This document provides information about Aravind Adiga's novel The White Tiger including: 1. An overview of the author Aravind Adiga and details about the novel such as it being framed as a narrative letter written over seven nights to the Chinese Premier. 2. A summary of the key facts and plot including that the novel is narrated by Balram Halwai and details his rise from poverty to becoming a successful entrepreneur. 3. Short descriptions of the main characters such as Balram Halwai, Mr. Ashok, Pinky Madam, and The Stork. 4. An outline of some of the main themes explored in the novel including corruption in India, global

2. Group Members-
1.Ajit Kaliya
2. Architaba Gohil
3. Binkalba Gohil
4. Kavita Mehta
5. Budhiditya S. Das

3. Index
•About the author
•About the novel
•Key facts
•Plot overview
•Characters
•Themes
•Symbols

4. About the Author and About the Novel
-By Kavita Mehta

5. About the Author
->Aravind Adiga was born in Madras in the
year 1974.
->He completed his elementary education
at Canara High School.
->Later, he went on to St. Aloysius High
School and graduated in the year 1990.
->He received his graduate degree in English
Literature in the year 1997 from the
prestigious Columbia University of USA.
-> He won the Man Booker Prize for his
debut novel The White Tiger in the year
2008.

6. About the novel
The White Tiger is a tale of two Indian.
This novel is framed as a narrative letter written over seven nights to the
Chinese Premier wen Jiabao, it is a tale of servitude, economic prosperity
and murder.
The novel employs a first person narrator, Balram Halwai, whose
unique, sarcastic voice carries the reader through his life in “new India”.
This novel divided in to eight chapter:
1. The first night
2. The second night
3. The fourth morning
4. The fourth night
5. The fifth night
6. The sixth morning
7. The sixth night
8. The seventh night.

7. Key Facts
-By Architaba Gohil

8. Key facts
Full title: The White Tiger
Author: Aravind Adiga
Type of work: Novel
Genre: Epistolary novel, Dark comedy, Satire
Language: Indian English
Date of first Publication: April 22, 2008
Publisher: Harper Collins India, 2008
Narrator: Balram Halwai
Technique: Flashback

9. Protagonist: Balram Halwai
Antagonist: Society, poverty and circumstances
Setting (time): Present-day
Setting (place): Various location in India including Laxmangarh,
Delhi, Dhanbad and Bangalore etc.
Point of View: The novel is from the perspective of Balram Halwai,
who is the mouthpiece of Aravind Adiga himself.
Tense: Past, Present
Climax: Balram realized very soon that a little dishonesty can bring
him enough money for a secure future, so he robs and murders his
employer Mr. Ashok, and run away to Bangalore with his nephew
and starts his own business there.

10. Themes: The Indian family, Lightness and Darkness, Marriage
in India, Globalization, The caste system, India’s relationship
with China, Freedom, Individualism, Immoral corruption, Class
Conflict, Good vs. Evil, Old Morality vs. New Morality.
Symbols: Rooster Coop, Chandelier, Cars, Delhi’s Road, Green
Lizard, Black fort, Black Ogre.
Motif: India of light and India of darkness.

11. Plot Overview
-Ajit Kaliya

12. Plot Overview
The entire novel is narrated through letters by Balram Halwai
to the Premier of China, who will soon be visiting India.
In Laxmangarh, Balram was raised in a large, poor family from the
Halwai caste, a caste that indicates sweet-makers. The village is
dominated and oppressed by the “Four Animals,” four landlords known
as the Wild Boar, the Stork, the Buffalo, and the Raven. Balram's
father is a struggling rickshaw driver, and his mother died when he is
young. The alpha figure of his family was his pushy
grandmother, Kusum.

13. At school, Balram is considered as an intelligent and gifted child that an
inspector once called him a “white tiger”, meaning he is rare and
exceptional. But he has to leave schooling when his family force him to
work with his brother in a teashop in Dhanbad so he can help pay for his
cousin’s dowry.
By listening in to customer’s conversations, Balram learns about the
government and economy of India and the often-corrupt way this world
operates. Soon he gets a job driving for the Stork’s sons. Embracing his
upward mobility, Balram soon drifts further and further from his old life
and stops sending money home to his family. His grandmother pressures
him to marry but wanting to keep climbing the social ladder, Balram
accompanies Ashok and Pinky Madam.

