of the people taking pride in technological
advancement of the country. Balram’s relating the story to the Chinese Premier is
symbolic of the typical Indian character of people bragging their greatness to the
guests in general while exposing their hypocritical reality to them unawares
simultaneously:
…Apparently sir, you Chinese are 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
entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them.9
His comment on the religious faith is also no different as the clear dismissal
of god/gods could be easily observable:
It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my
country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power.
I guess your Excellency, that I too should start off by
kissing some god’s arse.
Which god’s arse, though? There Are so many choices.
See, the Muslims have one god.
The Christians have three gods.
And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods.
Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to
choose from…
Bear with me, Mr. Jiabao. This could take while.
How quickly do you think you could kiss 36,000,004
arses?10
So, he doesn’t say anything nasty about the gods. He only betrays his
scientific temper in his skeptical overtones for divine power. Balram says after
slitting his master, Ashok’s head: ‘I pulled out all the stickers of the goddess, and
threw them on Ashok’s body—just in case they’d help his soul go to heaven.’11 Here
the blasé character of his remorseless comic style could be seen shocking by the
readers.
In fact, Balram’s religious disillusionment stems from the socio-economic
misery of his and his community’s life. As an young angry man, unlike Mulkraj
Anand’s Bakha, the protagonist of his Untouchable, who is described 'rising like a
tiger at bay’12 and as ‘a lion… enmeshed in a net’13, Balram is ‘the White Tiger’
who has broken free of the ‘rooster coop’ and who is ‘A Thinking Man.’14 Hence,
his loud thinking:
I thought there was no need to offer a prayer to the gods for
him, because his family would be offering very expensive
prayers all along the Ganga for his soul. What can a poor
man’s prayers mean to 36,000,004 gods in comparison with
those of the rich?15
Adiga’s description of India calls for a comparative reference to V.S.Naipaul,
who also once created furore with his book like An Area of Darkness. Some of the
sharp comments of Naipaul that stand comparable with Adiga’s treatment of the
problems of India include ‘Indians defecate everywhere’16, ‘labour is a
degaradtion’17, ‘reservation policy [which]places responsibility in the hands of the
unqualified.’18 But there is a marked difference between Naipaul’s treatment of the
problems of India and that of Adiga’s. The difference lies in terms of what Lisa Lau
calls:
Re-orientalism”(Modern Asian Studies, 2007:2) in the
sense that criticism comes not from orientalists, that is to
say, Western authors and scholars but from cosmopolitan
Indian authors who have a double vision of their own
culture: from inside and outside simultaneously as they
constitute themselves as self and other.19
The young adolescent protagonist of the novel pushed to the misery and
squalor of life has the knack to negotiate with the problems. His anger, frustrations,
and humiliations are controlled and guided by his attitude leading him finally to the
grandeur of life. Balram witnesses twin world of Delhi: ‘Men with Big Bellies, and
Men with Small Bellies. And, only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up.’20 He
chooses to be ‘an eater, someone with a big belly, and the novel tracks the way in
which this ambition plays out’21 signifying a kind of parodic subversion.
corresponding thereby to Breton’s notion of black humour which asserts such
subversions. In fact, Balram capitalizes on a factual understanding that the people,
particularly the poor, are not the beneficiary of burgeoning economy of India. This
understanding of being a deprived victim engenders in him the anger that gets
expressed through calm, poised, stoic humour. His anger is so intense that he
articulates it evoking a naïve humour which simultaneously registers the ironic
foregrounding of the murderer of his master, a rich man of the city. The unabashed
tonality of humour is too gripping when he says: ‘Even to think about this again
makes me so angry I might just go out and cut the throat of some rich man right man
right now.’22 He realizes that ‘…the history of the world is the history of a tenthousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor’23 and wonders ‘if only a
man could spit out his past so easily.’24
Even the humour that drips down the erotic innuendo would prevail with a
difference in Adiga’s The White Tiger. As a school boy, Balram would refer to a
cinema that showed films like ‘He Was a True Man, or We Opened Her Diary or
The Uncle Did It featuring golden haired women from America or lonely ladies from
Hongkong---.25 Adiga here derides the lewd erotic taste of Indians for films. Erotic
contexts are deftly handled and imbued with a sense of humour that points either to
an adolescent problem or a socio-political degeneration. For all such circumstances,
Adiga has conjured up a phrase, that is, ‘dip one’s beak into’—a phrase as much
efficacious at the surface level as at a deeper level when used as a metaphor. The
following excerpts from the numerous ones in the novel are observable in this
context:
Vijay’s family were pigherds, which meant they were the
lowest of the low, yet he had made it up in life. Somehow
he had befriended a politician. People said he had let the
