The White Tiger: Motifs 5 key examples

Coal’s very history has been inseparable from the forces of conquest and colonialism. Its discovery in the 18th century offered an inexpensive source of power to sustain England’s military arm and growing industries. By the early 19th century, England had set its sights abroad—the East India Company opened mines in Raniganj, laid down tracks for transport, and coerced peasants to labor in mines.

Adiga builds upon these strong colonial associations in The White Tiger. “They said that the coal mines went on and on for miles and miles outside the town,” Balram explains. Only fittingly, coal offers Balram his first experience of menial work. With his family trapped in debt, Kishan forces Balram to leave school and work in the tea shop, where he smashes coals to fuel the oven. The work humiliates Balram, who was previously dubbed the “white tiger” but is now consigned to mind-numbing servitude. From the very start, coal carries an exploitative valence. It bears an understanding of violence, too: as though aware of his brother’s frustration, Kishan tells Balram to imagine that each coal is his “skull.”

Balram leaves the tea shop for his chauffeur job, only to find himself as deeply entangled in the chain of extraction as he was before. The Stork’s business empire, the reader learns, rests precisely upon pilfered coal from government mines. If coal denies Balram his education, it makes the Stork’s fortunes—the Chinese, Balram overhears, are consuming coal “like crazy.” Bribes and delicate, closed-door negotiations fill up the edges of the novel, as Balram shuttles Ashok and the Mongoose to the Parliament House or the homes of ministers.

The novel’s peripheral details chronicle the destructive consequences of this greed as well. Mining—the literal hollowing out of the earth—wreaks havoc on the environment. Coal burning also contributes directly to the “acrid” smog that fills the city. Delhi’s air shrouds the buildings and shaves years off lifespans. Through Balram’s account of coal, the novel portrays an elite that fattens itself off the poor and violates the earth. Wealth, as The White Tiger suggests, is inherently dirty in this web of abuse and theft. Be it with blood or with soot, no one’s hands are truly clean.

In a country with bikes and rickshaws, cars are directly recognizable symbols of wealth. On the most immediate level, they distinguish the rich from the poor: the stylish Honda City—a “more sophisticated creature, with a mind of its own”—sets the Stork’s family apart. Cars also insulate the upper class from the cruder realities of society. At various points in the novel, Balram likens the Stork’s car to a “dark egg,” subtly extending the metaphor of the “Rooster Coop” while pointing out the distinct advantages of wealth. Pampered by tinted windows and air conditioning, its occupants can simply drive past the “small, thin, grimy people squatting.”

But cars are more than status markers. Amid the chaos of India’s streets, they support an entire suite of services. Chauffeurs must tend to individual families, and the profession promises to take Balram to new socioeconomic heights. Cars lure Balram out from the Dhanbad tea shops and into the driver’s seat, where he lands his job with the Stork and earns more than Kishan could have ever imagined. Balram raises his income further still after outwitting Ram Persad to take Pinky Madam and Ashok into Delhi. The novel draws a straight line from the steering wheel to Balram’s social prospects.

Life in Delhi eventually shows the car’s limits. For Balram, physical mobility—he transports Ashok everywhere from ministers' houses to less reputable hotels—does not translate into any further social mobility. The Mongoose tracks his mileage, Pinky Madam mocks his stupidity, and Ashok scapegoats him for a tragic incident that he had no responsibility for. The job that Balram had previously fought for begins to trap him. He joins the ranks of the thousands whose most promising outcome, as Vitiligo-Lips explains, is “to buy a small home in some slum.”

These tensions reach their fatal point when Balram resolves to kill his master. Balram leads Ashok into the rain on the pretense of a broken car, as though subconsciously articulating his own socioeconomic frustrations. The subsequent murder ultimately restores the car back to its status as a social stepping-stone—Balram escapes to Bangalore, where he establishes a taxi service for the employees at the outsourcing companies and strikes his greatest fortune yet. As a driver-turned-entrepreneur, Balram demonstrates—in perhaps a pun-like way—that cars are the ultimate vehicles of mobility.

Balram’s frequent comparisons to the animal world point out the abject poverty around him. He erodes the conventional separation between the human and non-human, thereby critiquing the country’s oppressive treatment of the poor. The “water buffalo” gets treated better than his father, who toils away at rickshaws and dies from tuberculosis in an unattended hospital. The taxi drivers who wait for their masters are “crouching and jabbering like monkeys,” though Balram himself fares no better in his state of servitude. “I crouched on the floor, happy as a dog, and waited for him to say it again,” he observes the day after Pinky Madam’s car accident, literally becoming the Mongoose’s lapdog. While wandering the street markets, Balram comes across a wagon of dead buffalo skulls that briefly resembles the “faces of my own family.” The recurring equivalences between the human and the animal underscore the extent of the country’s wealth inequalities and its oppressive class structures. In his deliberate comparisons to the world of animals, Balram suggests that the poor are not merely overworked or discriminated against; they are sub-human.

