The White Tiger

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapters 7-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

River Ganga (Ganges)

The River Ganga (Ganges) symbolizes corruption in India, especially in the “Darkness.” The polluted river serves as the demarcation point for the Darkness (which includes Balram’s village of Laxmangarh), “a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds […] But the river brings darkness to India” (12). Opposed to the ocean, the River Ganga connects places with ample natural resources and stifling poverty, with dark water and mud that swallow everything that touches them. Balram’s mother’s body is burned on the riverbank, reinforcing the river’s connection to corruption: With banks “full of rich, dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it,” the river demonstrates how political and social corruption spread throughout India, preventing growth and trapping the poor (12). The river’s mud, the destination of almost every living thing in the Darkness, demonstrates that corruption doesn’t end with the landlords or ministers in Delhi, or even the Great Socialist. These individuals’ actions seep into the lives of everyone they touch, like mud. For example, a teacher sells his students’ uniforms because a lower-level official stole his paycheck, and the regional public hospital meant for residents of the Darkness proves inadequate—the latter leading to the death of Balram’s father. Nothing escapes the River Ganga-like corruption unscathed.

Rooster Coop

While The White Tiger criticizes Western values of personal freedom and fulfillment (often at the cost of community), Balram offers his own criticism of the Rooster Coop, an Indian metaphor for the self-subjugation of the less fortunate— the clash between individualism and collectivism. He describes the concept to Premier Wen Jiabao: In Old Delhi, “Hundreds of pale hens and brightly colored roosters, stuffed tightly into wire-mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space” (148). The chickens seemingly accept their fate, fighting each other rather than working together to escape a system that creates artificial deprivation. The respect given to employers and their properties contrasts with the infighting among servants, families, and peers looking to control each other.

Balram believes the Rooster Coop self-regulates, as the powerful “have trained the remaining 99.9 percent […] to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse” (149). The stigma of trying to break free of one’s cage, one’s caste, comes from employers and peers alike; for example, Balram’s peers tease him for doing yoga in a car, an activity associated with the wealthy. Where self-regulation fails, the specter of violence makes unbreakable. Balram observes that “only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed—hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters—can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature” (150); crimes against the powerful and wealthy are often met with the erasure of entire families. When Balram manages to escape his cage, he changes his appraisal of the Rooster Coop, viewing it as a test of strength: “the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr. Ashok […] to be weeded out” (275). A Darwinian concept, the Rooster Coop ensures control of the naturally weak and elevation of the naturally strong (“weak” and “strong” being in terms of innate privileges)—twisting everyone it touches, like the River Ganga.

Honda City

The cars on Delhi’s crowded streets, like Ashok’s immaculate Honda City, symbolize India’s socioeconomic inequality. A symbol of the Stork’s wealth, the Honda City becomes a means of entrepreneurship in Balram’s hands and a weapon in an inebriated Pinky Madam’s. When Balram sees the car in Dhanbad, he describes it as “a more sophisticated creature, with a mind of his own; he has power steering, and an advanced engine, and he does what he wants to” (52). Personified, the Honda City becomes more valuable than the humans outside of its occupants. Signifying the cost of personal fulfillment, denied to most in Delhi, cars offer protection for the rich from the pollution they themselves create:

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed (112).

Cars carry the wealthy in safety and style, as men like Ashok and Mukesh Sir (the Mongoose) use them to carry bribes across the city, representing both literal (air pollution and litter) and metaphorical (political corruption) damage done to India.