14. In New Delhi, he gets job of their driver. One night in Delhi,
Pinky Madam, drives car in drinking state and accidently hits and kills
a child. The Mongoose pressures Balram to say that he was driving the
car and to go to jail in Pinky Madam’s place. Stork bribes police and
the case is dropped. Pinky Madam ends her marriage to Ashok and
leaves the country.
Ashok begins drinking heavily and going out to clubs. Despite
this, he continues to be heavily involved in corruption, frequently
collecting money in a distinctive red bag and using huge amounts of it
as bribes for government officials. Balram concludes that he will have
to murder Ashok if he is ever to escape what he calls the “Rooster
Coop” of poverty and servitude. Balram stabs Ashok in the neck with a
broken whiskey bottle and steals the red bag.

15. The bag contains 700,000 rupees, which Balram takes to the city of
Bangalore and uses to bribe the local police to help him set up a taxi
business. He names the company White Tiger Technology Drivers. Throug
bribery and corruption, his business grows and Balram becomes an
increasingly powerful and influential figure.
As proof of this, he explains how, when one of his drivers hit and killed a
child, he was able to simply pay off the family and use his connections to
make the case disappear, just like the Stork had done after Pinky Madam
accident.
As Balram finishes his letter to Jiabao, he justifies the murder of Ashok
and of his own family as being necessary steps in his struggle for freedom
and presents the whole grim tale as a positive story of entrepreneurial
success.

16. Characters
- By Binkalba Gohil

17. Characters
Characters
• Balram Halwai
-Narrator, protagonist, and anti-hero
-Rises from village peasant to successful entrepreneur
-Has significant faith in his exceptionalism, thinks of himself as a "White
Tiger", not tied to conventional morality or social expectations
-It is through his alternate moral system that he is able to rearrange his life
and identity
-Dark humour, cynicism, perceptiveness
-Born in Laxmangarh, into a life he considers miserable
-Despite his intelligence, forced to leave school early to work
-Continued educating himself by eavesdropping on conversations
-Progressed through the echelons of the underclass, hired as a driver
-Developed severe resentment of the upperclass, prompted him to murder
Mr. Ashok
-Munna, The White Tiger, Ashok Sharma

18. • Kusum
Balrams grandmother is called Kusum and the oldest member of
the family. She has her own opinion of the future of her
grandsons and barges in the parenting of her son, the father of
Balram and his brother. “That night she told my father: ‘He just
stood there gaping at the fort – just the way his mother used to.
He is going to come to nothing good in life, I’ll tell you that right
now.’. Another example is that she persuades his son to let
Balram and his brother work in the teashop. After the death of
Balram’s parents she decides about his future. All in all she only
wants the best for her grandsons, although she calls Balram a
“coward” because of his fright against lizards.

19. • Mr. Ashok
-Balram's principle master
-The Stork's son, brother of The Mongoose
-Handsome, generally kind and gentle
-Trusts Balram unlike the rest of his family
-Generally dislikes his family's business dealings
-He and Balram are a twinned pair, the light and the
dark, but one and the same

20. • Pinky Madam
-Ashok's wife
-Great sense of entitlement
-American, never fully accepted by Ashok's family
-Demanding, capricious, unsatisfied with life in
India
-Always hoping to return to America
-Generally cruel to Balram
-Leaves Ashok and goes back to America

21. • The Stork
-One of the four animals/landlords who control
Laxmangarh
-owns the river, collects tax from fishermen and
boaters
-father to Ashok and the Mongoose
-highly unethical business practices, bribes officials,
evades taxes, steals coal from government mines

22. • Vijay
-Balram's childhood hero, improved his station in
life by forging his own identity, gave Balram
hope he could do the same
-Bus drivers, the village boys admire his job and
uniform
-Enters politics, rises in the ranks, becomes
powerful politician, as corrupt and power
hungry as any of the rich elites in the novel

23. • The Wild Boar
-One of the four animals/landlords who control Laxmangarh
• The Buffalo
-One of the four animals/landlords who control Laxmangarh
The Mongoose
-One of the four animals/landlords who control Laxmangarh
-Ashok's brother
The Raven
-One of the four animals/landlords who control Laxmangarh
• There are some other characters like Vikram halwai, Balram’s
mother, kishan, Dharam, Balram ‘s cousin, aunts, uncles, Vitilligo
lips, Ms Uma and Driving instructor.

