[Reader-list] On WHITE TIGER and SES OF POPPIES

[prabhat kumar]

*Oceans Apart*

*Kalpana Wilson*

'The wind had fallen off, so there was not a fleck of white visible on the
surface, and with the afternoon sun glaring down, the water was as dark and
still as the cloak of shadows that covers the opening of an abyss. Like the
others around her, Deeti stared in stupefaction: it was impossible to think
of this as water at all - for water surely needed a boundary, a rim, a
shore, to give it shape and hold it in place? This was a firmament, like the
night sky, holding the vessel aloft as if it were a planet or a star.'
*- Sea of Poppies*

At first glance completely antithetical – *The White Tiger *and *Sea of
Poppies*, both shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize, share some common
features and themes. Both begin in apparently isolated closed boundaried
settings of villages in the plains of Bihar and eastern UP. And in both,
this is a starting point for physical and metaphorical journeys across a
world shaped by capitalist globalisation. In both the transformations
wrought by these processes are subjected to a bitterly critical gaze. Here
however the similarity ends. One might assume that Adiga's short (if not
very sharp) tale of a Bihari driver's experiences in 21st century Delhi,
contemporary in subject and self-consciously innovative in form - has more
immediacy for left and progressive readers than Ghosh's panoramic and
classically constructed novel of 19th century migration to Mauritius. But
reading both books leaves one with the inescapable feeling that whereas *The
White Tiger* is designed to be all too superficial and ultimately palatable
in its portrayal of the (apparently specifically Indian) inequalities of
globalisation, *Sea of Poppies* raises, and powerfully sustains, much more
fundamental questions about the nature of the expansion of capitalism,
through its subtle and highly evocative narration of the experiences and
emotions of a range of characters, and also gives one clues as to why it was
Adiga's book which was chosen to win the prestigious Booker Prize.
Written as a series of letters from a Bangalore-based 'Indian entrepreneur'
to the Chinese premier, *The White Tiger* is the story of  Munna, born in a
village in Gaya district, the son of a rickshaw puller and a mother who is
soon to die of TB. Having been allocated the more 'respectable' name of
Balram at school, he is dubbed 'White Tiger' - 'the creature that comes
along only once in a generation' by a visiting inspector of schools who
marks him out as a rare example of 'an intelligent honest vivacious fellow'.
But Balram's education is soon cut short when he is taken out of school to
work in a tea shop as part of the conditions of a loan his family takes from
one of the village landlords to meet the expenses of his cousin sister's
wedding. By shrewdly listening in on the conversations of customers, Balram
gathers that his best option is to become a driver, an ambition he doggedly
pursues. Seeking employment in Dhanbad, he is taken on as 'Number Two
Driver' and all-round servant by the same landlord. Quite soon (having
dispatched driver number one by threatening to expose his Muslim background)
he is on his way to Delhi as driver to the younger son of the family, the
liberal, cosseted Ashok, newly returned from America, and his wife Pinky.
Ashok's main activity in Delhi turns out to be to bribe various ministers
and politicians on behalf of the family's illicit coal business – and as
Balram drives him to these assignations interspersed with endless trips to
malls, restaurants and nightclubs, he becomes increasingly aware that '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'. With a series of
events compounding Balram's awareness of the material and psychological
barriers preventing him crossing from one group to the other, and an
arrogantly oblivious Ashok leaving him in charge of ever greater sums of
bribe money, the stage is set for Balram to murder his employer and flee to
Bangalore with the 'red bag' of cash. Having established his own successful
business, he sets out to explain with obvious irony, 'how entrepreneurship
is born, nurtured and developed in this, the glorious twenty-first century
of man.
The century, more specifically, of the *yellow* and the *brown* man.'
*The White Tiger* veers between detailed and highly specific descriptions of
the world Balram enters as a servant in Gurgaon, and a crudely simplified
code used to describe the world he leaves behind in Bihar – lower castes
become 'Pigherders', a powerful and corrupt politician, possibly intended as
an amalgam of Laloo and Mulayam, is 'the Great Socialist' (he is a
'pigherder' too) and most tellingly, the entire Gangetic plain is referred
to simply as 'the Darkness'.
Of course, the tactic of caricaturing and renaming has been used effectively
in many political satires – particularly under conditions of censorship and
repression - but *The White Tiger* lacks the sharpness and accuracy to be
one of them. Rather, it seems to be mainly in order to make his book more
'accessible' to Western readers that Adiga has simplified to this extent –
an impression which is intensified by the fact that he translates even
proper names, however incongruous the results: Balram's grandmother is
referred to as 'Kusum Granny'; an older stranger is addressed as 'Muslim
uncle'. In any case, Adiga's own disdain for political distinctions is clear
– and is very much in tune with the metropolitan elite's view of Bihar. Thus
the 'Great Socialist's party is shown sloganeering not about 'social
justice' but 'stand up to the rich', the landlords form a party called the
All India Social Progressive Front (Leninist Faction) and 'Naxals' main
activity is kidnapping the children of the rich.
It is perhaps not surprising then that there is little in the descriptions
of Balram's early life which evoke any sense of place: this is very much
Bihar-by-numbers, with set-pieces such as the description of vote rigging or
of the hospital devoid of doctors where Balram's father dies. Tellingly, the
most convincing observations are those which a traveller passing though
might make from the road: the village bus-stand, for example. The characters
too are seen through the lens of an outsider – Balram's father is described
