Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India - Paola Carbone

Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India 281
Can I cream off awards from your melting-pot phase
Do you medal yourselves when you meddle with my type[]
Daljit Nagra 15
Artists, Rushdie suggests, are in the business of cultural mapping. In
an interview, he asserts that his Booker-prize winning novel Midnight’s
Children attempted to answer a cartographical imperative – to chart a
new aesthetic map of his birth country because “India may be an ancient
civilization but it’s also a new country”. He reasserts that “[o]ne of the
things you have to do with new countries is to draw maps of them”;
after providing the reader with these imaginative maps, writers can then
“put [themselves] on the map”. 16 The White Tiger, published twentyseven
years after Midnight’s Children, sets out to chart the underside of
India’s new-found economic prowess by the hand of a protagonist who
stands for “tomorrow” (p.6). Even though Adiga’s mapping of a Dark
India might be seen as an opportunistic depiction of Indian destitution,
it represents to some critics the future of a nation coming to terms with
images of endemic poverty and underdevelopment, and of a literature
in search of a new creative path away from what they perceive as wornout
Rushdiesque motifs.
In a rave review of The White Tiger, the British magazine The Economist
lionizes Adiga as “the Charles Dickens of the call-centre generation”. 17
Following a familiar practice of comparing Indian novelists to Dickens
(a critical tradition that seems to descend from comments on Mulk
Raj Anand, a writer said to be “India’s Charles Dickens” 18 ), Charlotte
Higgins describes Adiga’s portrayal of India’s glaring social contrasts as
“almost Dickensian”, basing her comparison on the fact that, in the novel,
“the unpleasant reality of contemporary Indian society is revealed via
mordant sketches of characters, from millionaires in their air-conditioned
tower blocks to the unfortunates who are trapped in poverty and who
live literally below them, catering to their every whim”. 19 While these
reporters liken Dickens to Adiga, Rushdie regards the Victorian novelist
as “quintessentially Indian” and draws a parallel between Dickensian
London and “the pullulating cities of India”, which could include the
Delhi depicted in Adiga’s novel:
Dickensian London, that stenchy, rotting city full of sly, conniving shysters,
that city in which goodness was under constant assault by duplicity, malice
and greed, seemed to me to hold up the mirror to the pullulating cities of
India, with their preening élites living the high life in gleaming skyscrapers
while the great majority of their compatriots battled to survive in the
hurly-burly of the streets below. 20
In The Independent, a reviewer hails The White Tiger as “an Indian
novel that explodes the clichés – ornamental prose, the scent of saffron
Downloaded from jcl.sagepub.com at Senate House Library, University of London on November 29, 2010