24. Themes and Symbols
- By Budhiditya S. Das

25. Themes
• Corruption in India
-Adiga constantly exposes the prevalence of corruption
throughout India's institutions, schools, hospitals, police,
elections, industries, and every aspect of government are
thoroughly corrupt, bribery and fraud are commonplace
-Balram's approach to this truth involves a deeply cynical humour
-In order to escape the Darkness, and enter the Light, Balram
must become a part of this system
-His victory is thus bittersweet, he has succeeded in elevating his
social position, but continues to live in a country paralysed by
corruption, preventing progress
-Adiga's ultimate point, corruption breeds corruption, unless a
greater revolution remakes society

26. • Globalisation
-Balram's India is in the throes of major transformation, heralded in
part by globalization
-India at the crossroads of development in technology and
outsourcing
-nation adapting to address the needs of a global economy
-Balram recognizes and hopes to ride this wave of the future with
his business White Tiger Technology Drivers
-Force of globalization threatens and disenfranchises those
adhering to traditional way of life, like his family in Laxmangarh.
-Balram must change who is he to compete in this new world
-Adiga conjures the tension between the old and new India,
suggesting that succeeding in this world requires a flurry of ethical
and personal compromises

27. • Social Mobility
-Issues of social mobility in new social hierarchy of India
-Idolising Vijay from childhood, Balram recognises the possibility of moving up in
the world
-Has to confront the reality of such movement throughout story
-One big issue is how India's social system has changed
-Caste system mean people's fate was predetermined, but they were happy,
believing they belonged somewhere
-The new social structure promises possibility of social mobility, while only
offering two social divisions in actuality, the rich and the poor
-The poor are kept in eternal state of subservience and servitude to the rich by
The Rooster Coop, now more unhappy because there is possibility of social
mobility that remains out of grasp
-Balram escapes The Rooster Coop, but it requires him to compromise his ethics
and personality, has to kill his master and betray his family
-That social mobility is a spectre captured only through such difficult means is a
comment on the reality of a world built more on limitations than possibilities

28. • Identity
-Story of self-fashioning.
-Balram undergoes a transformative journey to
construct his own identity.
-Balram dedicates himself to self-improvement, willing
to destroy who he once was.
-Sees identity as fluid and malleable, seen in many
name changes he employs throughout the story.
-Novel is full of dramatic irony, Balram cannot fully
repudiate the person he once was.
-Remains full of unresolved guilt and provincial
superstitions, reminds us, while identity may be fluid, it
is also immovable.

29. • Pairs and Dualities
-Many instances of pairs and dualities, each corresponding to one half
of a central dichotomy; the rich and the poor halves of India.
-Balram thinks India is split into two halves, the darkness and the light
-The men with small bellies and the men with big bellies
-The hospital where Balram's father dies and the city hospital visited by
the Stork
-Ashok's blonde prostitute and Balram's faux blonde one
-The two versions of markets in India
-Ashok and Balram
-The rearview mirror, suggests identity can be transferred across the
divide, one can move from one to the other
-dualities serve to highlight Balram's transformation, the two car
accidents, demonstrate how far Balram has come, was once a pawn in
the game, and in the latter case he has found the power to be a
representative of the more fortunate Light.

30. • Family
-Extended Indian family plays incredibly significant role in the
traditional way of life in the darkness
-Family is the core of the social unit, all members expected to
act with selfless devotion to its interests
-The poor view this construct as a strength, but Balram
comes to see it as a way the poor are kept in The Rooster
Coop
-The expectations of family enforce limitations that can
quash individual ambition, and since servants disobedience is
visited upon his family, servants remain trapped by the
whims of their masters, social mobility becomes impossible
-To break free, Balram must sacrifice his family
-To thrive in a modern world and embrace the potential of
new India, traditional attachment to family must be
relinquished in favor of newfound emphasis on individualism

31. Symbols
• The chandelier
• The gaudy light fixture he has in his new office after
murdering Ashok and starting his own company in
Bangalore.
To Balram, it symbolises both his success at becoming a
wealthy businessman, and his success at moving from
the Darkness to the Light.
Chandelier emphasises how desperate Balram felt to
get out of poverty.
• "It makes me happy to see the

32. • The black fort
Symbol of the extreme poverty Balram is in. Represents all
that fascinates and appeals to Balram about the Light of
urban coastal India. Childhood fears held him back from
exploring the fort and escaping the Darkness, but once he
leaves and returns, wearing a uniform just like Vijay, he can
see how far he has come, and feels worthy of entering the fort.
• Animal Imagery
Balram sees everyone around him in terms of their animal
nature and gives them animal names.

