Chapter 5 - The Disappearing Rural in New India: Aravind Adiga and the Indian Anglophone Novel

Summary

Chapter 5 discovers an unlikely source of caste and class politics in Aravind Adiga’s Anglophone novel of individual ambition The White Tiger ‘2008’. I propose that the novel recodes, through a series of parodies and formal allusions – rural lower-caste militants, who regularly appear at the margins of the plot and whose contrapuntal significance the majority of commentators have overlooked. The chapter re-illuminates the complex maze of subterranean flows that undercuts the novel’s surface narrative of a new India. I hold that traditions of the protest novel, epistolary narrative, modernist, and indigenous satirical genres are at work in the novel: these gesture to suppressed narratives of peripheral internationalism. My reading of the novel elaborates on the evolving significance of internationalism in twenty-first-century India, where the rural and the subaltern have been all but banished from cultural discourse.