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Hyperbole
Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Chapter 7: The Sixth Night
Explanation and Analysis—At the Temple:
The White Tiger is a humorous commentary on the unreliability of face-value assumptions. Through instances of dramatic irony, its potent satire exposes all the mistaken impressions and half-hearted illusions that its characters rely upon. One particularly telling moment happens in Chapter 7, when Ashok surprises Balram with a visit to his underground servant’s quarters:
Mr. Ashok lifted up a corner of the net and looked at me, a sly grin on his face.
‘I know exactly what you were doing.’
‘Sir?’
‘I was calling your name and you weren’t responding. So I came down to see. But I know exactly what you were doing…that other driver, the man with the pink lips, he told me.’
My heart pounded. I looked down at the ground.
‘He said you were at the temple, offering prayers for my health.’
The irony of this master-servant exchange is especially comic. Ashok assumes that Balram had been piously praying for his health, and he could not have fallen further from the truth. Contrary to Vitiligo-Lips’s alibi, Ashok’s “religious” servant has just returned from “dipping his beak” into a faux-blond prostitute and getting conned while doing so. Because of Balram’s first-person narration, the reader knows what the master does not.
Ashok’s naïve simplicity reflects how deeply out-of-touch he is from his servant. The master harbors no suspicions against Balram, even against the warnings of his wife and brother. This lenience is both freeing and oppressive—it makes Ashok more sympathetic than Balram’s other masters, but it doesn’t prevent him from ignoring the plight of the poor. Oblivious to Balram’s whereabouts and uninterested in meaningfully engaging with his servant, Ashok indulges in a tourist-like romanticism of India’s lower-class. He misinterprets Balram’s eye touch as a sign of worship, frets over the sorry state of his servant’s bedroom, and then proceeds to do nothing about it. He projects his own perceptions rather than honoring Balram’s own agency. Ashok’s generosity may give Balram a measure of dignity, but it stems from a place of massive ignorance. “I want to be a simple man like you,” he tells the servant who is scheming to kill him. In declaring Balram to be “stupid as hell” but “honest,” Ashok ends up duping none other than himself.
Related Themes:
Chapter 8: The Seventh Night
Explanation and Analysis—Blood on My Hands:
After Balram escapes to Bangalore, situational irony often highlights his sudden reversal of fate. As CEO of “White Tiger Drivers,” Balram returns to cars, but this time turns his status as a driver on its head. When Mohammad Asif accidentally kills the bike rider, he arrives at the scene and defends his driver from the deceased’s brother:
‘Look here, son,’ I said, ‘I am the owner of this vehicle. Your fight is with me, not with this driver. He was following my orders, to drive as fast as he could. The blood is on my hands, not his. These girls need to go home. Come with me to the police station—I offer myself as your ransom. Let them go.'
Balram’s admission may be ironic in multiple senses. His open confession that “the blood is on my hands” perhaps applies better to the crime he did commit than the one he did not. Balram accepts the blame for Asif’s incident in a veiled attempt to atone for his far graver act of murder; it is as though, in the muddle of the double deaths, Balram tries cleaning his hands of both.
Still more ironically, Asif’s car accident is a direct reprise of Pinky Madam’s manslaughter episode: in both instances, the drivers had killed someone when Balram was not at the wheel. Yet Balram’s own response this second time makes a night-and-day difference. In an act of generous valor, he voluntarily steps in for Asif and shoulders the blame. Where he was previously forced to sign a written confession, he now willingly escorts himself and the bike rider’s brother to the police station.
Both ironies underscore the fundamentally broken scales of justice. Balram’s escape from his murder is a humiliating tale of law enforcement’s failure to properly track down criminals. His own theatrics of visiting the police station and filing the claims show how perversely the justice system accommodates the rich and powerful. To be wealthy, he suggests, is to be innocent. Laden with deep pockets, he barely bats an eye before turning himself in. He pays for “justice” and reveals its own poverty.
Balram himself recognizes all of this. The charades go as planned: he pretends to call out the policemen and the assistant commissioner, who then turns the blame onto the bike rider’s brother. The assistant commissioner was “scum,” he admits. “But he was my scum.” Once the poor bike rider’s brother but now the Mongoose, Balram holds the puppet strings; he toys with them.
Related Themes:
