The White tiger

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The White Tiger (English original title: The White Tiger ) is the debut novel of the Indian writer and journalist Aravind Adiga . The novel, which retrospectively describes the rise of Balram Halwai from great rural poverty to the relatively wealthy owner of a taxi company in the form of a letter novel, was first published in 2008 and was awarded the Man Booker Prize that same year. After Kiran Desai , Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie , Adiga was the fourth Indian author to receive this prestigious British literary award. At the same time, it was the fourth time that the selection committee honored a debut novel. The German edition, which wastranslatedby Ingo Herzke , was published by CH Beck in 2008.

The novel, in which Halwai paves his way to advancement with a murder, among other things, deals with the Indian caste system , loyalty and corruption as well as the survival of the poorest sections of the population in India in an increasingly globalized world with a lot of black humor . When asked which authors influenced him most in his book, Adiga referred to three African American writers - Ralph Ellison , James Baldwin and Richard Wright . Each of these authors thematized in his work the life of groups that are marginalized in society. The white tiger was an international sales success and reached the New York Times bestseller list .

Novel plot

Balram Halwai, who owns a taxi company in Bangalore , learns over the radio that the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao will be coming to Bangalore in a week to exchange ideas with up-and-coming Indian entrepreneurs.

“Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepeneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs - we entrepreneurs - have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now. "

“Apparently, in China, you are way ahead of us in every way, except for the fact that you have no entrepreneurs. Whereas our nation has neither roads nor drinking water, electricity, sewerage, public transport, a sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, it has thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurs. Especially in the area of ​​technologies. These entrepreneurs - we entrepreneurs - started thousands of outsourcing companies that are now basically running all of America. "

Halwai worships China because, besides Afghanistan and Ethiopia, this is the only country that has never been ruled by foreigners. Concerned that the protocol would prevent Wen Jiabao from getting to know real entrepreneurs, he decides to describe Jiabao his path to entrepreneurship in seven long emails that he will write over the coming nights. Halwai admits he doesn't have much education:

“Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who has taken out of school, let me assure you) , sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep - all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with. "

“Like me, thousands in this country are half baked because we weren't allowed to finish school. If you could open our skulls and shine a flashlight inside, you'd find a strange collection: a few sentences about history or math from an old school book (believe me, no boy remembers his schooling better than someone you know from from school), read a few sentences on politics from a newspaper while waiting for an official in front of his office, triangles and pyramids from the pages of old geometry books in which every cookshop in the country wraps their snacks, a few snippets of news from the All India Radio, thoughts that pop into your brain half an hour before you fall asleep like lizards from the ceiling, and all this stuff, half formed, half digested and half correct, is deposited in the brain. And there it mixes with the other half-finished stuff, and all these half-finished thoughts are probably driving it together and thus generate further thoughts, and according to these one aligns one's actions and life. "

But it is this half-baked education that enables true entrepreneurship. On the other hand, people who entered a company after twelve years of school and three years of university would become order takers who, for their entire life, would do nothing other than take instructions.

Balram Halwai was born in Laxmangarh, a rural village in the impoverished hinterland of India. His father is a rickshaw driver , his mother is so seriously ill that she never leaves her bed. The existence of Halwai is so insignificant to his entire extended family that they did not even give him a first name in the first few years of his life. His family calls him Munna - boy. He only gets his first name from his elementary school teacher, who names him after a companion of the god Krishna Balram. At school, Halwai proves to be a willing and capable child. Even so, his family forces him to drop out of school and go to work so that they can repay the debt they incurred because of the dowry for one of his cousins. His brother Kishan accommodates him in Dhanbad in the tea shop in which he also works. Kishan also had to drop out of school to help the family pay off a dowry debt. But, as Halwai points out, what makes a real entrepreneur is their ability to turn bad news into good. Halwai uses his work to overhear the conversations of customers and so continue his unfinished training. Because of his poor performance as an assistant waiter in the tea shop, Halwai is eventually sent back to his home village. Halwai decides to become a driver, but struggles to find someone to teach him how to drive. He belongs to the candy maker caste and - as one of the taxi drivers he begs for driving lessons explains - driving a car is like taming a wild stallion. Only a boy from one of the warrior castes can learn this. Bribery ultimately gives him driving lessons and luck to his job as a driver. He becomes the driver of Mr. Ashok, who has just returned from the United States, son of the landowner and moneylender, with whom Halwai's family regularly gets into debt and whom the village calls "the stork". Together with Ashok and his wife Pinky Madam, Halwai moves to Neudelhi, a city where corruption is particularly widespread and the contrast between the wealthy and poor sections of the population is pronounced. When Pinky Madam runs over a child while driving through the slums in Delhi, Halwai is forced to sign a guilty pledge drawn up by a lawyer: If anyone should be able to establish a connection between the dead child and the Ashoks' car, it stands the culprit firmly.

