M. L. SALGANIK, Knight Commander of the Padma Shri Order
The 2008 Booker Prize went to the thirty-three-year-old Indian writer Aravind Adiga for his novel "The White Tiger". Aravind Adiga became the fifth Indian to win the Booker Prize in its forty-year history. His predecessors were W. S. Naipaul (1971), who later became a Nobel laureate, Salman Rushdie (1981), who received the Booker Prize in 1993, Arundhati Roy (1997) and Kiran Desai (2006).
Aravind Adiga was born on October 23, 1974 in Madras (now Chennai), the son of a surgeon who emigrated to Australia when his son was 15 years old. He studied first in Sydney, at the Graduate School of Agriculture, then studied English literature at Columbia College, Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1997, after which he continued his studies at Magdalene College, Oxford University.
Although Adiga dreamed of becoming a writer from childhood, he had to start his working life as a business correspondent for the Financial Times. Then, for three years, starting in 2003, he was Time Magazine's South-East Asia correspondent and lived in Delhi. Aravind Adiga currently lives in Mumbai.
Speaking at the award ceremony, Michael Portillo, Chairman of the jury, said::
"It was difficult for the jury to make a choice, because the final list included very strong candidates. In the end, "White Tiger" won, as the jury members found the novel equally shocking and fascinating. The novel coped with an incredibly difficult task: to win and maintain the reader's sympathy for the uncompromising scoundrel. White Tiger benefits greatly from presenting burning social issues and important global trends in a strikingly witty way... In White Tiger, India is presented from an unusual angle, and the novel itself has great literary merit."
The image of the " uncompromising scoundrel "brought the chairman of the jury to an unexpected comparison of the" White Tiger "with" Macbeth": unlike the Macbeth couple, who are tormented by the thought of what they have done, the" White Tiger " is tormented by the fact that he could never have decided on villainy.
At a press conference after receiving the prize, A. Adiga spoke about what motivated-and gave him the material - to write "White Tiger":
"The experience of my return to India. I lived and studied outside India from the age of 15 to 28. In 2003, I started working as a correspondent for Time magazine, I had to travel a lot, and I discovered a previously completely unknown side of India."
That's right: whoever opened the water wasn't a fish. It can be argued that the biography of Adiga made him an amphibian, and this gives him a certain advantage both over fish living in their native element, and over land dwellers who are alien to water.
Here he returns to the land of his fathers, sees firsthand the mind-boggling difference in the way of life of the haves and have-nots, but he, an amphibian, is struck not so much by the gap between them as by the lack of protest from the lower classes and the complacency of the upper classes, their confidence that this is the order of things.
He lives in Delhi, he naturally comes into close contact with the middle class, more precisely, with the social structure of "masters-servants", and is surprised that the "masters" behave as if nothing has changed in India, as if it is in the nature of things: a person from the middle class is born to he was served, and a man from the lower ranks - to serve him.
Meanwhile, there is globalization, the Indian economy is booming, but the poor do not get anything from it, and the abyss is widening literally before our eyes!
During a trip to America, Adiga says: Sahni of Brooklyn Rail:
"In India, it has always been like this: if you are poor and someone is incredibly rich, then it is just a fact of life-like the heat: you can complain, but there is no point in protesting. Although most of India's population has always lived in poverty, crime has always been relatively low. But now the bonds of community, caste, and family are loosening. And there are a lot of temptations that you often see-
they create acute dissatisfaction and anger among the poor..."
The amphibian has a question: why is the crime rate in India significantly lower than in New York, South Africa or Latin America, where poverty is the main cause of high crime? Adiga is convinced that new lines of tension are forming in Indian society, and he feels that class-based protest is maturing for the first time - and he cannot understand why the middle class is not noticing this.
White Tiger is the first Indian novel about the truly tectonic shifts caused by the pressure of globalization on the" incorrigibly hierarchical society " of India, built on the caste system, for thousands of years (not centuries!) which provided the country with stability due to its conjugation with the system of the universe - no more and no less.
Aravind Adiga was the first to attempt to explore through art the profound changes in the social structure and mentality that the country is experiencing. The central figure of the novel, he made a man from the "lower classes", one of those who are bypassed by the prosperity of the last decade. According to statistics, they make up about two-thirds of the population of India. As a metaphor for their lives, Adiga made "Darkness", which is opposed by the" Light " of economic prosperity.
