And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog.

The novel is the one bright book of life. — D.H. Lawrence

The over-politicised Nobel is a demonstration of how one can get away without honouring great art for being just that, great art — or how one can ignore it altogether; the Booker itself raises eyebrows. Aravind Adiga has succeeded not with sweetness but a strong light. Which is not to take away from those others who didn’t win. It is to say that Adiga makes us view the vortex of the storm, without himself or ourselves being there. For reader and author alike, at the vortex the centre doesn’t hold; and yet the vortex the artist must make anew for us every time. The first-person narrative of The White Tiger doesn’t merely keep the author invisible, it constructs a sociological discourse without once ever sounding or being didactic. Adiga doesn’t spell anything out, although his narrator may seem to. But the narrator is not the author’s proxy. We are asked to judge him too.

Some commentators have written that The White Tiger is a book about Bharat, as opposed to India. They are wrong. Adiga re-creates the India of Light and the India of Darkness, but the novel is about that nuanced and paradoxical point where the two meet and overlap. Its strength arises from many things — the intelligent and original reworking of otherwise familiar and overworked motifs, a clever narrative strategy and context, a ruthlessly unsentimental tone, the unconscious inspiration from Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright without betraying the anxiety of influence. It comes close to the Indian novel in English from a debutant novelist that steers clear of both a faux socialist concern and the celebratory idiocy of India Shining or Rising. The White Tiger is the debut Indian novel about the “new” India in our de facto father tongue that we’ve waited for and had despaired of ever reading. It makes italicising redundant. It trashes those photogenic stories of poverty for the West. It speaks in a voice that Adiga could only have achieved through sensitive observation and analysis, by creating and killing and resurrecting the narrator-protagonist in his head a million times. It is not a novel that was written because the author decided he had to write something to market “incredible India” and pocket a Booker as fruit for his labour. Another writer of Indian origin who won the Booker in recent memory made some critics despair at the banality and success of that tradition. Adiga’s win gives hope instead. The pain of creation is something a sensitive reader should feel reading a good writer.

... contd.