“The jails of Delhi are full of drivers who are there behind bars because they are taking the blame for their good, solid middle-class masters. We have left the villages, but the masters still own us, body, soul, and are. [...] The judges? Wouldn't they see through this obviously forced confession? But they are in the racket too. They take their bribe, they ignore the discrepancies in the case. And life goes on. For everyone but the driver. "

“Delhi prisons are full of drivers who are behind bars for taking the blame for their good and solid middle class masters. We may have left the villages, but our masters still own us - body, soul and ass. […] The judge? Can't they see through these obviously forced confessions? But they are part of the scam themselves. They take their bribe and look into the inconsistencies in the case. Life goes on. For everyone except the driver. "

Although Halwai is aware that "the stork" will take revenge on his family for this, he decides to kill and rob Ashok. It is his only way out of this poverty trap. He knocks Ashok down and kills him by slitting his throat with a broken whiskey bottle. He then flees to Bangalore , where, after bribing the local police, he begins to set up his own business. He knows that this will kill some, maybe all, of his family members. And if some survived, the villagers would force them to leave the village. They would seek refuge in Delhi, Calcutta or Mumbai and live under a concrete bridge there, begging for food and facing a hopeless future. Towards the end of the book, however, Halwai notes:

“But isn't it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our prime minister (including you , Mr. Jiabao), has killed someone or other on their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi - but that is glory, and not what I am after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man - and for that, one murder was enough. "

“But isn't it likely that everyone who matters in this world, including our Prime Minister (and including you, Jiabao-san) killed someone on their way up? Kill enough people and they will erect bronze statues for you next to the parliament building in Delhi - but that's honor and that's not what I'm after. All I wanted was the chance to be a man and one murder was enough for that. "

Reviews in German-language media

  • Christa Wenner: The view from below. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. July 4, 2009: Christa Wender describes the novel as a fast-paced and perfectly told rogue piece. But she also writes: “… [Balram Halwai] 's irony and diction are not very credible when you consider that he only attended school for a short time. What Adiga puts into his mouth ultimately degrades him to the author's mouthpiece, and it doesn't help that Balram describes himself as an autodidact and explains that he doesn't speak English. Adiga does not grant him a soul or a language appropriate to him, and therefore the book is more of a satirical essay, from which Adiga's concern speaks to counteract the new media clichés of globalized, booming India. "
  • Susanne Mayer: The shadow in the light. In: The time. November 17, 2008: According to Susanne Mayer, Adiga plays on a keyboard that ranges from slapstick to harsh social reports to Hegel's philosophy. She sees parallels between Adiga's The White Tiger and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son and, in particular, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , in which the disregard for socially marginalized people lies in the refusal to even acknowledge their existence. Extinction consists in reducing the other to invisibility. She writes: “The funniest scenes in Adiga are due to this insight. When the rulers in the car talk about their chauffeur as if he were not in the car, changing commands and humiliations in seconds, you have whiskey handed to you and then curl up in the back seat as if the person in the front seat weren't there . ”In this sense, Adiga is a continuation of Ellison's socially critical work:“ He transforms [a particularly pithy scene in Ellison] into a coldly planned murder, which is based on Balram's realization that only those who act without conscience can free themselves from being a slave usurped with which he is ruled. The complex caste system of India, it is claimed, has split into two parts. In: above and below. People who live behind glass on the 13th floor and others who live under cockroaches in the basement. Masters and servants. The latter inevitably end up as garbage among those who lie in the gutters of the streets through which they once drove the luxury cars of their masters. "
  • Shirin Sojitrawalla: Roaring funny! In: taz . November 15, 2008: According to Shirin Sojitrawalla “[the novel] draws on the stark contrasts that it frankly encircles: masters and servants, white and brown, rich and poor, west and east, New Delhi and Old Delhi, power and Powerlessness, light and darkness. ”In her opinion, it is“ a picaresque novel and the 'autobiography of a half-baked Indian', which, in a roaringly comic way, short-circuits the Indian reality with the decal of the subcontinent. ”

expenditure

Audio productions

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Amitav Ghosh, Aravind Adiga in Booker shortlist. Rediff.com , September 9, 2008, accessed July 4, 2014 .
  2. ↑ Aravind Adiga receives the Booker Award . In: time online
  3. ^ Fearful symmetry ( Memento of March 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ The white tiger. From the English by Ingo Herzke . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57691-1 .
  5. ↑ The white tiger. From the English by Ingo Herzke . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57691-1 .
  6. ↑ The White Tiger . Free Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-6273-3 , p. 32. The original quote is: To break the law of his land - to turn bad news into good news - is the entrepreneur's prerogative .
  7. ↑ The White Tiger . Free Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-6273-3 , p. 47.
  8. ↑ The White Tiger. Free Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-6273-3 , p. 145.
  9. ↑ The White Tiger . Free Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-6273-3 , p. 270.
  10. ↑ The White Tiger. Free Press, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-6273-3 , p. 273.
  11. ↑ Christa Wenner: The view from below. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . July 4, 2009, accessed July 5, 2014.
  12. ↑ Susanne Mayer: The shadow in the light . In: The time . November 17, 2008, accessed July 5, 2014.
  13. ↑ Shirin Sojitrawalla: Roaring funny! . In: taz . November 15, 2008.