The New Indian Renaissance: An Exploration of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

The image of contemporary India had become so popular in the media, and its achievements had become so widely publicized, that the plight of the great majority of the poor, both in rural and urban India, went unnoticed. India’s economic, intellectual, and scientific development have earned it a new label in the country’s major narratives. This picture of a prosperous India distorts the plight of the poor and the socio-economic issues that impede the country’s advancement. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning book, is about the shifting status of the fiercely contested “proletarian self.” The proletarian self” is as much mandated as imprinted in and recorded by human and metropolitan geographies, which have been termed the “New India” as a socio-historically established idea, one would argue. This article explains how land ownership, poverty, a poorly equipped school system, inadequate health facilities, government corruption, issues of contemporary society and moral degradation have exacerbated the poor’s miseries and slowed the nation’s progress.