Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger : From Zoo to Jungle Lecture 2 Presentation

1. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: From Zoo to JungleLecture 2 Presentation E-mail – john.masterson@wits.ac.za Office - SH3011

2. How to access these presentations • Access the English 1 Blog via the following web-link • http://witsenglishi.wordpress.com

3. The White Tiger, p.50 • Stories of rottenness and corruption are always the best stories, aren’t they?

4. The White Tiger and Questions of Criminality What are the greatest crimes committed in the text and who are its greatest criminals?

5. Structure of text • Split into 7 Nights. • Consider presentation of time. • Balram occupying the spaces and working the hours others don’t/won’t. Symbolic significance? • Function of chapter endings – what impact on reader? • Consider the end of ‘The First Night’ • I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction of my village – and then I did something too disgusting to describe to you. Well, actually, I spat. Again and again. And then, whistling and humming, I went back down the hill. Eight months later, I slit Mr Ashok’s throat. (p.42)

6. Self-reflexive nature of narrative, p.47 • True, eventually Mr Ashok and I had a disagreement or two about an English term – income tax – and things began to sour between us, but that messy stuff comes later on in the story. Right now we’re still on the best of terms: we’ve just met, far from Delhi, in the city called Dhanbad.

7. Balram’s reflections on the mysterious nature of his narrative, p.113 • Remember, Mr Premier, the first time, perhaps as a boy, when you opened the bonnet of a car and looked into its entrails? ... remember how mysterious and magical everything seemed? When I peer into the portion of my story that unfolds in New Delhi, I feel the same way. If you ask me to explain how one event connects to another, or how one motive strengthens or weakens the next, or how I went from thinking this about my master to thinking that – I will tell you that I myself don’t understand these things. I cannot be certain that the story, as I will tell it, is the right story to tell. I cannot be certain that I know exactly why Mr Ashok died. It will be good for me to stop here. When we meet up again, at midnight , remind me to turn the chandelier up a bit. The story gets much darker from here.

8. Globalization and Outsourcing How and why do these two concerns inform The White Tiger as a whole? Consider the following images …

10. Bangalore and Outsourcing, p.38 • It is almost three in the morning. This is when Bangalore comes to life. The American workday is coming to an end, and mine is beginning in earnest. I have to be alert as all the call-centre girls and boys are leaving their offices for their homes. This is when I must be near the phone.

12. The Voices of Modern Bangalore, p.54 • Go to any pub or bar in Bangalore with your ears open and it’s the same thing you hear: can’t get enough call-centre workers, can’t get enough software engineers, can’t get enough sales managers. There are twenty, twenty-five pages of job advertisements in the newspaper every week. Things are different in the Darkness …

13. Bangalore’s Voice, pp.297-298 • I tried to hear Bangalore’s voice, just as I had heard Delhi’s. I went down M.G. Road and sat down at the Café Coffee Day … I had a pen and a piece of paper with me, and I wrote down everything I overheard. I completed that computer program in two and a half minutes. An American today offered me four hundred thousand dollars for my start-up and I told him, ‘That’s not enough!’ Is Hewlett-Packard a better company than IBM? Everything in the city, it seemed, came down to one thing. Outsourcing. Which meant doing things in India for Americans over the phone. Everything flowed from it – real estate, wealth, power, sex. So I would have to join this outsourcing thing, one way or another.

15. Mangalore and Outsourcing • Adiga - ‘How English literature shaped me’ – “The world has flooded into Mangalore. India’s great economic boom, the arrival of the internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between India and the world.” • From The White Tiger to Tiger Economies?

16. . • From the high growth driven by Asian tiger economies to the emergence of giants India and China, the region has continued to be a centre of immense activity … [Indian] Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with US President Barack Obama at a G20 meeting

17. Consider Structure of The White Tiger Beginning and Ending with reference to e-mail. Final line of novel = boss@whitetiger-technologydrivers.com

18. The White Tiger – Voice and Language, p.3 • “Mr Premier, Sir. Neither you nor I can speak English, but there are some things that can only be said in English.” • Consider this in relation to ‘politics of language’ debates in novel and beyond. • What is English the language of? Any chance of this being threatened?