as a man with a sense of dignity 'despite' being a rickshaw puller, 'a human
beast of burden'. But this is shown by the fact that he chooses to remain
standing while waiting for long hours rather than squatting 'hunched over'
on the ground which, apparently, is 'the posture common to servants in every
part of India'. One cannot help wondering if servants are perhaps the only
people Adiga has met who find such a position comfortable!
While Balram retains some affection for his father and his elder brother
Kishan, the women of his large extended family, led by his hypocritical,
grasping grandmother, are portrayed as parasitically driving the men to
premature death – they are described as 'pouncing' on the men who return
home with their earnings as migrant labourers 'like wildcats on a slab of
flesh', more concerned with feeding the family buffalo than the men of the
household, and responsible for forcing the boys of the family into child
labour and the young men into early marriage for the sake of dowry. When
Balram returns home to find Kishan 'thinner, and darker….' he imagines that
instead of chicken the women 'had served me flesh from Kishan's own body on
that plate.' While it could be argued that the misogyny is Balram's rather
than Adiga's, the author clearly shares his protagonist's distorted
perception that women of all classes only consume. Why else, for example,
are there no women in the world of domestic servants in Delhi – where are
all the maids and ayahs, so many of whom have also migrated to Delhi from
Bihar and Jharkhand to work?
Ultimately, Balram's family's poverty is explained all too stereotypically
in terms of the joint family system, too many children, a penchant for
lavish weddings – and with so little depth to his personal history, he
inevitably remains a superficial character. Once installed in an upmarket
apartment block in Gurgaon, however, Adiga is clearly on more familiar
ground, and in fact the portrayal of Balram's employer Ashok, seen through
his driver's eyes, is much more complex and credible. America-returned Ashok
is attached to his self-image as more liberal and caring than his feudal
father and brother, expressing concern over Balram's cockroach-infested
living quarters and appreciating his (mostly faked) religiosity. Many of
Adiga's readers, particularly NRIs, might recognise something of themselves
in this – as where he demands '"Take me to the kind of place you go to eat,
Balram" "Sir?" "I'm sick of the food I eat, Balram. I'm sick of the life I
lead. We rich people, we've lost our way, Balram…" I ordered okra,
cauliflower, radish, spinach, and *dhal*. Enough to feed a whole family, or
one rich man. He ate and burped and ate some more. "This food is fantastic.
And just twenty-five rupees! You people eat so well!"' The dispensability of
Ashok's principles is brought home when he agrees to his family's scheme to
make Balram take the rap after his wife Pinky drunkenly runs over and kills
a child on the road.
Much of the second half of the book focuses in on the relationship between
'servant' and 'master', a  relationship which grows increasingly obsessive
on Balram's side. Adiga seems to intend this as a metaphor for the current
Indian economic model – and there is much emphasis on the increasing
polarisation between rich and poor (which, according to Balram, has rendered
all previously existing barriers of caste, community and gender obsolete!).
But the India presented in *The White Tiger* has been denuded not only of
its vast and varied middle class, but also its working class – people who
have to wait for buses are all servants in the houses of the rich - or
destitute pavement dwellers; Delhi's call centre workers are all the
daughters of the rich. By doing this - and by embodying the poor in Balram -
a man apparently without human ties of any kind, inextricably bound to his
employer, and only desiring (literally) to become Ashok - Adiga avoids and
elides any question of the possibility of challenges to the model
itself.[image:
the white tiger]
In fact, despite the references to economic polarisation, it soon becomes
clear that it is not capitalist globalisation, but only the specifically
Indian version which Adiga has a problem with. Much is made of Balram's
notion of the Rooster Coop – a system where 'a handful of men in this
country have trained the remaining 99.9 per cent – as strong, as talented,
as intelligent in every way – to exist in perpetual servitude'.
That *The White Tiger* is reassuring fare for those who are merely
uncomfortable with the idea of Indian competition in global markets is
confirmed by the comments of Michael Portillo, head of the Booker Prize
judges and erstwhile Conservative minister in the British government, that
the book exposes 'the dark side' of India's 'economic miracle' and reviews
like that in *Time *Magazine (Adiga's own ex-employer) which was titled
somewhat gloatingly 'The Death of the Indian Dream'.
And if Adiga's message – that a poor 'entrepreneur' can only make it from
rags to riches via murder – might imply at least a healthy cynicism about
capitalist 'dreams' in general, even this cynicism turns to sentimentality
towards the end of the book, where Balram opines 'The moment you recognise
what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave…If you taught every
poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.'
Where Adiga simplifies and translates (both linguistically and conceptually)
for a target audience, Amitav Ghosh in *Sea of Poppies *does the opposite:
he immerses us in a vast and diverse ocean of overlapping languages,
experiences and subjectivities. Yet the attention to details gathered from
extensive research, and more importantly the sensitivity, depth and dynamism
of Ghosh's writing seems to convey the very texture of the lives he
describes. This ensures that the reader identifies effortlessly with a
half-dozen central characters, notably Deeti, a young woman widowed by opium
addiction in a Bhojpur ravaged by forced poppy cultivation, who is now on
the run from her Rajput in-laws, Zachary Reid, an African American ship's
carpenter, the son of a freed slave woman who finds himself  making his way
in a rigidly racialised world by passing as white, Paulette Lambert, the
