Breaking Out of the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga's White Tiger and Richard Wright's Native Son

White Tiger, the winner of the 2008 Man Booker prize, has much in common with Richard Wright's Native Son. Both Balram Halwi and Bigger Thomas are born into sharply divided societies where the lower classes struggle in dire poverty without hope of advancement.¹ While at first blush neither novel fits the usual postcolonial mold since Native Son is set in the United States and White Tiger involves a native "master," in fact both novels reflect a Manichean duality of rich/master/powerful and poor/servant/oppressed.

To date, there is little published scholarship on White Tiger or mention of its debt to Wright. A comparison proves very fruitful, however, because both novels examine the extent to which poverty, frustration, hopelessness, and humiliation figure into the complex of causes that result in violent crime. Both Bigger and Balram turn to violence to escape the oppression that relentlessly threatens their aspirations for livelihood and manhood. Both men bite the hands that feed them by committing acts of homicide: far from repenting the loss of life, each justifies it as an existential act. Balram goes so far as to justify murder as comparable to the misdeeds routinely engaged in by senior government officials and successful businessmen as they climb to the top. The novels invite comparison in spite of the fact that they take place seventy years apart in different continents and in widely different cultures. Each can be understood as postcolonial in that each describes an unbridgeable chasm between marginalized, impoverished populations and dominant wealthy elites who mimic colonizers.

White Tiger invites us to consider the relationship between inequality and violent crime. Is violent crime a protest against conditions of oppression? More crucially, is it excused by such conditions? Aravind Adiga tells the shocking, apparently amoral story of a young man who brutally murders his employer—and gets away with it. Adiga explains in an interview that serves as a coda to the novel that he was strongly influenced by Richard Wright.² There are many parallels between Adiga's protagonist, Balram Halwai, and Wright's antihero in Native Son, Bigger Thomas.³ Bigger, who has grown up in the slums of Chicago and finally gets a decent job as chauffeur to the kindly Dalton family, strangles their daughter Mary. Balram, who has grown up in "the Darkness" of Laxmanargh and becomes a chauffeur for a wealthy Indian, murders his benevolent employer Ashok. Balram lives in a hopeless world where legitimate opportunity is foreclosed. This resourceful if unprincipled individual resorts to violence because he sees no other way to "get ahead." Neither Bigger nor Balram feels remorse: in both instances the killings give rise to a sense of newfound freedom and existential identity.

Despite the similarities and Adiga's acknowledgment of debt, there are significant differences between the two works. Unlike Bigger's killing of Mary Dalton, which is largely accidental, Balram's crime, which involves robbery as well as murder, is a premeditated act of violence. Bigger is executed at the end of Native Son; in contrast, Balram uses the money that he has stolen to start a taxi service and becomes a successful entrepreneur. In White Tiger, crime pays. Balram becomes the new master, enriching himself but at the same time perpetuating a neocolonial structure.

The philosophy of Frantz Fanon has profoundly influenced Adiga, as is evident in White Tiger. In Fanon's landmark work, Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth], published in 1961, twenty-one years after Native Son, he writes that revolutionary violence is a constructive means for the liberation and self-expression of colonized people. Fanon identifies three stages that postcolonial writers go through: the assimilation stage, the adaptation stage, and the fighting stage when the writer produces "une littérature de combat, une littérature révolutionnaire, une littérature nationale" ["a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, a national literature"].⁴ On Fanon's matrix, White Tiger is a third-stage novel. Adiga describes a diseased society where corruption siphons off money...