Books - Fact not fiction

Shobhan Saxena


Guilt is a terrible thing. It makes one suspicious. It makes you see conspiracies everywhere. And the guilt of killing a man you call your "second f
ather" could be huge. So, even as he rolls in money and lives his dream in New India, Balram Halwai can't get rid of the bloodstains on his conscience.

His personal guilt - of realizing his ambition through murder - turns political, and this morally bankrupt man confesses to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, telling the story of his rise from the swamp to Silicon Valley. But, it becomes a story of the darkness that is India, where an election is "like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra", where the new economy means shiny call-centre workers sitting in air-conditioned towers overlooking filthy shanties, and where an entrepreneur can survive the slime and grime of bureaucracy only by greasing palms.

Just when we thought that the world was raving about the economic miracle of India, a brutal confession by The
White Tiger protagonist exposes the rot in the three pillars of modern India - democracy, enterprise and justice - reducing them to the tired clichés of a faltering nation. And the author of this tragic tale grabs the prestigious Booker, with the head of the jury, Michel Portillio, calling it a work that shows the "dark side of India - a new territory".

For most Indians, there is nothing new about this territory. For them, there is nothing novel about Western tourists looking at India as a dustbowl, where death hangs in the air like a stale smell and a glass of water can kill you with diarrhoea in minutes. Indian readers are familiar with the works of Western writers who travelled through India and saw nothing but the broken bodies of beggars, buzzing flies, dirty drains and famished faces.

What's new - for prosperous, post-liberalization India - is the old suspicion that the West is holding up The White Tiger as a mirror to us. It's telling us that India is not shining and, despite its claims of a booming economy, it is still "the near-heart of darkness", which it has been since time immemorial. Should we smell a conspiracy here?

"There is no conspiracy. The present Booker jury thought it was a good book and it got the award. A different jury might have given the award to an equally good book on the bright side of India," says William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal and City of Djinns. Left-leaning Australian writer and broadcaster John Pilger is even more dismissive, calling the Booker "only one award that represents the views of a clutch of mostly elite, London-centric, conservative-liberal judges".

But that's not how many Indians see Aravind Adiga's success. They were euphoric when Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai won the Booker. This time, there is a stunned silence: for many of us, our worst fears have come true - the West is once again using our poverty to humiliate us. Seeing the award as a stamp of disapproval on India's poor social indicators, a recently published Indian author calls The White Tiger "a tourist's account of India". He raises questions about the intentions of Adiga, who grew up in Australia and went to elite universities in England and the US.

Reality may be a question of perspective, but in an age where history is being written like fiction and fiction is being read like history, the Booker for The White Tiger might be the West's way of telling us that it's not been thinking about us the way we thought it was. "Everybody knows the truth," says a Mumbai-based US diplomat dealing with trade and business. "We don't need a novel to tell us what's wrong with India. It's visible to us every day." To India's middle-class elite, says Dalrymple, things like hunger may not matter, but they are "obvious to Westerners". "There should be more of this kind of book," he says. However, Pilger believes "the most important way to tell India's dark stories is through journalism and not just fiction".

But in the age of embedded journalists, it is argued that only the novel can tell the true stories of countries torn apart by conflict. Thousands of reports coming out of Afghanistan failed to do what Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner did for the country - chronicling contemporary history through the eyes of an insider. The truth about Iraq, it is being said, will be captured by a novel written by an Iraqi. And that's where The White Tiger falls short.

Even as India struggles with conflicts of caste, class and religion, Adiga's story may remain the view of a professional observer, who failed to see anything good about the country he travelled through as a journalist, always recording and never experiencing anything real. It could be mere suspicion, but it takes care of our guilt