The White Tiger Essay

The White Tiger written by Aravind Adiga is a bildungsroman telling the tale of how the peasant Balram rises to power. From a simple village boy, Balram becomes the founder of a corrupt and successful driving company. The majority of his journey he picked up small lessons from his master, Ashok on how he survives in the fast paced business world. Balram observes his masters actions and eventually becomes more successful than him, but consequently loses his innocence. Adiga uses corruption to explore morality, which is significant because the protagonist is sent on a challenging moral dilemma.
People of power in India are of the light and have a deep understanding of how to be successful. Balram is a servant and believes he is innocent compared

to the prime minister and members of the higher caste. It is ironic that the higher caste is called the light when their morals are dark and the lower caste called the darkness when their morals are correct or light. Balram supports this by saying, “One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have truth about that thing”(12). He argues that whatever you hear from the prime minister isn’t necessarily true in regard to the people of lower caste and probably only affect the light. To be successful Balram learns, one must be corrupt and lose all of his morals. Soon after Balram learns the true key to being successful in India his daily life drastically changes. Balram, fully aware of who he now is, says, “As the black water went past, a voice inside me said, ‘But your heart has become even blacker than that, Munna”’(227). Balram knows his heart is black and his mind corrupt and full accepts the feeling if it means being successful in India. He has broken the caste system and climbed in India to start life as a new man under a new identity.
In order to stay in his high caste, Balram had to make a change in his identity to a well-known man.

After killing his old master, he soon picked up his name and lived life as if nothing happened. Balram is so accustomed to his new life because he was already corrupted and can easily adapt to it. Balram says, “the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness”(167). It is interesting to note how he mentions all men who have been citified are wicked and the village folk are fools. In order to be citified you have to do something awful and the worse you become, the more popular and powerful you become. Balram hypothesizes that is why nobody can escape the rooster coop, because all the village folks are innocent and foolish. A man’s identity and caste is everything in India, but more specifically Balram says, “To sum up—in the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten up”(54). Balram knows in order to be in the caste of men with big bellies he needs to alter his personality. So to fit in he becomes his master, Mr.

Ashok.
To be successful in India, it is essential to be corrupt and have an identity that is worthy. The issue Balram faces is all of his moral values, including his devotion to his family must be sacrificed. He still has Dharam, his nephew to look after and at the end of the novel. Balram comments, “this generation has no morals”. His nephew has learned everything he knows from Balram. It is interesting Balram notes his nephew’s morals rather than noticing his own mistakes. He has truly become his boss, a man with no morals.