19. Indication of division of critical opinion in relation to The White Tiger • Robbie B. H. Goh - • “What characterizes the narrative is the chilling frankness and simplicity with which Balram recounts his career of poverty and oppression, desperation and finally murder of his employer and theft of the fortune that sets him up in his successful business.”

20. Amitava Kumar • “Halwai’s voice sounds like a curious mix of an American teen and a middle-aged Indian essayist. I find Adiga’s villains utterly cartoonish, like the characters in Bollywood melodrama. However, it is his presentation of ordinary people that seems not only trite but also offensive.”

21. ChandrahasChoudhury • “What readers around the world frequently find instructive, fresh, and moving about Indian novels available to them in English, is often experienced by Indian readers as dull, clichéd, and superficial.”

22. Balram as “truth-teller,” p.4 • See, the lady on the radio said, ‘Mr Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to know the truth about Bangalore.’ My blood froze. If anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it’s me. How I became an entrepreneur …

23. India, China and Orientalism, p.5 • in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India’s past, present, and future … I read about your history in a book, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, that I found on the pavement, back in the days when I was trying to get some enlightenment by going through the secondhand book market in Old Delhi. • WHAT A F**KING JOKE!

24. Orientalism – Performing the Exotic, p.154 • It wasn’t his fault, what happened between them – I will insist on that, even in a court of law. He was a good husband, always coming up with plans to make her happy. On her birthday, for instance, he had me dress up as a maharaja, with red turban and dark cooling glasses, and serve them their food in this costume. I’m not talking of any ordinary home cooking, either – he got me to serve her some of that stinking stuff [pizza] that comes in cardboard boxes and drives all the rich absolutely crazy.

25. Strategies of Subversion? Performing the Part of the ‘Spiritual’ Servant?, p.90 • Having passed a temple – He touched me on the shoulder. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Balram.’ ‘So Balram here touched his eye as a mark of respect. The villagers are so religious in the Darkness.’ That seemed to have impressed the two of them, so I put my finger to my eye a moment later, again. ‘What’s that for, driver? I don’t see any temples around.’ ‘Er … we drove past a sacred tree, sir. I was offering my respects.’ ‘Did you hear that? They worship nature. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The two of them kept an eye open for every tree or temple we passed by, and turned to me for a reaction of piety – which I gave them, of course, and with growing elaborateness: first just touching my eye, then my neck, then my clavicle, and even my nipples.

26. Edward W. Said

28. Edward Said’s Introduction to Orientalism • I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities - to say nothing of historical entities - such locales, regions, geographical sectors as "Orient" and "Occident" are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.

29. Zadie Smith, White Teeth • Samad - ‘Please. Do me this one, great favour, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home – if you, if we, get back to our respective homes – if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,’ and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, ‘hold your judgement. If you are told “they are all this” or “they do this” or “their opinions are these”, withhold your judgement until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call “India” goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.’

30. How and why do certain ‘Orientalist’ ways of thinking persist today? Consider contemporary media representations and tourist discourse

31. The White Tiger and Tourist Discourse, p.15 • One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about the thing. Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds of American tourists come each year to take photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or Benaras, and our prime minister will no doubt describe it that way to you, and urge you to take a dip in it. No! – Mr Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.

32. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual • [The intellectual] is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted … The intellectual does so on the basis of universal principles: that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.

33. Satire and/as Subversion? , p.40 • (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.) • Who/what is really being attacked here?

34. Edward Said’s 2003 Preface to Orientalism • In the demonization of an unknown enemy, for whom the label “terrorist” serves the general purpose of keeping people stirred up and angry, media images command too much attention and can be exploited at times of crisis and insecurity of the kind that the post-9/11 period has produced. Speaking both as an American and as an Arab I must ask my reader not to underestimate the kind of simplified view of the world that a relative handful of Pentagon civilian elites have formulated for US policy in the entire Arab and Islamic worlds, a view in which terror, pre-emptive war, and unilateral regime change – backed up by the most bloated military budget in history – are the main ideas debated endlessly and impoverishingly by a media that assigns itself the role of producing so-called “experts” who validate the government’s general line.