Justice,subalternism,and literary justice: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern — disprivileged by both caste and class — and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice — literary justice — by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.

Who would be against justice? With what seems like an intuitive concept, linked by philosophers to virtue and ethics, the delivery of justice demands and rivets attention. And the opposite is true as well: the perceived miscarriage of justice commands attention, sparking outrage and condemnation. This essay joins recent scholarly work on the relationships among human rights, law, literature and, more widely, narration (see, for instance, Dawes, 2007; Goldberg, 2007; Goldberg and Moore, 2012; Hunt, 2007; Nash, 2009; Peters, 2005; Schaffer and Smith, 2004; Slaughter, 2008). It contributes to this discussion by bringing perspectives from the postcolonial Indian novel, particularly one that represents subaltern oppression and violence, to show how the fictional representation of caste, crime, corruption, and poverty can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. As Mrinalini Chakravorty has argued, “postcolonial fictions of human injury compel us to reenvision human subjectivity on the basis of a politics of collective human sentience that goes beyond the individuated forms of human sovereignty allowed by legal, juridical orders” (2013: 543).

The White Tiger (2008) is an epistolary novel comprising letters written by Balram Halwai to the Premier of China, Wen Jiabao, who is on a visit to India to learn from its entrepreneurial successes. Balram tells the premier of his move from his impoverished village Laxmangarh to New Delhi, where he becomes a chauffeur, murders his boss, and then absconds to Bangalore, where he starts his own successful taxi company. Questions of justice appear throughout the novel, including their implications with and for the law. Where laws must rely on consistency, clarity, and universality, literature of course welcomes contradiction, ambiguity, and multiple perspectives. As Peter Fitzpatrick has argued, “literature’s realms of the imagined and the possible oppose the all-too-solid certainty of law” (2004: 222). By thematizing law within the novel through the corruption of a forced confession (Balram is forced to confess to a fatal hit-and-run accident committed by his boss’s wife), Aravind Adiga points to the limits of the law to deliver justice. At the same time, it is through the perspective of a poor character that Adiga seeks to show the “human” and the abstract concept of “rights” that the law can fall short of representing, respecting, and protecting. The epistolary genre gives the novel a directness and a call to be heard, which adds to the ethical force of the narrative. The novel raises awareness about the crime of poverty and the poverty of crime, showing the indignities of poverty, and how such dehumanization can lead to crime. This provocation of the contiguities between crime and poverty captivates readerly attention — cognitive, empathic, and ethical — while animating and demonstrating the workings of justice in ways not fully captured by legal abstractions of “rights”.

With respect to crime and poverty, that the protagonist and narrator of The White Tiger is poor is significant, for it allows Adiga to imagine justice from the perspective of the poor, a representation that, moreover, provocatively links justice with violence. Justice carries a certain intuitive, virtuous quality: it appeals to a sense of fairness, merit, deservedness, and equality. But what if the delivery of justice entailed a violent act — murder? It is here that the lens of subalternism can be useful in criticism of this novel, since the linking of justice with violence emerges through the plight of a subaltern character. Balram is of the Halwai caste, a caste associated with making sweets (from the Hindi word halwa, the name of a common sweet). The Halwais are not subaltern because they are neither a member of the OBC (“Other Backward Class”), nor are they low caste. As a middling caste, they do not suffer untouchability. But they also cannot benefit from caste-based reservations, and do not enjoy — and are subordinate to — the material and social privileges and status of the upper castes (Gajarawala, 2013: 140; Luhar and Choudhary, 2017: 157; Shingavi, 2014: 14). Because of the industrialization of sweet production, the Halwais have fallen into poverty, becoming “little more than servants” (Luhar and Choudhary, 2017: 157). And this is where I believe subalternism can designate a position of marginality and powerlessness based on caste and class subordination and oppression (on the inextricability of caste identity and capital, whether producing poverty or wealth, see Shingavi, 2014: 9–14). As Balram states, where there were previously a “thousand castes” (Adiga, 2008: 64), ¹ there are now two, men with big bellies versus those with small ones.

There are several ways through which Balram embodies subalternism in that concept’s theorization across the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Gramsci’s (1971, 1978) conception of subaltern was those with limited means of representation, outside of cultural and political hegemony, so that the history of the subaltern is “fragmentary and episodic” (Chakrabarty, 2002: 34–36). Guha used “subaltern” to designate “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way” (1988: 35). A phrase that Spivak has often used in her definition of the subaltern is “those removed from lines of social mobility” (2004: 531) or removed from “social lines of mobility” (2005: 476). Spivak’s examples (1988: 283, 288) of the subaltern include subsistence farmers, the illiterate peasantry, unorganized peasant labour, tribals, and “communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside” (1988: 288). For Spivak, if subalterns were to have access to lines of social mobility, they could represent themselves, because these lines will “permit the formation of a recognisable basis of action” (2005: 476). Such action can involve the subalterns actually feeling like a part of the nation — if only temporarily, as they choose — so that they can, according to Spivak, “synecdochise” (2005: 481–482) themselves, as if they were a part of the whole that is the nation. This can explain Balram’s statements to the premier of China (at the beginning of the novel, after his entrepreneurial success) that his is a representative voice from India.

Alongside subalternism, Spivak uses the concept of the (urban) subproletariat to describe those “outside of organized labour” (1993: 78), what is known in India as the informal or unorganized sector. Marx used the term lumpenproletariat (with lumpen connoting “rags and tatters”, “rabble”, “shabby”, “paltry”; Stallybrass, 1990: 70) to describe this “indefinite” group of peoples. Marx described the lumpenproletariat in Paris as follows: “vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither” (1975: 75; emphasis in original). Where Marx viewed the lumpenproletariat as incapable of revolutionary struggle, Fanon viewed their self-organization — “once it is constituted” (1968: 130) — and education as central to class revolution. Given these theorizations of subalternism, we can ask: what avenues for escaping from subalternism does the modern state provide? For Adiga, the novel demonstrates Balram’s rise into social mobility, and thus, in a sense, out of subalternism, with Balram valuing entrepreneurship as one of the signs of his resistance, heroism, and even “goodness” in the wake of class and caste oppression.