Additionally, this animalist emphasis borrows from popular conceptions of Darwinian competition. The notion of a “state of nature”—a lawless struggle that rewards only the strongest—informally underlies some of the novel’s animal references. Balram’s discussion is at least partly inflected by this primal anxiety for survival. One of his most resonant symbols compares the country’s poor to chickens trying to escape the caging conditions of the “Rooster Coop.” Balram imagines pre-colonial India as a “clean, well-kept, orderly zoo” and contrasts it with the later chaos of the “jungle.” As “jungle law” replaces “zoo law,” only might makes right. Balram must out-duel his fellow servants, sacrifice his family, and kill to attain his freedom. His attention to animals points out the offensive indignities of his dog-like servility. But it also anticipates the struggle to reclaim his title as apex predator—the “white tiger.” It critiques the social conditions that awaken the fierce and feral within the human.

The White Tiger tightens the link between clothing and class from the start. Balram follows Vijay’s rise at least partly through the changes in his attire. The pig farmer’s son begins the story with the enviable position of a bus driver and shows it through his “bus-company-issue khaki uniform.” In a village of rickshaw drivers and farmers, Vijay’s “silver whistle” speaks to a prestige and ascendance that inspires Balram to do the same. “Everything about him said: he had made it in life,” the narrator recounts.

Vijay only continues his rise in clothing and in power. The next moment when Balram sees Vijay, the former bus driver now wears a “white Nehru cap on his head” and “rings of solid gold” on eight of his fingers. He sports a “red headband” in support of the Great Socialist. By the time Balram chauffeurs Ashok to coal negotiations, Vijay has crept into the political sphere itself. The ex-bus-driver now orders him to drive towards Ashoka Road while swigging Johnnie Walkers in “polished suit and tie.”

Clothing makes the wearer, and Balram experiences this for himself. When he is wearing his Maharaja outfit, Pinky Madam and Ashok make fun of his poor English pronunciation and, by extension, his ignorance. The costume exploits Indian culture to his masters’ perverse delight. Meanwhile, merely slipping into a plain white T-shirt grants him entry into the exclusive upper-class malls. Through these firsthand incidents, Balram shows how status and privileges shift with changes in attire.

People outgrow their clothes, but clothes also outlast the people. Despite the novel’s many wardrobe makeovers, it offers moments in which clothing persists beyond death. The cheap “green cloth” on the tire identifies Pinky Madam’s drunk-driving victim as a young, poor child. Clothes identify the dead child and incriminate Ashok’s family—what could have been roadkill becomes tragic manslaughter. Clothes change lives, and they leave their signatures long after death.

The White Tiger casts language as a function of power. Balram’s experience as the Stork’s servant spotlights the allure of the English language. “In this country we have two kinds of men: ‘Indian’ liquor men and ‘English’ liquor men,” he explains. Anything “English” belongs to the rich, who desperately seek after the designation for its associations with western power. Delhi’s wealthy neighborhoods sport luxury wannabes named “Buckingham B” or “Windsor Manor,” while Pinky Madam mocks Balram for repeatedly mispronouncing “pizza.” In the 21st-century Global South, any and all associations with foreign, western language places its users in a class above.

In a broader sense, language gives Balram the skills for survival. Balram doesn’t pronounce English perfectly, but he benefits nonetheless from basic literacy. His linguistic knowledge allows him to pick up on Pinky Madam’s grumbles against him and to catch Ashok’s complaints. They enable him to play dumb before the Mongoose, who underestimates his intelligence and insists on reading Kusum’s letters aloud. Most crucially, they alert him to the two brothers’ plot to incriminate him. Reading the signed confession disabuses him of the Stork’s affectionate gestures, and they liberate him from the family’s stranglehold. Balram kills Ashok and successfully escapes by following the news of the police search. At the train station, he even twists the words of his own “Wanted” poster to an illiterate man—a moment that symbolically marks the fulfillment of his father’s aspirations. In this poignant scene, Balram has unlocked the better life that his father could have only dreamed of. Literacy makes the difference between knowledge and ignorance, placing in his hands the tools for his own freedom.