Oppression By Any Other Name...

In the interview printed with his novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga cites Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright as major influences on the text. Not having read Baldwin, I can’t speak to his influence. Ellison and Wright’s major works, The Invisible Man and Native Son, I have read, and I see their ghostly traces throughout The White Tiger. Traces, because their influences seem to appear almost in passing, needing to be tracked back to the source, even if the source seems obvious at first. Overt clues, if you will. Ghostly, because the evidence of these influences starts to drift away under too-close observation.

Clearly, an immediate connection can be made between Adiga’s Balram, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Wright’s Bigger Thomas. Each character suffers systematic oppression, which reveals itself economically and socially. Each takes unprecedented, and extremely violent, measures to escape that oppression. But there, the major similarities end.

Balram’s story has a whiff of the farcical about it, with scatological humor and expletives strewn liberally about. Any story in which a man falls face-first into sewage with his pants around his ankles because of body-toppling guffaws cannot be taking itself too seriously. We don’t see these moments of humor, particularly low humor, in Ellison or Wright. Their atmospheres are decidedly gloomier, as are their characters’ self-reflective moments. While Balram relates his prior complacence with the oppressive life of a servant, the Invisible Man and Bigger rant against it.

And yet, there is a sense that all of Balram’s insights into the rooster coop system that is his India have not gained him the knowledge and autonomy he yearns for. Despite being an entrepreneur, despite no longer massaging the feet of his masters, he cannot escape a system which rewards only those who know how to work it. It is telling that Balram can use his shiny silver Macintosh to peruse the details of his own Wanted poster, but not to google the name of the fourth most important poet in history. India’s burgeoning access to technology is but one more way to play the system, not subvert it by reading poetry and discovering the “secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war [with the rich] on terms favorable to himself” (216).

The irony of Balram’s poetic ignorance comes full circle when he faints while watching the white tiger at the zoo, pacing back and forth in his cage, “walking in the same line, again and agin--from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell” (237). Balram’s insight, that his own life is no better than the caged tiger’s, echoes the undertones of Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnet "The Panther." The poem’s final stanza describe the panther’s gaze:

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhange der Pupilles
sich lautlos auf. -Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

In this moment, the panther takes in an image, just as the tiger gazes into Balram’s eyes. The image vanishes, travels through the panther’s tense musculature, and ceases to be in the caged animal’s heart. Balram’s tiger itself vanishes before his eyes, then Balram follows suit by fainting, falling into the dark earth and vanishing from himself. His moment of clarity gives him the resolution to act drastically in order to change his life. Yet he remains ignorant of this moment’s poetic precedent, and Rilke’s command that in the face of art, “You must change your life.”

But Balram soldiers on, unabashed by his ignorance, and exhausting the use-value of every drop of knowledge he does possess. This trait put me in mind of a real, live, breathing person who has had to find a way with relatively limited information about the world. Planet Money, an NPR podcast and blog about various economic issues, recently broadcast a story about “The Paradox of Oil” in Angola. Their interview subjects were Gregory Schiedler, an American working for a foreign oil company in Luanda, and Minguito, the young local man who sells Gregory gum every day. Minguito does not like his job, and would prefer one in construction, which is almost exclusively a Chinese trade in Angola. When asked, he does not or cannot name any other work he would like. Like Balram, he seems to know the system is broken, that he could do better for himself given the opportunity. But what those opportunities might be? The question has no answer.

Even Balram’s great entrepreneurial venture does not represent any great opportunity or new way of living (which is to say, making a living). He starts a cab company with set contracts, hardly a ground-breaking idea, and even has to sabotage other companies already providing the same service in order to get his own off the ground. Yet the chandelier in his spacious office has blinded Balram to the misnomer of entrepreneur he continuously applies to himself. Similarly, through no fault of his own, Minguito seems blind to the possibility of a life not paid for by selling gum and working construction.

But what are we to do? Does The White Tiger give us a take-home lesson in how to begin dealing with the morass of corruption, injustice, oppression, suppression that we find in India and Angola, not to mention right here in the U.S. of A.? Other than being aware of the morass, and its stultifying effects on the human spirit, I’m not sure there is a lesson. I do know, when I listen to Minguito, I am bothered that he is referred to as a boy, although he says he is about seventeen or eighteen. And perhaps, that needling sense of discomfort with imposed labels, be they ‘businessman’ or ‘boy,’ is a step in the right direction. A direction which is shaped by Bigger’s anger towards the man, the Invisible Man’s refusal to play along, Balram’s belief in himself, and the wishes I wish Minguito will someday have, as well as the knowledge that his wishes are not for me to choose.