Adiga rides to Booker on The White Tiger

LONDON: The 40th Man Booker literary award has gone to a first time novelist who now lives in Santa Cruz, Mumbai. But Aravind Adiga dedicated his book The White Tiger to New Delhi. “It’s the city that will determine India’s future that is why I decided to dedicate it to the city,” he said.

Born in Chennai in 1974, Adiga moved to Australia when he was 15. He returned to Delhi as a journalist with Time magazine. “It was during my time in Delhi that I wrote the book. Thanks to my profession I was able to see aspects of the country that most do not have access to.”

After Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai, Adiga is the fourth Indian to win the Booker. When asked what he will do with his £50,000 prize money, Adiga said with a twinkle in his eye “first find a bank to put it in”.

Kevin Rushby, a literary critic with The Guardian, described the book in April when it was released as “an outsider’s view and a superficial one” of India. Michael Portillo, chairman of the judges and a senior member of the Conservative Party, said the final meeting of the debate was characterised by a “passionate debate”. “What sets it apart is its originality… dealing with different aspects of India. The feeling was that this was new territory,” Portillo said.

Adiga accepted that class was a boring topic to write about but there was a need for books like his. “Class is the most pressing concern because other things spring out of it like terrorism and instability. Once there was a common culture between rich and poor, but that has been eroded,” said Adiga.  

Adiga also rejected suggestions that The White Tiger was overly critical of Indian society saying that he had intended to be provocative but “funny” at the same time to engage the reader.  

“I like books that have ideas in them and that move and that entertain,” Adiga said.  
Asked by BBC Radio about writing his next book, Adiga said he didn’t “have to sit down to write it, it’s almost done.” He declined to give details on the subject he would be writing on.

“It won’t change much, because I live in Mumbai, and I’m going back there day after tomorrow, and life in Mumbai has a way of reminding you that writers are not particularly important,” Adiga told BBC Radio.   

“It won’t mean anything to my neighbours, they won’t know about this. Life will continue.”

Of his future literary efforts, he said: “India just teems with untold stories, and no one who is alive to the poetry, the anger and the intelligence of Indian society will ever run out of stories to write.”   

“I do want to write about people who haven’t been written about, and there’s a lot of them in India still.”

Adiga was one of two Indian writers nominated for the award, alongside Amitav Ghosh for Sea of Poppies.

The other shortlisted authors were Australia’s Steve Toltz, with A Fraction of the Whole, Irishman Sebastian Barry for The Secret Scripture, and British writers Linda Grant and Philip Hensher for The Clothes on Their Backs and The Northern Clemency respectively.

The White Tiger follows Balram Halwai, the son of a rickshaw puller who dreams of better things than life as teashop worker and driver. But when he finally makes it to the bright lights of New Delhi, he is caught between his loyalty to his family and his desire to better himself.

Adiga is only the third debut novelist to win after DBC Pierre in 2003, for Vernon God Little, and Arundhati Roy in 1997 for The God of Small Things.