Paper No. - 13
New Literature
Name :- Dharti makwana
Batch :- 2019-2021
Semester :- M.A. Sem-4
Roll No. :- 5
Enrollment No. :- 2069108420200024
Submitted :- Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English, MKBU.
Email :- dharteemakwana789@gmail.com
Paper :- New Literature
Topic :- Neoliberalism in the White Tiger
Neoliberalism in The White Tiger
INTRODUCTION
The White Tiger is a novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was published in 2008 and won the 40th Man Booker Prize the same year. The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India's class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy.
“Politics in our novels therefore is, according to Stendhal’s canonical formulation, a ‘pistol shot in the middle of a concert.’”
–Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”
Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger in the light of some insights about neoliberalism as discussed by Franco Berardi. In his celebrated book, The Soul at Work, Franco Berardi offers a sustained explanation of workerist Marxism as well as the nature of digital capital and its ‘appropriation’ of the human souls in the processes of production. He, however, is precise in using the term soul. Berardi asserts: The soul I intend to discuss does not have much to do with the spirit. It is rather the vital breath that converts biological matter into an animated body. I want to discuss the soul in a materialistic way. What the body can do, that is its soul, as Spinoza said. (21).
Neoliberalism is not just a set of economic policies; it is an all-encompassing ideology that continuously reshapes both global conditions and individual configurations. It requires a fundamental formation of individuals to perpetuate its continued success, which it has achieved to an excessive degree. Literature is beginning to respond to these new existential conditions with novel that trace the development of neoliberal subjects. Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) are two contemporary novels that center on characters who come-of-age in our current context of global capitalism.
OBJECTIVES OF THIS ASSESSMENT
To Analyse the What are the impacts of neoliberalism in The white Tiger?
How does neoliberalism affect the dynamics of society and culture of India?
Can entrepreneurs coincide with the neoliberal India?
To construct the manifestations of idealized masculinities of neoliberal India in The white Tiger?
WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?
A widely quoted example of those 'usual definitions' is What is "NeoLiberalism"? by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo García:
Neo-liberalism is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neoliberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer....Around the world, neo-liberalism has been imposed by powerful financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter- American Development Bank....the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it 'neo' or new.
This sense of the word 'neoliberalism' is widely used in Latin America. However, neoliberalism is more a phenomenon of the rich western market democracies, than of poor regions. That is why I emphasise the historical development of liberalism, in those western market democracies.
Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy that conceptually describes a move towards free markets, capitalism, and a diversion from government ownership. The typical policies associated with neoliberalism include free trade, globalization, privatization, and changes in government spending to stimulate the private sector.
ORIGINS OF NEOLIBERALISM
The term neoliberalism was first coined in 1938 at a conference of noted economists in Paris. The group, which included Walter Lippmann, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises, defined neoliberalism as an emphasis on “the priority of the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and a strong and impartial state.”
EFFECTS OF NEOLIBERALISM: LIGHT AND DARKNESS
Aravind Adiga presents a compelling critique of
postcolonial, neoliberal India that is ensnared with-in this binary abstraction of 'darkness' and 'light' in his debut novel, The White Tiger (Adiga, 2008). Adiga is engaging with multiple vectors in this text such as the politics of class and caste identity at the local level and the effects of neoliberalism at the glob-al level. Byfore grounding his protagonist, Balram’s narrative, Adiga consistently engages with the fundamental power dynamics of the murky society that he inhabits, to present a critique of neoliberal India. This is a “new India”, caught between the shiny, glit-tery, artifice of its chain supermarkets and high end malls and a dark, fecund India, infested with name-less, voiceless creatures who live and die like field rats, in a world too limited to celebrate their humanity.
Balram’s story is however presented in a complex man-ner. According to Shetty et al, it is not necessarily a revolt of the oppressed based on consciousness of class antag-onism but rather one which uses it for the sake of in-dividual profit. Balram is the “white tiger” , the careful interlocutor who brings the worlds of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ in conversation with each other. He believes in social mobility and actively resists the identity that he is born with. However, his social mobility comes at the cost of him turning increasingly corrupt in a world, where it is impossible to retain his sense of ethical morality. There is no scope for absolute heroism in this world. At best, he can inhabit a liminal space with his con-flicted morality, in the form of an apparent celebration of the coming together of the periphery with the centres. Balram constructs an independent identity for himself, which is aligned with his movement from ‘the dark-ness’ to ‘the light’.
This self-fashioning however comes at a heavy price where he must compromise on some of the core values and ideals that define him. Balram sees identity as fluid and malleable, which is stressed by the frequent name changes that he goes through. Ironically, the fact that he does not have any institutional presence arguably places him in a position to take on different public identities that have more leverage in this kind of society.