politician deep his beak in his backside… Now it had been
a long time since I had dipped my beak into anything, sir,
and the pressure had built up. The girl would be so young—
seventeen or eighteen – and you know girls taste like at that
age, like watermelons. Any diseases, of body or mind, get
cured when you penetrate a virgin. These are known facts.26
The first-person narrative of The White Tiger draws a close parallel with
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in so far as it puts across a kind of
monologue in which the invisible audience seems to be participating in the
discussion. This make-believe participatory impression of the invisible audience
brings out the politics of the narrative to communicate a grave issue with lighter,
humorous overtones. The first –page excerpts from both the books offers a
comparable space wherein humour as a style of depicting a disturbing concern of
humanity oozes out effortlessly:
Mr. Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things
that can be said only in English…. In fact, each time when great
men like you visit our country I say it. Not that I have anything
against great men. In my way, sir, I consider myself one of your
kind.27
EXCUSE ME, SIR, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have
alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of
America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than
looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both
a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I
might offer you my services.28
The two books are replete with the plethora of examples that characterize the oblique
or lopsided view for a particular country, caste or community. Adiga’s indication is
towards
i) the people with snobbish privilege of English communicative ability over those
denied that linguistic skill
ii) the politics of English language in terms of the contexts of its usage ensuring the
unintelligibility of the riff raffs like Balram around.
Hamid also sparks off the humour engaging with language, which is once
again English, to convince the American invisible audience of the reliability and
credibility of a Pakistani Muslim. The small seemingly conversational passage
speaks volume of the relationship between Pakistan and America in the post twintower attack years. Adiga also counters the general perceptions of Muslims in an
equally seemingly conversational passage:
(By the way, Mr. Premier: have you noticed that all four of
the greatest poets in the world are Muslim? And yet all the
Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered head to toe in
black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up? It’s a
puzzle, isn’t it? If you ever figure these people out, send me
an e-mail.)29
What makes Adiga’s humour sharp is his consistent ironic tone which spells
out the inherent ambivalence of whatever he narrates. Even a re-creation of
Shakespearean rhetoric as the figurative rendering of a post -murder situation of his
master is not without his sardonic tone:
True, there was the matter of murder –which is wrong
thing to do, no question about it.It has darkened my soul.
All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India
won’t clean my hands again.30
These words of Balram are reminiscent of Queen Macbeth in Shakespearean
play, Macbeth where she says: ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
little hand.’31 This smart re-creation of Adiga leaves the judge portfolio at the 2008
Booker Prize ceremony impressed enough as the following compliment suggests:
It is about ambition through murder, but with a delicious
twist. Whereas Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are driven mad
by their crime, the hero of this book is only driven mad by
the fact that he hesitated and might not have committed his
crime.32
The smile or the laughter triggered through such tonal peculiarity is actually
suggestive of the utter hopelessness about any other situation addressed in the novel.
For instance, Balram smiling calmly along with the smile of the policemen in front
of the outraging brother of the boy killed by Balram-turned- Ashok, the
Entrepreneur’s driver is, in fact, a mark of identification with the situation of utter
hopelessness where nothing could be done to effect the essential positive change. So,
one laughs and laughs out desperately asserting one’s own positioning and
prirotising one’s own individual voice and choice. Humour is, thus, used as a
strategy to both confront the wrong on the part of the rich and get complicit in the
very wrong mocked on the part of the poor. The outspoken and disdainful tone of the
narrator seems to be appropriating and legitimizing the acts of immorality for both
the rich and the poor –for the rich as they are too immersed inebriated in the luxury
and power to be sensitive and upright, and for the poor as they are, as if, left with no
other option but to resort to crime. This desperation of the poor goes well with a
Sanskrit adage,i.e. ‘Bubhukshitam kim na karoti paapam’,which means that a hungry
man is given to all sorts of sin.
To conclude, The White Tiger offers a relishing story born of Adiga’s
superlative creativity dipped in a humour that smacks of a grimness of modern India.
It is a humour that converges on the frontiers of creation of a hero, an anti-hero and a
narrator of the story lent with intermingling of humour and horror. But, any grimness
with howsoever intensity is superseded by the mockingly playful style of Adiga that
transforms it into a great narrative.
*****