“I don’t know when I’m even going to have the time to read this,” Meena said, turning to the young guy driving our car. She was waving a copy of Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger towards him. Immediately, she turned back to the phone conversation she was having on the tiny Nokia in her palm and proceeded to argue in Hindi. Meena was sealing a deal with one of her advertising clients. It hasn’t stopped fascinating me that Hindi, like German, seems to be one of those languages which makes people sound like they’re constantly arguing, even when they’re just asking for directions on the street.
White Tiger is not written in Hindi. But it does read as one long argument, and one which most Indians have been ready to join, on one side or the other. For many, the fact that Adiga’s novel was named winner of the Booker Prize a fortnight ago (the second Indian to take the award in three years) was hardly a cause for celebration. The novel exposes Indian’s servant culture to eyes that used to ignore the underbelly, not least because the underbelly are the people who work in their kitchens, drive their cars, and sweep their floors. The Times of India hardly greeted it with rapturous applause.
I comment on Meena’s book, explaining that I’m reading it too. But what’s new? Half of the young people in Delhi are reading it. It’s on sale from every street vendor in Connaught Place, piles of white hardbacked copies wrapped in plastic. “He’s under house arrest, you know?” she says. “Really?” She looks harried. She’s waiting for a callback. “Well, no, I mean, it’s like self-imposed house arrest. People want to kill him. He has police outside his house.”
“Why doesn’t he move to another country? Or just outside of Delhi?” I ask, questioning why anyone would want to be a martyr to their first novel, especially when they were already working on a second. Meena looks at me and shrugs, as if to say, ‘why doesn’t anyone?’.
Adiga’s book has offended many in its criticism of modern India. Religion, money, illiteracy, poverty, sanitation, new business, corruption: all these issues, boils on the social conscience of the Indian Middle classes, are ruptured by his narrative. And worse, it’s narrated in the form of a letter from a lowly Indian servant to the Chinese Premier, India’s arch-rival bar none.
It’s easy to be power-blind in India. But India’s servant culture is everywhere. It didn’t leave with the masters and the memsahibs and the hierarchy of the British Raj. Everywhere, labourers works for those who buy them. Labour is so cheap here: the millions of deeply poor Indians who need jobs and food can likewise be employed in vast numbers by the other side of the yawning social chasm - the most wealthy - who can afford to buy several of them. The very poorest won’t leave, no matter how badly they are treated, because of the cash they send home and the pride their family take in their employment in a good household. Adiga’s narrator Balram is servant to his master Mr Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam: Indian entrepreneurs who boast about their days living in New York, drink cocktails and eat steak at TGI Friday’s in Connaught Place, and hang portraits of their dogs, Cuddles and Puddles, on the walls of their mansion. Balram is paid a fraction of the amount Mr Ashok regularly takes to meetings in suitcases to bribe politicians. He is forced to lie to take the blame when a child is run over by a drunk Pinky Madam; it is only narrowly he escapes jail. He watches his master count wads of cash, visit prostitutes, return home drunk, hit and abuse him. He stays silent for a paycheck.
But the very poorest do not stand at a respectful distance and bow low to the floor: they pull at your sleeve and push their small, shrivelled babies into your arms, grabbing at your elbows and asking for a few rupees. In their eyes you can see not only their hunger but their anger, and they demand, unlike the London homeless who look up lethargically and apologetically.
The servants are the other half of the poor, the silent half. People dressed in uniforms still bow to you, and it’s easy to get used to such treatment, even to expect it. Today, I leave my desk at the office for two minutes, and when I return there is a young man cleaning my keyboard and mouse with a duster. I wait, tapping my foot, incredulous that such an unexpected, pointless, and time-consuming task is happening when I have important Facebooking to do.
One half of the Indian poor pinch and grab at clean, wealthy hands and demand a small fraction of what these hands own. The other half stay clean, play dumb, take abuse, and wait for their measly paycheck. It is to the latter that Adiga gives a voice.
Why do they not yet revolt, and find their own voice? Partly, because they need the rupees. But there is still a deeply-entrenched servant-master mentality that verges on Stockholm Syndrome. Balram stays with his master not only because he gets paid, but because he deeply admires him. He is caught between conflictingfeelings of great moral inferiority and hatred. Like Balram, many are taken from the provincial life of the village, where the hub of life is the milk-producing water buffalo, and brought into the city, in a uniform, in a house, in the drivers seat of a Toyota Qualis. Like the British before them, Indian masters believe they are civilizing the village animals, and the village animals believe they are being civilised.
When will the revolution come? It’s difficult to believe that a serving-class consciousness will rise up from an award-winning novel; one that is being absorbed by the Indian middle classes and lauded by Western white literati. As the urban population grows (and it’s expected that half of Indians will live in cities by 2050) it may be that live-in servants are no longer sourced from villages, and instead day servants, with working hours and lives of their own, will feel looser loyalties and demand more rights.
Regardless of speculation, Adiga’s novel demands. And not just of the middle classes, but of those who serve them.
“The book of the revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian,” writes Adiga. “Crap it out and read.”
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