Indian Tiger, Foreign Gaze
The White Tiger (2021) is a dark and explosive rags-to-riches Indian story, cooked to be palatable to Western tastes. The adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s novel sticks too close to its source, losing on screen what was gained in text.
The very first sound you hear in The White Tiger—Ramin Bahrani’s 2021 adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 award-winning novel—is the remix of the song “Mundian Tu Bach Ke” by British-Indian artist Panjabi MC, featuring legendary American rapper Jay-Z. The track was a unique crossover hit in the early/mid 2000s, with success both in the East and West. Jay-Z’s remix of “Mundian Tu Bach Ke” is a fun, energetic song: its bhangra backbone is Indian in its musical essence, but the layer of hip-hop makes the song more palatable to the Western audience, more adaptable to dance-floors around the world.
It’s a song that tells an Indian story in a foreign accent.
The accent is also the first thing one notices—and then, simply can’t shake off—when watching The White Tiger, released on Netflix last week. The film’s three leads (Adarsh Gourav, Rajkkumar Rao, Priyanka Chopra) and others communicate in English in the caricatured ‘westernised’ Indian voice, in the accent of Apu of the The Simpsons, the accent of Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire, the accent that tells viewers in the larger English-speaking world that what they’re watching is definitely foreign enough to sound a little exotic, but not foreign enough to require a translation. To the Indian, it could be a cringeworthy and difficult watch: the accents are awkward and almost unbearable; the stereotyped vision of India feels shallow and archaic.
To be fair to The White Tiger, an adaptation of Adiga’s novel was bound to have this accent, bound to be the product of a Western gaze upon India. In his novel, Adiga makes the ingenious decision to have the first-person narration addressed as a letter to Wen Jiabao, then-Premier of China. This literary device allows the novel to be an over-explainer of India as much as it was a personal story. In choosing to detail his life to a foreign recipient, the novel’s protagonist—Balram Halwai—has no option but to cast an outsider’s gaze upon his country. While the story itself is electrifying and enthralling, the frame in which it was told allowed it to be easily-digestible to foreign readership, leading to near-unanimous acclaim for the work internationally, plus a slew of awards including the 2008 Man Booker Prize. The novel was at once an enthralling rags-to-riches Indian story, as it was a primer on India itself: its culture, values, religions, corruption, financial inequalities, and more.
The film, more or less, does the same. The White Tiger is the tale of Balram Halwai, the poor, barely-educated son of a rickshaw-wallah from a part of India that the author calls ‘The Darkness’, who eventually hustles his way to a job with a rich family, to driving his wealthy employers around India’s capital city, and eventually, becoming an employer himself—shifting chairs from ‘servant’ to ‘master’—in India’s lucrative tech capital. Balram’s journey from Laxmangarh to Dhanbad to Delhi-NCR to Bangalore signifies the journey of the past becoming the future, of rural India making way for urban acceleration, from the ‘Darkness’ to the ‘Light’.
Balram’s voice is one of the biggest strengths of the novel: humorous, confident, intelligent, brave, and unsentimental. It is also a voice, as earlier mentioned, of over-exposition and over-explanation. On the screen, this narration hinders rather than assists the plot.
At the heart of this character is Adarsh Gourav, the breakout star of The White Tiger, who upstages established and acclaimed actors Rao and Chopra in his embodiment of Balram. A relatively-unknown before the movie, Gourav was an inspired casting choice by Bahrani, as the actor’s rise to prominence through the course of the film mirrors Balram’s rise in fortunes. Gourav, who supposedly prepared for his role by living as a dishwasher in a small village in Jharkhand, assumes Balram completely, from the subservient gait of a servant to the confident swaggering march of a rich man.
When Balram’s face appears on the poster seeking a ‘Missing Man’, he claims that he is never caught because his face could belong to almost any man in India. It’s this ‘everyman’ story that makes Balram both pedestrian and unique, that allows for his escape into anonymity, and later, success. As a faithful servant to Ashok (Rao), Balram knows every whim and habit of his employers. In a delicious detail included in both the novel and film, ‘The Mongoose’, Ashok’s elder brother, asks Balram for a dosa at the train station, and Balram ensures to unwrap and remove the potatoes—the ‘masala’ of the dosa—because potatoes make The Mongoose fart—and The Mongoose didn’t like that. “A servant gets to know his master’s intestinal tract,” says Balram in a voiceover.
When he isn’t narrating the story, Gourav communicates an ocean of Balram’s emotions through his eyes, even in moments of silent rumination. He is truly conflicted about the simmering anger within him, and his ambition lights the fuse for the film’s fiery climax, completing Balram’s story from servitude to dominance.
