Postcolonial Oppression and Class Consciousness in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger significantly contributes to the postcolonial novel as an essential vehicle to discuss continuing forms of repression and the evolution of class consciousness in modern-day India. India has, politically speaking, liberated itself from British colonial rule; however, Adiga’s story reveals how the country today is under deep-seated neocolonial forms of social and economic control, where systems of caste, class, and corruption continue to exercise power and suppress the disenfranchised. In a postcolonial context, repression comes no longer from an external power but domestic systems inherited from these former ruling powers. These oppressive structures are the political elites, capitalists, and upper castes who engage in certain forms of domination (i.e., colonialism) and reinforce and reproduce native modes of oppression and economic divisions that still exist throughout their transition. Balram Halwai is the story’s narrator, and he goes from being a driver to an entrepreneur. It reflects on India’s systemic inequalities through Balram’s lens, relating them to India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The structure of autonomy created by the Indian Independence Act created a form of autonomy. Still, it resulted in widespread violence and led to a partition of India and the formation of Pakistan. Even though the caste system was abolished in the 1960s, Balram believed abolishing caste created more chaos and wider inequality.