unconventional daughter of a French Jacobin raised in Calcutta and
struggling to fit into English colonial high society, and Neel Rattan
Halder, an unworldly Bengali aristocrat oblivious to the fact that he is
about to lose everything he possesses at the hands of a British opium trader
and the colonial judiciary.
Set in 1838, *Sea of Poppies*' key motif – which gives its name to the
trilogy of which this book is the first part - is the Ibis, a ship until
recently used to transport human beings from Africa to work as slaves on
European owned cotton and sugar plantations and now, in the wake of the
abolition of the slave trade, and under new owner Benjamin Burnham, a
corrupt Calcutta based opium trader and evangelist Christian, preparing to
transport indentured labourers -  'girmitiyas' - from the plains and hills
of eastern India to the plantations of Mauritius instead. As migrants,
convicts sentenced to transportation, lascars, guards and officers, the
lives of the book's many characters become inextricably intertwined on board
the Ibis.
The Ibis sets sail from Calcutta on the eve of the First Opium War, in which
Britain attacked China to enforce what Ghosh himself has called 'the biggest
drug trading operation in the history of the world' in which opium, produced
from white poppies grown under conditions of colonial coercion by peasants
across eastern India was forced on the people of China by the British in a
hugely profitable triangular trade.
Through the British characters, Ghosh highlight the tensions and shifts
within colonial strategy in this pre-1857 period – the self-righteous
triumphalism of Burnham and his associates in justifying the impending war
on China in the name of spreading 'civilisation' and Christianity, so
reminiscent of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq ('it cannot be denied that
there are times when war is not merely just and necessary, but also humane.
In China that time has come') is questioned by Captain Chillingworth, the
opium-smoking Englishman who is to command the Ibis. Chillingworth favours
the approach of preserving 'native' customs – but the reality of what this
means becomes all too clear at sea when the upper caste feudal violence of
the Subedar in charge of guarding the migrants, Bhyro Singh, is directly
sanctioned.
While this is quite nuanced, the fact that the British characters are mainly
seen through the eyes of Indians, or other 'outsiders' like Zachary and
Paulette has predictably attracted the hostility of some British reviewers.
Notably, William Dalrymple, the British Empire's current apologist-in-chief,
has described the book as reproducing 'a world familiar from Bollywood
movies' in which 'the Indian characters are invariably drawn vulnerable and
big-hearted, while the English are uniformly unfeeling brutes', before
condescendingly dubbing it a 'masterpiece of anti-imperial fiction'. This
drew an uncharacteristically sharp response from Ghosh in an interview for *
The* *Hindu*: "… every character in my book is deeply flawed...It seems to
me that he does not want to recognise what his countrymen once did… You
think these slave traders and drug lords were also nice people? It makes you
think that his whole project is to sort of whitewash the past."
This project is of course not solely Dalrymple's, but has become
increasingly dominant with advocates from Gordon Brown to Manmohan Singh
enthusiastically espousing the rehabilitation of the British imperialism of
the past even while consolidating the contemporary American-led version. *Sea
of Poppies* counters this project with passion, humour and meticulous
research, and conveys how lives were shaped not only by the racism and
cruelty of the British colonial enterprise but the globalised economic
processes of capital accumulation which it developed and sustained. [image:
sea of poppies]
In fact, the novel navigates not only specifically British colonialism but
all the currents and counter-currents of mid-19th century globalisation.
'The tide was beginning to sweep in, and the Hooghly had filled with sails,
as ships and boats hurried to take their berths or to stand out to
mid-channel. From where he lay, on the slats of his gently rocking dinghy,
Jodu could imagine that the world had turned itself upside down, so that the
river had become the sky, crowded with banks of cloud; if you narrowed your
eyes, you might almost think that the ships' masts and spars were bolts of
lightning, forking through the billowing sails….Looking across the river
Jodu could count the flags of a dozen kingdoms and countries: Genoa, the Two
Sicilies, France, Prussia, Holland, America, Venice. He had learnt to
recognise them from Putli…she knew stories about the places from which they
came…nurturing his desire to see the roses of Basra and the port of
Chin-kalan…'
One of its central themes is the transformation of identity within these
processes, and the contingency of identity itself. On board the Ibis, almost
everyone is in the process of becoming someone else – out of choice or
compulsion. Deeti must abandon her caste identity and embrace that of Kalua,
the dalit cart-driver whose life is intertwined with hers and who becomes
her husband; the Bengali speaking Paulette poses as a Brahmin's daughter in
order to gain a place on the ship; Jodu, the young Bengali Muslim boatman
who shared Paulette's childhood, is also on board, yearning to become a
fully-fledged lascar; Zachary must continue to go along with the assumptions
that he is a white man even when the analogies between the treatment of the
indentured migrants and the slavery his mother was born into become
impossible to escape; Neel has been turned into a convict with his crime
tattooed on his forehead: hearing the Bhojpuri songs of the migrants in the
quarters adjoining his cell, as the ship is about to enter the open sea, he
suddenly remembers the language he learnt as a small child from the retainer
who cared for him.
'Slowly, as the women's voices grew in strength and confidence, the men
forgot their quarrels: at home too, during village weddings, it was always
the women who sang when the bride was torn from her parents' embrace – it
was as if they were acknowledging, through their silence, that they, as men,
had no words to describe the pain of the child who is exiled from home.