INDIAN ENTREPRENEUR AND NEOLIBERAL INDIA
In the book, Balram says, “My coun-try is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere at the same time"(Adiga, 6). Balram is laying the grounds for his self-fashioning as a ‘successful entrepreneur’ at the very beginning, inviting his readers to critique the new, ‘shining’ neoliberal India. By doing so, he com-plicates the Times of India advertisement where one India is ‘poised’ to fly while the other India is look-ing down from the edge of the precipice. He positions himself as someone who straddles both these worlds, which are not in dialectical opposition to one another but rather exist as an extension of one another. His consistent emphasis on the fact that entrepreneurs are formed from ‘half-baked clay’ further elucidates this point. He is a half-life caught between both these worlds, not fully belonging to either. He embodies a specific form of entrepreneurial masculineb subjectivity that is produced within this neoliberal discourse.
MASCULINITIES IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA
In this assignment foregrounds a close textual reading of Balram and Ashok in the novel. I intend to explore the construction of new masculine subjectivities that are produced within a neoliberal framework. The inherent master-servant relationship between Ashok and Balram places them in homosocial spaces where we see manifestations of different forms of toxic masculine subjectivities. The reader is quick to interpret this space as essentially coded within a stratified class structure, where servants like Balram are relegated to the inferior position of washing the master’s feet. A passage in the novel reads, “I had to heat water on the stove, carry it into the court-yard, and then lift the old man’s (Stork) feet up one after the other and immerse them in the hot water and then massage them both gently…”(Adiga, 60)
In the village of Laxmangarh, the ultimate power resides with the politicians, the ones who mobilize public opinion by promising certain freedoms and opportunities that are never implemented after the elections. If someone like the upper class, higher caste Stork does not submit to his power the politician has the power to destabilize his entire empire and livelihood. where Balram is shown washing the feet of the Stork, Ashok protests against the treatment meted out to him by his father, when the Stork hits Balram after the water had gone cold:
“Do you have to hit the servants, Father?”
“This is not America, son. Don’t ask questions like that.”
“Why can’t I ask questions?”
“They expect it from us, Ashok. Remember that they respect us for it.””- comes the warning admonition from his father. (Adiga, 43)
This is a very telling scene, where we see Ashok embodying a subjectivity that is relationally positioned in opposition to that of the one embodied by his father. He is shown to be more outwardly progressive about his beliefs than his father, who clearly performs the traditional role of toxic masculinity, which is aimed more at producing fear than commanding respect.
There is also the suggestion that naturalized power dynamics within the society need to be sustained, for its smooth functioning. People like Ashok who dare to reason are presented as an anomaly here, at the risk of being feminised/being considered weak, which is traditionally considered to be the worst af- front to one’s masculinity in a heteronormative setting. A little later in the novel Balram writes, "I realized that this tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, foreignbeducated man, who would be my only master in a few minutes, when the long whistle blew and this train headed off toward Dhanbad, was weak, helpless, absent-minded, and completely unprotected by the usual instincts that run in the blood of a Landlord. If you were back in Lax- mangarh, we would have called you the lamb.” (Adiga, 120)
CONCLUSION
In short, One of the only survivors of his extended family after the reprisals unleashed by his own act at wrestling his own agency and starting his own “free” enterprise in the neoliberal capital. Thus, besides many things, the novel clearly teaches us that not many workers have the option of striking on their own in the current regime of capital and that those who do break the bondage are as rare as White Tigers! Entrepreneurial masculinity, as embodied by Balram, in a neoliberal framework is primarily undergirded by his natural instinct to survive and succeed. His masculine subjectivity is almost radically rooted in the present: in tandem with his zeal to survive in his im-mediate circumstance. Balram’s uncertainty regarding his future existence and the precarity of his circum-stances are encapsulated in the neoliberal moment. As part of this complex constellation of different kinds of masculine subjectivities, we see a rewriting of tradi-tional ideas of hegemonic masculinities in an India that is ‘poised to fly’. There are moments when you see Balram, looking down from the ‘edge of a precipice’, or ‘the black fort’ in his case and at other times, he is preparing himself for flight. Balram’s story can be read as both the promise and plague of neoliberalism.
REFERENCES
Alonso-Breto, Isabel. (2015). Water, White Tigers and Corrupt Neoliberalism: Controversial Entrepreneurs in Recent Fiction from the Subcontinent. Indialogs. 2, 5, 2015.
De, Amrita. Of neoliberalism and its masculine interlocutors: The case of Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga's, The White Tiger. Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies (ISSN 2455 6564), Vol. III, Issue 1, 2018, pp. 70–97.
Kilian Joseph. The Neoliberal Bildungsroman: Individual and National “Development” in Peter Mountford’s A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. The University of North Carolina at Asheville’s NC DOCKS Institutional Repository, 2AD.
Liani Lochner (2014) The Politics of Precarity: Contesting Neoliberalism's Subjects in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, English Academy Review, 31:2, 2014, pp. 35-48.
Nandi, Swaralipi. "Narrative Ambiguity and the Neoliberal Bildungsroman in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger." Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 47 no. 2, 2017, p. 276-301. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jnt.2017.0011.
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