In a conversation with X. Sahni the writer revealed the genesis of this metaphor:
"One night in Calcutta, I was talking to a group of Muslim rickshaw drivers from Bihar, and when I asked them if it would be easier to work in the fields, even as a labourer, than to spend so much time in the city, one of them told me: It seems to you that we live in mud and darkness, but for us it is a city of light. At home, in the country, that's where the darkness is."
"THE STORY OF MY LIFE"
"White Tiger" - a novel in letters. For seven nights in a row, Balram Halvai, the White Tiger, writes them to Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in the privacy of his firm's huge, Bollywood movie-opulent office in Bangalore, the heart of India's Silicon Valley. After hearing on the radio about the upcoming arrival of the Chinese premier in Bangalore, and his desire to meet with local entrepreneurs and learn directly from them how they came to be successful, Balram Halvai decides to tell him about Indian entrepreneurship - "through the story of my life".
"The lady on the radio has just explained everything," he writes, " it turns out that you, the Chinese, have overtaken us in everything, only with entrepreneurs you are not good. And in our country, even though we have poor drinking water, electricity, sewerage, public transport, hygiene, discipline, courtesy rules or punctuality, we have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs, that is, we, created all these outsourcing firms, which now, in fact, run America."
He continues:"Out of respect for the freedom of the Chinese people, and also in the belief that now that our former master, a white man, has ruined himself with sodomy, mobile phones and drugs, yellow and black people are responsible for the future of the world, I offer you the truth about Bangalore free of charge."
Balram Halvai tells the Prime Minister that although he was born in Darkness, he managed to rise to the Light thanks to his own efforts and "an act of entrepreneurship":
"Please note, Your Excellency, India is two countries in one: there is an India of Light and an India of Darkness... The ocean brings light to my country. Every place near the ocean on the map of India lives in prosperity. But the river brings darkness to India - the black river...
What black river am I writing about - what river of Death, whose banks are saturated with thick, dark, sticky mud that sucks in everything that grows on it, suffocates and does not allow anything to develop?
Of course, about Mother Ganga, the daughter of the Vedas, the river of illumination, protecting us all, breaking the chain of endless births. Where this river flows , the whole area is Darkness."
And warns the Chinese premier:
"Don't bathe in the Ganges unless you want a mouthful of shit, straw, sodden human remains, carrion, and seven different types of industrial acids."
Then he tells about himself: he was born in the village of Lakshmangarh, his father was a rickshaw driver and died early from an occupational disease, tuberculosis. His mother soon followed. So he doesn't know what name his parents gave him: at home, they just called him Munna, baby. The village teacher had given him a balram, and the headman had put down his birth year later when he was collecting votes for the election. "You're already 18? Don't you know? All right, let's assume so."
About his native village, located near Bodh Gaya, the famous place where the Buddha found enlightenment, the hero of the novel speaks unflatteringly:
"I doubt that the Buddha passed through Lakshmangarh, as the people say. I personally think that he should have run as fast as he could through this village and run away without looking back."
It wasn't that the idea of running away without looking back didn't immediately occur to him-it was just that there was nothing she could eat.
First Balram took a job cleaning tables and helping out in the kitchen of the village tearoom. They took him because he is from the halvai caste, makers of sweets (from the well-known word "halva"). They were kicked out for stealing and lying, and even the owner disgraced the whole village. With great difficulty, I persuaded an old driver from a neighboring town to take him as an apprentice - at first he resisted, thinking that halvai did not belong behind the wheel. Let him make sweets.
Later, in a letter to the Chinese premier, Balram found it necessary to explain to him what the caste system is in India.
CASTE IS DESTINY
"Halvai, this is my caste - my destiny. In the Dark, anyone who hears my name will immediately know all about me. But if we are Halwai, why did my father not cook sweets, but was a rickshaw driver? And why did I grow up skinny, black and sly, and not plump, smooth and smiling, as a child should be brought up on sweets?
I explain that when our country was the greatest and richest in the world, it was organized as a zoo - as a clean, good zoo, where everyone has their own place. Goldsmiths here, shepherds there.
Halvais prepare sweets. Shepherds watch the cows. Untouchables clean up shit. Women walk around with their heads covered.
And then, on August 15, 1947, when the British left, these politicians from Delhi opened all the cages, the animals attacked each other, and the law of the jungle replaced the order of the zoo...
My father's father was probably a real halvai, but someone from another caste took over his shop - with the help of the police. And my father didn't have the strength to fight back, so he ended up in the mud, fell to the level of a rickshaw, and I lost the fate of fat, smooth and smiling.
In short, there were a thousand castes in India in the old days, but now there are only two: Big Bellies and Skinny Bellies. And only two fates: eat yourself or be devoured."