33. • The Rooster Coop
central metaphor, most pointed animal imagery that Balram
uses to make sense of the world. The Rooster Coop is Balram's
worldview. Allows him to justify the murder he commits, but the
way it conforms to the depravity of India's underclass makes it
resonate in an objective way as well.
• The White Tiger
central metaphor, Balram considers himself a white tiger, a
unique and exceptional creature, both trapped in the rooster
coop yet poised to escape, he cannot prove his exceptionalism
without breaking free, the rooster coop will never be bested by
chickens, it will take a white tiger.

34. Annoted Bibliography
Gagat, Neena. "Social issues in Arvind Adiga's The White Tiger: An investigation."
December 2016. The Achievers Journal. 7 January 2018
<http://theachieversjournal.org/index.php/taj/article/view/126/33>.
This article highlights social issues in the novel. The protagonist Balaram was
raised in poor family and had no friends. His village is dominated by four
landlords. Those social issues affect him. Adiga presents struggle of lower class
and their desire to become rich.
Gaulding, Ellen. Literary Analysis of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. 14 May
2012. 7 January 2018 <http://ellengaulding.blogspot.in/2012/05/literary-
analysis-of-white-tiger-by.html>.
Not only summary, or only analysis. The writer of the article has written detailed
analysis with summary. Important aspects of novel has included like poor's
thinking process, their wish to become rich, corruption, dark side of India, how
humor is used etc.

35. Godina, Jenya and S.R. ed Cedars. The White Tiger characters. 29 November
2013. 13 December 2017 <http://www.gradesaver.com/the-white-tiger/study-
guide/character-list>.
Information of all the major and minor characters is here. What are their roles in
the novel and what did they do? Balaram Halwai is the protagonist of the novel.
He finds job as driver and kills his master Mr. Ashok, steals money and becomes
rich. Mr. Ashok who is Balaram's master was good to him but in return did not
get good. Pinky madam is Ashok's wife and not happy in India and returns to
New York. There is information about Mr. Krishna- Balaram's teacher, Vikram -
Balaram's father, Kishan - Balaram's brother and about all other characters.
Kapoor, Akash. The secret of his success. 7 November 2008. 13 December 2017
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Kapur-t.html>.
The narrator of the novel, Balaram Halawai is a modern Indian hero. He kills his
master, steals his money and starts taxi business in Bangalore. He handles all the
things by bribing the police. The background of the novel shows corruption,
inequality and poverty. Writer tells that this world is far removed from glossy
images of bollywood and technology. It is not a world that rich urban Indians like
to see. The novel identifies inequalities in new prosperous world. The writer of
this article finds the novel simplistic and incomplete portrait of a nation.

36. Scopa, Sally. "The White Tiger." 17 June 2015. LitCharts LLC. 7 January
2018 <https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-white-tiger>.
All the information about the novel is here. Key facts, about author,
plot summary, analysis of all characters, themes, symbols and study
questions. The site includes all the things.
Sebastian, A. J. Poor – Rich Divide in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. 7
June 2015. 7 January 2018 <http://studenthelpline.co.in/2015/06/poor-
rich-divide-in-aravind-adigas-the-white-tiger-prof-aj-sebastian-sdb/>.
In this article there is description of how poverty and injustice makes
negative effect on poor's mind. Balaram experiences injustice and insult
by rich people. As a driver of the rich he is not allowed to switch on A.C.
while he is alone. He is not allowed to enter in mall and Mr. Ashok
makes fun of him. This all things psychologically affects mind of poor. In
this article author has talked about it in detail with examples.

37. Verma, et al. Re- establishment of Dharma in White Tiger. June 2015. 7 January
2018
<http://web.b.ebscohost.com/abstract?direct=true&profile=ehost&scope=site
&authtype=crawler&jrnl=2348537X&AN=108425369&h=ebYc%2baepC94pJbGi
fTD8GXo2o8FT3d5xsb4Ts7wH53R7InjVD3lk87t4wVzoV574X%2fpJyptJz94BH5Df
D1ZMNQ%3d%3d&crl=c&resultNs=AdminWebAuth&resultLocal>.
In Indian holy books Dharma has gives much importance. But the present India
is moving away from Dharma. This article finds this aspect in the novel 'The
white tiger'. In the article writers give example of Arjuna. As Arjuna fought to
establish Dharma, each person has to fight for his/her right and people like
Balaram are obstacle in that way.