Roars of angerAravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland.
He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country's dark side
Stuart Jeffries writing in The Guardian,
Thursday October 16 2008
Stuart Jeffries writing in The Guardian,
Thursday October 16 2008
How do you get the nerve, I ask Aravind Adiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you're an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?
It's the morning after Adiga, 33, won the £50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga's homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of India's economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight's Children (a book that Adiga recognises as a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee.The Indian tourist board must be livid.
Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question.
Or as affronted as a man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media hoopla can be.
Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: "I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me." On a shortlist that included several books written by people very much like their central characters (Sheffield-born Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire suburbanites during the miners' strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.
Read the complete story at the Guardian online.
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One of the most significant characteristics of American culture since the war has been the inhibition and silencing of memory: of the antiwar sentiment that existed during the war; of the hard questions that were asked about our conduct of it; and of the impact the United States had on Vietnam. Since the early 1980s, most of my students have come to class, for example, not having heard of the My Lai massacre. Many have not seen (or not thought about) the famous -- to an older generation -- photographs of a self-immolating Buddhist monk, of General Loan's pistol-to-the-temple assassination of a Viet Cong suspect, or of Kim Phuc, the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm and running naked toward the camera.Broadly distributed representations of Vietnamese suffering are uncommon today, and works that charge U.S. responsibility for it are even rarer. Most postwar public discourse that purportedly has been about "Vietnam" has really been about Americans and their struggle to recover from the war.
Several recent books attempt to explain why. Many of the authors believe that our memory of the past is as important as the past itself; that history, like a butterfly, is not sufficiently studied by pinning it to a display board, but is always in flux. Our memories, whether rooted in a verifiable reality or not, shape the present.
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