*Kaisé katé ab*
*Birahá ki ratiyã?*
*(How will it pass*
*This night of parting?')*
At the same time, the novel's portrayal of feudal patriarchal abuse and
violence through the experiences of Deeti and Kalua both in Bhojpur and on
board the Ibis is chillingly familiar from much more recent events,
reminding us that as significant as the transformative impacts of global
capitalism are the pre-existing power relations that it sustains and
incorporates. Sea of Poppies conveys the meaning of both these processes in
a way which has inescapable contemporary resonance.
Perhaps most memorable of all is the emergence of new forms of collective
consciousness and new possibilities:
'But aren't you afraid, she said, of losing caste? Of crossing the Black
Water, and being on a ship with so many sorts of people?
Not at all, the girl replied, in a tone of unalloyed certainty. On a boat of
pilgrims, no-one can lose caste and everyone is the same…From now on, and
forever afterwards, we will all be ship-siblings – *jaházbhais* and *
jaházbahens* – to each other. There'll be no differences between us.

This answer was so daring, so ingenious, as fairly to rob the women of their
breath. Not in a lifetime of thinking, Deeti knew, would she have stumbled
on an answer so complete, so satisfactory, and so thrilling in its
possibilities. In the glow of the moment, she did something she would never
have done otherwise: she reached out to take the stranger's hand in her own.
Instantly, in emulation of her gesture, every other woman reached out too,
to share in this communion of touch.'


-- 
Prabhat Kumar
Ph.D. Student,
Department of History,
South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg,
Im Neuenheimer Feld 330,
69120 Heidelberg, Germany.
Mobile: 00 49 17685050077
FAX: 00 49 06221 546381.