Read
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga · 2008
fiction
The cage holds because the people inside it are taught to guard it.
About the book
Narrated by Balram Halwai, a driver from a poor village who tells the story of his rise to becoming an entrepreneur, including the crime that made it possible. It is a sharp, dark satire of caste, corruption, and inequality in a fast-changing India, and it won the Booker Prize in 2008.
About the author
Aravind Adiga is an Indian-Australian writer educated at Columbia and Oxford. The White Tiger was his first novel.
Key ideas
- The Rooster Coop is Adiga's image for how the poor are kept trapped, guarding their own cage out of duty and fear.
- Two Indias sit side by side: the light of the new economy and the darkness most people still live in.
- Escape comes at a moral cost, and the narrator never pretends otherwise.
- Corruption and servitude are drawn as a system, not as personal failings.