After making his way as a chauffeur, Balram managed to get into the house of a local rich man. And when he bought a car for his son Ashok, who had returned to his homeland from America with an American wife, he found himself driving a brand-new Honda City - having sat out the former driver:
- Who are you by caste? Balram was asked.
- Halvai.
"Drinking?"
"They don't drink in our caste.
"Will you cook when you're not driving?"
"Sir, I'm a great cook and I can make sweets, and I've been doing it for years...
"Amazing," Ashok laughed. "It's only possible in India to have a chauffeur make you sweets. Start tomorrow."
So Balram Halvai broke out of the hopelessness of Darkness into the Light of city life. Besides, I drove into it driving a Honda City - I didn't spend the night under bridges, I didn't go hungry, like hundreds of thousands of people who come to cities in search of money. He went straight to Gurgaon, the most glamorous of Delhi's suburbs, and in the morning took the elevator up to the master's apartment, on the 13th floor of the marble-clad new rabbit-house for servants, where he was settled.
The owner treated him well, even sometimes protected him from the nagging and whims of his wife. However, when the owner drunkenly ran over a street urchin, Ashok does not hesitate to shift the blame to Balram. Balram is told to sign a written confession certified by the family lawyer in attendance... Balram's grandmother, as evidenced by her signature.
He did not go to jail because the police did not receive a report about the death of a homeless child.
The master feels no remorse: Balram is a nobody, a servant, one of a large, easily renewable household. Balram does not protest, nor does it occur to him to run away from undeserved punishment, or to tell the truth in court. He takes the master's will for granted: this is the way life works, the rich can do anything, the poor can't do anything, whether in a dark village or in a city shining with lights.
But only in the Darkness of rural life did the distinction between the haves and the poor have a religious sanction, a justification in the form of karma - excluding the very idea of injustice, because everything depends on the worthy or unworthy behavior of a person in past lives. In the Light, however, this is somehow not remembered...
Three months later, Balram Halvai stabbed Ashok to death and fled, taking with him a red suitcase with cash that Ashok was going to drop off to an influential government official.
Balram might not have dared to do this "entrepreneurial act" in the Dark, but the Light filled him with a determination to break out of the Darkness at all costs. And here he understood the main thing: The Darkness is ruled by a traditional hierarchy, and the Light is ruled by entrepreneurship and self-reliance. He saw the Light and knew it was good. And I discovered the difference between Bangalore and Lakshmangarh:
"You see, Mr. Jiabao, it's not that when you come to Bangalore, you see only morality and decency. The city has its own bandits and politicians. But here, if a person wants to behave well, they can. In Laksmangarh, he doesn't have that choice. And that's the difference between this India and that one-the choice."
But the price of choosing is murder...
HE'S A WHITE TIGER
The tiger is supposed to be a brindle color. The white tiger is an anomaly. It is born white due to a defect in the gene responsible for the pigment. Nature compensates for the defect: the white tiger is larger, stronger, and fiercer than its normal counterparts. It is also noted that the white tiger does not respond well to taming.
"He is still a white tiger, but in twenty years' time he may be just another tiger, "Aravind Adiga tells the Times, describing his novel as" a portrait of a society on the verge of turmoil."
The author of "White Tiger" in all his interviews, articles and public speeches never tires of repeating that he wrote not a political treatise, but a work of fiction, and everything he wrote is fiction:
"There isn't a single real character in White Tiger. But everything-down to the smallest detail - is built on the substrate of Indian reality. Filthy hospitals, wine shops, prostitutes in bazaars - everything is real, I saw it when I wandered around India, wandering through railway stations, bus stations, slums. I joined in conversations and listened to what was being said around me - there was always a low growl or growl coming from the middle-class underground, but no one was listening to the hum. Balram is something you would know if one day the pipes and taps of your house started talking."
Accordingly, Balram Halvai does not have a real prototype either. Based on his observations and communication experience, Aravind Adiga built a composite image of a man from the lower classes, doomed by birth to lifelong poverty and disenfranchisement, but in his hero the author enlarged some features. The writer needed a character who had no respect for the traditional foundations or institutions of a democratic state, and who was determined to get to the top "from the bottom of the pile" at any cost. A servant who can kill his master in cold blood, steal money, evade the police, and deliberately assume a new role.
This image had to be extremely authentic, so that the reader would not doubt its authenticity: "It was important to me that my hero spoke in the voice of a poor, not quite ordinary, but still typical Indian, with his humor, with his anger, with his sarcasm and with his ability to appreciate beauty," says the author.
writer to English journalist Scott Simon.
