Darkness In Avarind Adiga's The White Tiger

In Avarind Adiga’s novel, the White Tiger, Balram’s final goal is to move from the darkness to the light, however, he fails to realize that even the light is darkness. Balram wishes to escape the darkness to the light so that he can escape poverty and create a better life for himself. He hopes to create a better life in the light is where the rich are able to live carefree lives, and be ignorant of the consequences of their actions. Light offers hope for a better life, but once the poor who were living in the darkness make it to the light, their lives are as bad, if not worse than as it was in the darkness. The black river – the Mother Ganga, is darkness itself, filling the country with darkness, extinguishing the light. Light cannot exist

because of the strength of the darkness concealing the light from those who seek it.
In the novel, darkness is the land northeast of the river of death, the Mother Ganga. Balram describes the darkness in a description of his village, saying, “Laxmangarh is your typical Indian village paradise, adequately supplied with electricity, running water, and working telephones; and … the children of my village [are] raised on a nutritious diet of meat, eggs, vegetables, and lentils, will be found upon examination with tape measures and scales to match up to the minimum standards set by the United Nations … Ha! Electricity poles-defunct. Water tap-broken. Children too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India” (Adiga 16). Darkness is the place where greedy actions of the rich force the unlucky poor into servitude because of situations they have been born into. The rich of the darkness, the animals, force those with little resources to help strengthen the wealth of the already rich. Even the rich of the darkness flee their homes in search of better lives for themselves and their families where the consequences of their actions are not as obvious. Geographically, the light is the land southwest of the Mother Ganga River. Light is the paradise of the rich where greedy lives can be continued, and the consequences of selfish actions are hidden from plain sight.
Balram’s goal is to escape the darkness to the light so that he can escape poverty and create a better life for himself. Balram’s family teaches him that a man who makes it in life, will be treated with respect. Respect is achieved through education, which will help the man make it to the light. Balram’s father said, “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine–at least one-should live like a man” (26). Mr. Halwai works very hard so that one of his sons may receive a good education, so that he may one day one of his children may escape the darkness. As he grows up in the darkness, he watches his childhood hero, Vijay, create a better life for himself in the light. Vijay got out of Laxmangarh to peruse a better life, “The man on the right was my childhood hero-Vijay, the pig herd’s son turned bus conductor turned politician from Laxmangarh. He had changed uniforms again: now he was wearing the polished suit and tie of a modern Indian businessman” (251-252). Vijay does what every family in the darkness hopes for their children, to escape the darkness and create a life for themselves in the light by climbing the social ladder through the government. If a man can escape the darkness, he also can hide, and become a new man. After he kills his master, Balram says, “The police searched for me in darkness: but I hid myself in light” (98). Because Balram eventually escapes his slavery, he is even able to change his name and create a new identity for himself in the light.
Light is where the rich are able to live carefree lives, and not see the consequences of their actions. In the light, the rich are able to spend hours shopping, and doing carefree activities, but they will never see that the man who built the shopping center is living in a tent in a slum, or under a bridge because the workers are not payed enough money to live on, or provide for their families. After arriving in Delhi, Balram’s masters went shopping in one of these shopping centers, “After half an hour, Mukesh Sir and Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam came out of the mall with shopping bags; I ran ahead to take their bags from them, and put them in the back of the car, and then closed the back and jumped into the driver’s seat of the Honda City and drove them to their new home” (107). They never saw the slums of the construction workers, or the people dying in the streets of town but instead the inside of shinny glass buildings and fancy new cars. The rich are blind to the problems of their servants, because they are caught up in their own little world, where the only thing that matters is earning more money faster. In realizing this, Balram says, “What blindness you people are capable of. Here you are, sitting in glass buildings and talking on the phone night after night to Americans who are thousands of miles away, but you don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening to the man who is driving your car!” (220). The image of the world as the rich see it is so tainted by wealth that the extreme poverty going on around them is completely invisible, “We were lie two separate cities-inside and outside the dark egg. I knew I was in the right city. But my father, if he were alive, would be sitting on that pavement, cooking rice gruel for dinner, and getting ready to lie down and sleep under a streetlamp” (116). As a servant, Balram is not oblivious to these two worlds and feels himself torn between them. His family, and all that he knows, are those living on the streets, but the life he so seeks is so close in the shiny cars that go about the streets of town allowing the rich to do whatever they please.
Light offers hope for a better life, but once the poor who were living in the Darkness make it to the Light, their lives are as bad, if not worse than as it was in the Darkness. The people living in the darkness who were lucky enough to make it across the Mother Ganga, and into the land of the light are still stuck in the same places they were in to begin with. If they are able to find work, the pay is so bad that the streets become homes, and food becomes an unknown just as it was in the darkness. Balram notes, “These people were building homes for the rich, but they lived in tents covered with blue tarpaulin sheets, and partitioned into lanes by lines of sewage. It was even worse than Laxmangarh” (222). In the struggle to survive, hope is lost, and the light becomes just as painful as the darkness once was. The light should offer hope for all people, but the only people who benefit from the light are the rich. The poor are stuck in the same cycle of poverty that they were caught in when they lived in the darkness. When he was working as the driver for Mr. Ashok, he says, “These poor bastards had come from the darkness to Delhi to find some light-but they were still in the darkness” (116). The light and hope offered to the poor are lost in the struggle just to survive in the world of the light. Balram sees the growth of Bangalore as an opportunity to really experience the light. He says, “There is construction everywhere … The entire city is masked in smoke, smog, powder, cement dust. It is under a veil. When the veil is lifted, what will Bangalore be like?” “Maybe it will be a disaster: slums, sewage, shopping malls, traffic jams, policemen … it may turn out to be a decent city, where humans can live like humans and animals like animals” (273). He hopes that the construction will actually create the light he has been searching for his whole life. This cannot happen because the darkness has touched all of India, leaving its influence everywhere.
The black river – the Mother Ganga, is darkness itself, spreading its filth thought all of India.

The darkness is both a metaphorical and a physical darkness. The river is polluted with feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids (12). This pollution contributes to the deadly nature of the Ganga river, “[the] river of Death, whose banks are full of rich, dark sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it … I am talking of the Mother Ganga, Daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth” (12). The river suffocates, and kills all life that comes in contact with it. A person’s experience of the river stays with him forever, and is carried as luggage even after leaving the darkness. The sewer in the slum of Delhi, points back to the Ganga river, revealing the movement of darkness into the light. The darkness of the slum is even stronger than that of Balram’s village of Laxmangarh, “The slum ended in an open sewer-a small river of black water went sluggishly past me, bubbles sparkling in it and little circles spreading on its surface. Two children were splashing about in the black water” (222). This moment serves as time to remind Balram and the reader of a quote from the very beginning of the novel, “Everywhere this river flows, that area is darkness” (12). Balram has become part of the river, and everywhere he goes, darkness is brought with him. This creates a world of darkness, unnoticed by a man seeking freedom from

darkness.
Balram ultimately wishes to escape the darkness and live in the light so in order to escape poverty and create a better life for himself. He dreams of living where the rich are able to live carefree lives, and not see the consequences of their actions. Light offers hope for a better life, but once the poor who were living in the Darkness make it to the Light, their lives are as bad, if not worse than as it was in the Darkness. All of this is caused by the black river – the Mother Ganga, darkness itself, spreading its filth thought all of India. Balram fails to realize that even the light is darkness, causing his final goal of moving to the light to become impossible.