COURSE: M.A ENGLISH
SEMESTER: 4
BATCH: 2016-2018
ENROLMENT NO- 2069108420170010
SUBMITTED TO – Dr. Dilip Barad
SMT .S.B.GARDI
SMT .S.B.GARDI
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
MAHARAJA KRISHNAKUMARSINHJI BHAVNAGER UNIVERSITY
EMAIL ID –BinkalbaGohil1995@Gmail.Com
PARER NO-13 The New literature.
TOPIC:” Character study of Balram
Halwai”.
Introduction:
Aravind Adiga in his debut novel The
White Tiger, which earned him Man Booker Prize 2008, is considered one of the
most powerful books of the present decades. The book represents the brutal
truths and realistic picture of India.
According to Adiga,
“This novel had been the fruit of his labours as a reporter in India” Balram
Halwai in Indian society by raising the essential issues like social
inequalities and injustice based on the class, caste and religion. Also
describes how Adiga illustrates the discrimination among rich and poor and how
rich dominating the poor and they came out of the “Rooster Coop” in defence,
either by murdering their masters or betrayal of one’s family.
Balram likes Chinese’s freedom and individual
liberty. He knows that British tried a lot to make Chinese their servants, but
they never succeed. This is the main reason that Balram appreciates China and
narrates his life to
Journey of Balram Halwai Rage to riches:
Person
goes there because of they wanted to money. Balram How to reach where he
is so that confessional mode telling the process because they done several
wrong things.
Balram himself say I am half back of India a person with an incomplete understanding. who sees the world is incomplete. We do not get 360 degree viewpoint of everything only single dimension of happening. and so it loose stone we can break that half baked individual cannot have 360 degree of view.
He
calls himself heartbreak but he himself tells it becomes very strong loose
stone. in the narrative with perhaps Adiga has beautifully put inside. Adidas
says I am not saying but it is bal ram’s point of view Balram is half baked
Indian he is not anther angel to looking everything look from his. Balram
represent patriarchy male identity of India and then how it looked towards
other female also.
Balram
does not use the name Balram Halawi, when he introduces himself to the Chinese
Prime Minister. But he uses a nickname, the ‘White Tiger’. This becomes his
grand narrative; the way he identifies himself. However, this nickname, this
identification with a tiger, is not his original invention; but comes from his
school as a reward for his ability to read. Thus he awarded the title of a
white tiger for his distinction.
Sometimes, he believes that
he is the representative of ordinary men from the dominated classes, and at the
other time, he believes that he is the exception to them; he is a white tiger,
a unique animal among his species. On the other hand, Balram’s father did not
know the difference between animal and lower class, and Balram knows that, but
he does not excuse him. This is the first movement of Balram towards Ashok’s
class: he believes that his father raised him to live like an animal, and never
realise that they are living as such. Because he does not recognise that he is
a human being and his life is different than that of animals, he deserves
better.
When Balram
is in Laxmangarh he is living in darkness, begins his journey without a name;
his family called him “Munna” or “boy”. In fact, a school teacher has to name
him, later, a local official decides on his date of birth in order to
facilitate the stealing of his vote. But in Bangalore and Delhi, he comes in
light. Here everything is supposed to be perfect, with its big hotels,
multi-storey buildings, call centres, mall, and high tech area etc. whereas,
India lives in villages and all the city glamour are due to the disintegration
of village life.
After experiencing with both rural and urban
India, Balram concludes that there are only two castes in modern India. The
traditional importance of caste has been increasingly replaced by that of
class. Balram points out: In the old days, there were one thousand castes and
destinies in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men with Big
Bellies, and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat—or get eaten
up”
The final
incident changes the Balram’s life to a greater extent, in which Ashok’s wife
accidentally killed a nameless poor person on the road. His brutal master Ashok
suggests that Balram takes the fall for the crime so that they have free from
all the charges and insults. But this incident forces Balram into an even
deeper turmoil of despair and anger.
This anger rises at its
peak when Balram finally does kill his master by the roadside, proclaims
immediately that now he is a free man. Davis Mike observed, “If the poor are
victims of poverty, that poverty also makes them criminals, in part as a result
of the illegality of unplanned, slum housing and the criminal networks which
allow the poor to defend themselves”
Adiga’s book The White Tiger deals with precisely the morality
and effects of the actions displayed in this passage. It is a powerful
idea and a controversial one that murder and other immoral actions can be
justified by extreme circumstances like poverty.
Balram realises himself
that he would be exploited to do so in which his master did not see him as a
part of the family. At last Balram asserts “the greatest thing to come out of
this country in the ten thousand years of its history is the ‘Rooster Coop” Masters
blackmail their servants to send money home and forced them to do things what
they want. Adiga also explores the very way in which masters control their
servants and protect themselves from murder is the threat of violence against
the servant’s family.
As a result, poor
people are the trap in the rooster coop and do not resist to be destroyed by
the big bellies. Balram compares small bellies with roosters in old Delhi,
behind Jama Masjid, where they are stuffed tightly as the roosters in the coop
smell blood from above. They see the organs of their brothers lying around
them. They know they’re next. Yet they do not rebel. They do not try to get out
of the coop.
The same thing happens
with the human in this country. They are enslaved in their own minds and
consider it their birthright to live and die for their masters in everlasting
subjugation. Consequently, he is able to justify his action that suppresses
instinctive feelings of loyalty to his master and responsibility to family’s
death.
According to Adiga,
caste system determines a person’s social and economic status. Balram inherited
caste is ‘Halwai’ or ‘sweet maker’ which is considered as men with small
bellies and that makes him far away from the opportunity to succeed. Thus the
only way to break this irreversible cycle, one must take drastic action which
in Balram’s case is to murder his master and take his money as well as
identity. In fact, it’s a dark book as Balram compromises with wrong to cross
over to the bright side.
Balram’s family members
also become terrible victims of their landlord’s exploitation. Balram also
suffers such exploitation, dropped from the school and ask to work in a tea
stall to pay off his father’s debt to their landlord. Thus Adiga draws our
attention to the severe poverty that exists in India.
According to Balram, the
darkness represents those areas of rural India where education and electricity
are inadequate, and where villagers crosstalk about local elections “like
eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, which is proved to be true, when a
rickshaw-puller decided to cast his vote and was brutally murdered. Actually
the main difference between “Darkness” and “Light” is that in “Light,” people
are free to cast their own vote but according to Balram in “Darkness” people
are not free by themselves to give their vote: “I am India’s most faithful voter
and I still have not seen the inside of a voting booth”
Conclusion:
To conclude it can be said that The White
Tiger is a story about the predicament of Balram Halwai who narrates his story
from “darkness to light,” “rags to riches,” transforming from a village tea
shop boy into a Bangalore entrepreneur. His spring up from a poor village boy
to a successful entrepreneur is not at all easy but hard-hitting struggle to unconstrained from brutal society.
At the end of the novel,
Balram makes a prediction that at last, his life is totally free from white
man. Adiga indirectly advocates changes in the social, economic and political
system by abolishing individual vices, social evils and disintegrating system.
All the issues raised by Adiga are prevalent in the whole chapter and are to be
understood with their complexity and addressed properly by the protagonist
Balram.
Works Cited
DEVI, RAJNI and RAJNII DEVI. Internatinal for english
Language Literature and Humanities. 7 2017. 13 3 2018
<http://ijellh.com/OJS/index.php/OJS/article/view/2112>.
Haitham, Hind. Lehigh
University. 1 9 2013. 13 3 2018
<https://preserve.lehigh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2499&context=etd>.
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