Therefore, in the final version of the novel, which was initially written in the third person, Adiga made Balram Halvai the narrator, in order to present the reader with life as it is seen, understood and explained by the White Tiger himself.
His Balram Halvai is smart and adventurous, assertive and confident. He's a great judge of people and knows how to exploit their weaknesses. Corruption, embezzlement, hypocrisy of politicians, arbitrariness of the powerful and those in power, known to him from a young age, he perceives as the norm of life. He is not a fighter for justice, but for his own well-being. A complete individualist and a complete pragmatist, ready to live according to the laws of the modern world: how he understands them. He has no doubt that he understands them correctly: "I am tomorrow!" he declares.
The White Tiger's path from Darkness to Light is the path from the Bihar wilderness to Bangalore. Adiga did not accidentally choose these geographical coordinates of the career of his scandalous hero. Bihar and Bangalore are the poles of modern Indian reality, the vector of development of the country in the last decade: the state of Bihar, the most backward in India by all indicators, which received the nickname of the Cow Belt, and Bangalore - the pride and hope of the country, the heart of its Silicon Valley.
INVISIBLE PEOPLE
In response to the obligatory question: which writer influenced you? Aravind Adiga names three African-Americans - Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright-whose books opened America's eyes to the reality of a nation divided along racial lines.
Judging by " White Tiger, "the impact of Ellison's novel" The Invisible Man, " which opens with the phrase, was the strongest.: "I am invisible simply because they refuse to see me." The novel appeared in 1952, a year later Ellison was awarded the National Prize - the civil rights movement was taking its first steps, Martin Luther King had not yet become a priest, no one could have imagined that in a little more than half a century America would have a black president.
When you drive through Delhi or its elegant suburbs, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Noida, interspersed with five-star hotels, banks, offices, entertainment centers and shopping galleries, you can see clusters of huts over which rags fly on ropes, and dirty children swarm in the dust. In this samostroi live the "newcomers" from the villages: construction workers, movers, rickshaws, cleaners, gardeners, watchmen, car mechanics, servants, messengers, peddlers... They are lucky - others sleep right on the streets.
"I left Harlem, but I'm still surrounded by Invisible People. We are of the same race, and their skin is the same color as mine, but I can't see them, " Adiga writes in the English newspaper Independent shortly after the publication of The White Tiger. "If you come to Delhi, I will tell you,' In this city, people sit down to dinner late.' Thousands of people-workers, rickshaws, beggars-sleep on the sidewalks wrapped in rags at nine in the evening, filling them to the curb, and I will tell you as I drive by: "I have never seen a person in Delhi go to bed before midnight. It's a city of late-night entertainment." And what is invisible to me will become invisible to you. Until the day when the Invisible Man says with his fists: "You see me first!"
The middle class does not see them, even though they live side by side with them and constantly see how rich and complacent they live. Invisibles are necessary for its comfort, but there are many of them, this cheap labor is inexhaustible and replenishable, so it is not noticed.
"THE GREAT MIDDLE CLASS"
India's middle class does not live without servants. In the era of the formation of the middle class, back in colonial times, he imitated the manners of the colonialists, then it turned into a status symbol. And it has been preserved to this day, when the homes of wealthy citizens are filled with household appliances-washing machines and dishwashers, refrigerators, microwaves, and so on.
In high-rise new buildings of rapidly growing Indian cities, servants ' quarters are necessarily provided, however, as in state apartments provided to senior officials. In middle-class neighborhoods, servants arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, serving several families. Sometimes poor families hire teenagers, almost children, who spend the night in the same place where they work - but do not use the master's facilities. Sometimes they send out servants from the villages, or bring in poor village relatives who live wherever they can. The servant works as long as the owners order, gets weekends off when the owners want to let go.
The middle class, which is huge in size, has been the main beneficiary of the economic boom, and it is getting richer and growing at the expense of those who have managed to take advantage of the rapid development of IT (information technology), which has become the engine of Indian progress over the past decade.
Among the" recruits " to the middle class are many young people from the poor-and not only urban, but also rural, who managed to get a technical education at the cost of truly superhuman efforts. "Success stories", adored by the Indian media, are the purest truth, each one becomes a role model for hundreds of thousands of young people - dozens make their way up. Joining the middle class, they happily adopt its way of life, first of all they acquire servants. It is hard to imagine a young programmer - Japanese or French - who would start with this, but India is a special country.
