There are two books selling on the streets of Mumbai now. Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince, and a cheap paperback of this year’s Booker winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. The former, a sensationalized tell-all of the rise of Dhirubhai Ambani, is officially banned in India. You could call it a street classic—since 1999 when Australian publisher Allen & Unwin published the book, most copies have been sold at traffic signals. But The Polyester Prince doesn’t seem to excite the street sellers anymore.
Illustration: Jayachandran / Mint
About the second, the boys are aggressive. “Booker, Adiga”, they say, pressing its cover against car windows. They know that like Shobhaa De’s books, “Booker” is big, “Booker” will sell.
If you were to judge the success of The White Tiger and its author by this prize, it’s the biggest thing to have happened in the Indian publishing world this year. But the importance of this book lies elsewhere.
It’s the story of Balram, a voluble, murderous man from the dark hinterlands who makes it in the big, sinister city. His story is told through letters to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
Adiga’s narrative is shocking—partly in a good way. It is symptomatic of a final breaking-away from a long tradition of Indian English fiction. Finally, we are no longer unapologetic about the way we visualize, think and therefore write about ourselves. Unlike the big names in the 1990s and even 2000s, we have stopped negotiating a language that has to be true to colonial traditions of syntax and imagery and yet capable of faithfully reproducing Indian realities. It is finally about our English and our metaphors. The White Tiger exploded these clichés and stunned many people, certainly the judges of the Booker Prize: “With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then, an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out of an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is released.”
The merit of Adiga’s book can’t be stretched much beyond this shock value. So The White Tiger is certainly not the biggest or best thing to have happened to Indian publishing this year. In fact, the new beginning that Adiga seemed to represent has been in the making for a few years now, with many young writers holding up new voices and making works of literary value, more sophisticated and universal than Adiga’s. Altaf Tyrewala’s No God in Sight and Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head immediately come to mind. It’s unfair that he emerged as the torch-bearer. But let’s leave the quibbling aside for now.