Speak Like You Were Dead: Episteme of the Ghosted in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47963/jla.v2i1.238Keywords:
India, Fiction, Postcolonial, Anglophone, Neoliberalism, Aravind Adiga, The White TigerAbstract
Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger has been hailed as a paradigmatic narrative of postcolonial wealth-formation in the 21st century, and as a novel that speaks to the “shining” India of globalization in its transformative moment of an emergent centrality on the global stage. I argue that The White Tiger, by using counter-intuitive epistemes, is also a transnational novel whose primary motive is to offer a trenchant critique of global neoliberalism, and its underlying epistemes of violence and inequality. Through the voice of its protagonist Balram Halwai, the novel, I claim, projects the 21st century postcolonial nation of India as Capital’s colony—a thriving and free “market”, if you will—whose well-being, in turn, is predicated on the phagocytizing of the human capital of the other India that is hidden from the gazes of those who admiringly gawk at “shining” India of Capital.
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