Aravind Adiga: ‘Life goes on as before’
Aravind Adiga talks about the inspiration behind The White Tiger
Congratulations on being longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008. Has the news sunk in yet?
It's a great thrill to be longlisted for the Booker. Especially alongside Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie. But I live in Mumbai, where not many people know of the Man Booker Prize; I'm still standing in long queues and standing in over-packed local trains in the morning and worrying about falling ill from unsafe drinking water. Life goes on as before.
This is your first novel but you're known for your journalism. Has it been a smooth transition to writing literary fiction?
I've wanted to be a novelist since I was a boy. I studied English literature - a lot of Elizabethan drama - at university, and wanted to write a novel about India that would be vivid, political, and funny, like The Duchess of Malfi set in Delhi. While I was figuring out how to do this, journalism paid the bills - and also gave me a chance to travel throughout India (and the rest of South Asia). When you work for a mainstream publication, even a very good one like TIME, there is a limit to what you can put into your stories; there is so much you see or observe that goes not into your official reporter's diary but into another, secret diary-which became The White Tiger.
What inspired you to write The White Tiger?
The novel began as an experiment of a kind. Visitors to India from South Africa or Latin America often asked me why there seemed to be so little crime in India, given the vast (and growing) disparity in wealth between the classes - a condition that had led to much higher levels of crime in their countries. Why was it, I began to wonder, that even though rich people in India keep so many servants, and the servants have such regular and intimate access to their master's households, that the servants in India, by and large, stay so honest? What keeps the class system in place - and what are the conditions under which it might start to crumble? I began to think of a servant in Delhi who would, cold-bloodedly, steal from his master - and do something even worse to him. And imagining what that servant would think, and feel, and do, I began making notes that turned into this novel.
The White Tiger has been described as a new vision of India with one reviewer calling it 'a witty parable of India's changing society'. How do you feel about that?
The White Tiger is not a political or social statement: it's a novel - meant to provoke and entertain its readers. The narrator is a tainted one - a murderer - and his views are certainly not mine. But there is something I'd like my readers to think about. I'm increasingly convinced that the servant-master system, the bed rock of middle-class Indian life, is coming apart: and its unravelling will lead to greater crime and instability. The novel is a portrait of a society that is on the brink of unrest.
What made you choose to write an epistolary novel? What makes it work as a vehicle for this particular story?
This isn't an epistolary novel: there are no real letters involved. The narrator is lying in his small room in Bangalore in the middle of the night, talking out aloud about the story of his life. It's a story he can never tell anyone-because it involves murder-in real life; now he tells it when no one is around. Like all Indians, who are obsessed (a colonial legacy, probably) with the outsider's gaze, he is stimulated to think about his country and society by the imminent arrival of a foreigner, and an important one. So he talks about himself and his country in the solitude of his room.
What book have you read recently that you would recommend?
Catherine O'Flynn's What was Lost. I met the author briefly at an Oxford book festival this year, and was struck by what a friendly and modest person she was. I had no idea, until I got back to India, that she was a best-selling author and one of the most respected young British writers. I'm thinking now I should visit Birmingham sometime to find out if everyone there is as well behaved as Ms. O'Flynn.
Aravind Adiga was born in Madras, India, in 1974, and completed his schooling in India and Australia. He studied English literature at Columbia University, New York, and Magdalen College, Oxford. He worked in India as a journalist for TIME magazine from 2003 to 2005; his work has also appeared in British newspapers like the Financial Times and the Independent. The White Tiger is his first novel. He lives in Mumbai.
