Asian Window

Amitava Kumar in The Boston Review [via 3quarksdaily]:

All through the summer, I followed the story from my home in upstate New York. Then, in mid-June, I read an article in a British newspaper about the Aarushi case, in which I found out that a popular novel had already been written this year about middle-class Indian fear of domestic servants. The novel, the article said, “tells the story of a bitter and disenchanted chauffeur in Delhi who slits his employer’s throat.”

That is how I came to discover Aravind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

Soon after I learned of the book, I met Adiga in New York City. He was born in Chennai, India and later migrated to Australia. He then studied at Columbia University and at Oxford. After university he returned to India, where for three years he worked as TIME ’s correspondent before quitting to write fiction. Adiga told me that his novel is the fruit of his labors as a reporter in India. He traveled to various parts of the country, including places whose backwardness shocked his sensibility. The White Tiger is his rebuke of the cheerful, and false, notion of a new, transformed India.

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And in the Sunday Times an interview with Arvind Adiga:

‘We all live in the greatest democracy on earth . . . what a f****** joke.” So the newest Indian literary idol, Aravind Adiga, sets out his stall in his incendiary, bitterly hilarious and Man Booker prize-winning first novel, The White Tiger. Adiga gives democracy a relatively easy ride – it’s free market capitalism that takes the real hiding.

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