In the old days, generations of servants often served generations of wealthy citizens, becoming almost household members - memoirs and fiction have captured images of loyal Indian Savelichs, Khitrovans Osipov and even Firs. But times have changed, and with them the character of the middle class, and the attitude of the owners to the servants.
The medium is the message itself, as the media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously put it. New technologies saturating India carry the mentality of an individual.-
lisma, which oppresses the collectivist mentality of India: caste, clan, or family type. A survey conducted by a group of young IT professionals showed that the vast majority of young people cite money and personal success as the motivation for choosing a profession.
The renewing middle class is increasingly imbued with a new ideology, becoming the bearer of a new mentality: it openly strives for money and only for money, no longer hiding behind the manifest idealism that was characteristic of it before. The" new Indians " are characterized by manifest consumerism, status demonstrations, and a dismissive attitude toward inferiors.
And what about the lower ones? What is the attitude of servants to their owners? The servants steal, if they can, and get away with it as best they can, but they don't protest. What kind of protest? It's good that the job was found.
"There is a gap between rich and poor in India, but there is no conscious ideology of protest in India, "Adiga tells the Sunday Times.
Not yet. But Balram Halvai, a Bangalore-based entrepreneur, has nightmares:
"I dream that I got cold feet and let Mr. Ashok go, that I'm still in Delhi, that I'm still a servant - but then I wake up. No, I did it! I killed him!"
WHO ARE THE PROS AND CONS
As you might expect, "The White Tiger" immediately attracted attention (the Booker Prize-and even for the first novel!), but the sharp response that it received and the heat of controversy around it-this has nothing to do with the award.
The Western reader is certainly interested in the novel, but the interest is generally predictable: an unusual image of India, written with talent (inevitable comparisons with Salman Rushdie), India without exotics, etc.
India was shocked by the novel - reading India, that is, the middle class, because only they read books in India.
At first, there were indignant responses: Adiga, of course, was accused of denigrating everything Indian, of vilifying Hinduism, of trying to flatter the West and lack of patriotism. However, some of the indignants still recognized the merits of the "White Tiger". The Indian Express newspaper published a letter from its reader: "At one level, "White Tiger" can simply be dismissed as another denigration of India. The author denounces everything Indian and attacks Indian vices-the caste system, poverty, the gap between rich and poor, etc. - which are already quite criticized by many Indian writers who write in English. When you read a novel, you sometimes feel uneasy because you are an Indian, and sometimes you feel uneasy because you are an Indian and you are reading it. But, unfortunately, every time you close the book, the desire to find out what's next makes you open it again. This is the power of the White Tiger. The novel captures and captivates..."
Aravind Adiga simply dismisses the accusations of defamation and unpatriotic behavior: "This is the reality of life for most Indians, so it is important to write about it, and not just about the 5% of the population of my country who are doing well. I don't know what could be more patriotic than to demand a better share for two - thirds of my compatriots," he replies to his accusers.
The writer claims to have written a novel that is necessary for India - and timely: "Literature can make readers react to what is happening around them, and now this is exactly what India needs, where rapid changes are upsetting traditional hierarchy systems, but there is little written about it, "Adiga tells the Guardian, citing the example of such writers like Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens, "whose works helped France and England understand their social ills."
Niranjana Roy, who runs the online literary magazine Kitabhana, recognising the literary merits of White Tiger, doesn't see the novel's innovation: "Adiga wrote a great book, and his Balram Halvai will now stay with us. But every well-read Indian knows that Adiga is far from the first to look where-as Western reviewers of the White Tiger believe-Indian writers did not look."
You can argue with her opinion-Adiga is still the first.
Indeed, there has been a tradition of compassionate portrayal of the poor and disadvantaged in Indian literature since the 19th century. Later, the theme of bypassed fate was also heard in the cinema (not in "Bollywood"!) - just remember the films of famous directors of the 50s and 70s crowned with international film awards. Satyajit Rhea or Mrinal Sena. But no matter how realistic or sentimental the images of literature or cinema are, there is not one of them that even remotely resembles Balram Halvai. Conditionally - very conditionally-they all relate to the hero of "White Tiger", as "Uncle Tom's Cabin" with the African-American literature of protest.
There is no doubt that Balram Halvai will remain in the consciousness of India. He may have numerous clones-mass culture is unlikely to miss such a tasty morsel, his name may become a household name, but once he appears, he will live.
Will "White Tiger" become for India what the first African-American protest works once were in America? The Buddha said, " When a stone falls into a pond, no one knows how far the ripples will go."
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