Readers of the novel will, of course, recall that this climax isn’t a mystery at all. With the destination known, Adiga counts on the journey to push the narrative forward. While the film, too, is told in flashbacks, the crime isn’t revealed: it is simply teased as an ‘act of entrepreneurship’.
Apart from this and few minor deviances, Bahrani’s film is a faithful adaptation of the novel, perhaps too faithful. It seemed fated for Bahrani—an Iranian-American director—to helm this film: upon the novel’s release 13 years ago, Adiga dedicated The White Tiger to Bahrami, who reportedly read early drafts of the manuscript long before the world. But it can be a tricky endeavour to turn a first-person narrative from text to screen: the novel relies heavily on Balram’s narration, a story told as a series of letters to Premier Wen. Balram’s voice is one of the biggest strengths of the novel: humorous, confident, intelligent, brave, and unsentimental. It is also a voice, as earlier mentioned, of over-exposition and over-explanation.
It would’ve served Bahrami’s film to take an audacious risk on screen the way the novel took on paper 13 years ago, to let the story unfold instead of be told, to be an India that is seen rather than one that is explained.
On the screen, however, this narration hinders rather than assists the plot. Like the book, the movie opens with a stereotyped explanation of India to the novice outsider (and to Wen Jiabao). “I'm Indian after all,” says Balram, in slow, forcibly-accented English. “And it is an ancient and venerated custom of my people to start a story by praying to a higher power." The Western gaze is already affixed on India, and more caricatures follow. There are wide shots of India in action: traffic, temples, crowds, and a short discourse on religion that could be taken straight out of a light-hearted British travel show.
There are many more such moments of exposition that don’t work for the film and take away from the book’s explosive energy. In the film, the emotional turbulence of the main characters eventually feels a little hollow. The White Tiger truly takes off in the moments when Balram stops explaining, when the voiceover disappears, and the action is allowed to move forward, leaving the viewers to decipher the context for themselves.
Nevertheless, the story is an important study of India’s class relations. Adiga’s book and Bahrami’s film don’t over-romanticise poverty or offer an easy get-rich scheme out of what Balram calls ‘the rooster coop’ of India’s poor. The film notoriously dismisses the complexities of India’s caste conflict, with the line, “These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies.” Balram’s ascent from a small belly to a big belly isn’t a story of goodness and morality; to become a rich man, he has to sin like a rich man. It’s a dark story of success. “I was trapped in the rooster coop,” says Balram. In an unsubtle reference to the fantastical ending of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), he adds, “Don't believe for a second there's a million-rupee game show you can win to get out of it.”
Gourav is adept playing both sides of the coin: inside and outside the metaphorical coop. And some of the strongest passages in the film chart his complex and ever-changing relationship with Ashok. As his driver, having close intimacy to Ashok over long hours shared in the same vehicle, Balram watches his employer transform from a US-returned rich Indian to a corrupt businessman to a drunken, heart-broken mess. Balram loves Ashok and loathes him, he respects and disrespects him, he learns from him and dreams of being better than him. The film displays the casual cruelty of rich in India upon those like Balram—the small bellies—and then tells us how unlikely it is for someone like Balram to break out of this cruel cage, how rare it is to become a once-in-a-generation animal, a true white tiger.
It is this underdog narrative that will be the universal sticking point for viewers of The White Tiger, for Indians and Non-Indians alike. But, with the story being set in the mid-2000s, much of it feels archaic in the current climate of Indian politics. It conveniently sidesteps Balram’s extended criticism of Hinduism and the caste system from the novel; and while it correctly points an accusatory finger at institutional corruption, the film feels starkly out of touch with the rise of nationalism, neo-fascism and minority-subjugation that have been hot-boiler topics for India in the decade-and-a-half since the novel was written.
There was a palatable sense of awe and adventure from the book when it was first published in 2008. The White Tiger—as a novel—worked because of its pure audaciousness: it looked at India like no piece of literature before, telling a personal story of an Indian out of the self-proclaimed ‘Darkness’. It flipped the perspective, becoming a voice of the darkness instead of a voice about the darkness.
And yet, even Adiga’s novel felt as if it was spoon-feeding India as a cultural setting, as if we were reading not about India as it is, but about a reflected image of India through a foreign mirror. The book and the film are both like The Mongoose’s potato-less dosas from the train station: an Indian flavour without the true masala. Sometimes, you just need to let the people fart.
Perhaps it would’ve served Bahrami’s film to be a little less like the book, to take an audacious risk on screen the way the novel took on paper 13 years ago, to let the story unfold instead of be told, to be an India that is seen rather than one that is explained.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
