Darkness to Light: Postcolonialism, Subalternity, and the Politics of Power in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55544/ijrah.6.3.46Keywords:
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga, postcolonialism, subalternity, Spivak, Fanon, Gramsci, hegemony, class struggle, Indian literatureAbstract
Winning the Man Booker prize in 2008, The White Tiger is a searing portrait of class struggle, postcolonial identity and subaltern resistance in contemporary India by Aravind Adiga. Adiga questions the ingrained colonial and neo-colonial structures of power of contemporary Indian society by exposing-Balram Halwai, a poor village boy, who becomes the voice of a confessional through murder and becomes an entrepreneur. The novel is discussed here in relation to two concepts that have the potential to shed light on the texts, postcolonial theory, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's idea of subalternity, as well as the analytics of power presented by Michel Foucault. It theorises The White Tiger by invoking Frantz Fanon's theorizations of colonial violence, Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, and Homi K. Bhabha's idea of mimicry and ambivalence and claims that the novel does not just critique the economic inequality but is a radical deconstruction of the epistemological and ideological notions on which postcolonial Indian society is built. Balram's journey from darkness to light is one individual journey of liberation and also a collective song of indictment in the face of systemic oppression.
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