Long versus short: ‘The White Tiger’ and ‘Between the Assassinations’ by Aravind Adiga
Aravind Adiga will go down as having maintained India's winning streak in the international literary scene by bagging the 2008 Man Booker prize. The fact that he pipped at the post his more illustrious compatriot Amitav Ghosh makes his triumph even more significant. The question is whether The White Tiger, his debut novel, is deserving of the high profile it has achieved. And now that Adiga's first volume of short fiction, titled Between the Assassinations, has been released close on the heels of his Booker win, how would one review Adiga as a writer?
The first thing which is of note about Adiga's work is that it is a welcome break from the dominant trend of writing by the diaspora. Indeed, Adiga slams the door shut in the face of the West even while portraying India, both pre- and post-economic reform, as an insufficiently imagined community. The novel, a triumphant product of globalisation that has reversed the power equations between the North and the global South, is marked by its pronounced irreverence towards the West ("In twenty years' time, it will be just us yellow men and brown men at the top of the pyramid, and we will rule the world") and its comic deflation of the white man (in decline, as the novel's first-person narrator says, due to "buggery, drug abuse and mobile phone usage").