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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Like Balram himself, The White Tiger is brutally quick-witted. Its short, bitingly sarcastic sentences deal out jokes, stereotypes, and conspiracies. Balram mocks India’s “glorious parliamentary democracy” and, at other moments, explains how the Japanese invented cellphones to “diminish the white man’s brains and balls.” The novel’s epistolary format gives freedom for improvisational candor. The story reads as though Balram is speaking to Jiabao himself; the protagonist-narrator digresses and pauses his own story at the end of every chapter.
Balram’s letter promises to explain the “truth about Bangalore,” but it withholds certain specifics at the same time. The protagonist constructs a story that, through its own unaddressed gaps, obscures and mystifies. He never provides any precise reason for offering his life story to the Chinese premier, apart from the generous goodwill of doing it “free of charge.” He avoids certain names as well, preferring to call characters “Nepali eyes” and “Vitiligo-Lips” instead. He retreats to animal names—the “Stork,” “Raven,” “Wild Boar,” and “Buffalo”—to describe the Laxmangarh’s landlords, which gives the story a hazy, Aesop’s-fable-like quality. Through his occasional avoidance of precise details, Balram seems to engage himself in his own project of myth-making.
The story balances this vagueness with other formal features. Details like capitalized excerpts from signs or newspapers add an impression of realism to Balram’s account. At the “‘JACKPOT’ ENGLISH LIQUOR SHOP,” for instance, he directly transcribes the alcohol price list. Clever sidebars—“HOW DOES THE ENTERPRISING DRIVER EARN A LITTLE EXTRA CASH?”—turn his account into a quasi-realistic collage of different media.
More centrally, though, Balram’s work disabuses the reader. Paragraph breaks allow him to undercut earlier impressions and startle his audience; “eight months later, I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat,” he confesses after describing his visit to the black fort. Meanwhile, parentheticals add new context or information that take a sledgehammer to the romantic portrayals of Indian society. Tucked away in these asides, servants kick the owner’s dogs in rebellion and Muslims are illiterate. Balram’s open letter spares no details about the underbelly of Indian society, simultaneously creating and deconstructing stories.