Examining the question of human rights in the novel, Lena Khor invokes subaltern theory in the context of global class apartheid to argue that Balram’s murder of Ashok complicates the position of ethics in human rights. When the subaltern become the agent of human rights (rather than the powerful righting wrongs for the less powerful), murder then seems justified from the perspective of a poor man like Balram. But, in Khor’s words, “can human rights and development work for the poor if their policies subscribe to what the rich think is ethical?” (2012: 59). She argues that the challenge is “to re-imagine what human rights and development efforts might look like according to an ethics logical to those most in need of the freedoms of human rights and development” (2012: 64). Khor concludes that the novel not only provokes empathy in readers but also creates ethical provocation in showing the interconnectedness between the novel’s (globally class-privileged) readers and the subalterns oppressed by global class apartheid, perhaps fostering ethical self-reflexivity in readers. Adiga’s placement of Balram at the centre of his narrative — written and narrated from Balram’s perspective — emphasizes Balram’s agency, allowing the murder to appear justified to some readers. While Balram might not have the ability or opportunity to claim specific “rights” (for example, legal rights; at several instances Adiga shows the limitations, through corruption, of the law), Adiga represents the wider question of justice and the processes leading to its realizations.

It is in this sense of processes that we can consider some of the novel’s literary features. The novel does and does not exemplify realism (it exemplifies a social realism, but lacks the detailed realism of, say, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert); and it is both authentic (of emotions) and inauthentic (Balram is an implausible character, given his vocabulary, knowledge, and inconsistency of voice; see Kapur, 2008; Kumar, 2008; Sebastian, 2009; Subrahmanyam, 2008; Tripathi, 2008). I want to connect this array of different and mixed phenomena to the question of representing subalternism. Adiga is not subaltern, but he imagines a central character who is subaltern, and that difference allows in part for the above heterogeneous qualities of the novel. In her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak invokes the concept of heterogeneity, echoing it from the work of Ranajit Guha (1982: 8) and the Subaltern Studies project, to argue for the irretrievability of the subaltern subject: “Certain members of the Indian elite are of course native informants for first-world intellectuals interested in the voice of the Other. But one must nevertheless insist that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous” (1988: 284; emphasis in original). The constitutive heterogeneity of the subaltern allows for the range of representations — plausible, implausible — that Adiga creates in his novel, suggesting the possibility — and impossibility — of some retrievability in Adiga’s literary representations of justice for the subaltern. Certainly Adiga would hope for some retrievability, for subalternism serves a measure of provocation, that the hunger for justice is driven by the poverty, literally and metaphorically, of justice. In India, the Anglophone novel seems apt for this kind of justice, given the privileges of visibility and respectability, especially globally, enjoyed by Anglophonism in India (with that Anglophonism so often enabled by the caste and class privilege of its authors, as is the case for Adiga). The subaltern himself or herself does not have access to English, so that not only giving voice, but an English voice — and the “I” voice — can itself be seen as an act of justice on the part of the Anglophone Indian middle class novelist. Recent millennial Anglophone novels in India giving voice to the non-Anglophone subaltern include Rupa Bajwa’s The Sari Shop (2004), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2011), with both Sinha and Sethi using the trope of journalism to enhance the realism of their novels. As Nicole Thiara and Judith Misrahi-Barak argue in a recent issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature dedicated to Dalit literature, a focus on Dalit reconfigurations of modernity (foregrounding the interests of the oppressed and marginalized) has the potential to “push the boundaries of current postcolonial literary criticism […] to accommodate the fact that the oppression in India was coming from within and not only from without” (2019: 3).

The rest of this essay explores why and how Adiga imagines the various relations of subalternism and justice in this novel. I demonstrate how the postcolonial Indian novel can represent equalities that are central to the realization of justice, through literary means that bring alive such equalities in ways that law perhaps cannot. I draw upon two theoretical structures as yet uninvoked in criticism of The White Tiger, the first by Jacques Derrida (1990) on justice, in his essay “Force of Law”. The second structure I draw upon is by Robert J. C. Young, building on the work of Giorgio Agamben (1993), Emmanuel Levinas (1981), and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991), in his argument that postcolonial studies should abandon the category of the other. These writings can provide a useful theoretical vocabulary for analysing how Adiga gestures toward possibilities of subaltern justice by examining agency and oppression (and their necessary interconnectedness). But the novel of course is not simply an illustration of theoretical concepts. I pursue how Adiga, using literary means, complicates theoretical notions of justice and otherness, demonstrating in the process an emergent notion of literary justice.

In challenging the category of the other and calling for its abandonment in postcolonial studies, Robert Young has argued for a philosophy of the same based on Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of auto-heteronomy. For Levinas, in Young’s words, this is “a same that has been heterogenized with the recognition that sameness must be determined and unsettled by the other against which it defines itself” (2012: 39). According to Young, this philosophy has “made little impact on the discourse of postcolonial studies” (2012: 39), given the latter’s entrenched distinction between self and other (at the level of the individual, nation, civilization, and otherwise). The determination and unsettling of one’s identity by another person constitutes part of the provocation of The White Tiger and this fictional representation can contribute to the theoretical discourse of postcolonial studies and subaltern justice. The master–servant occupation roles in the novel serve as a metaphor for the psychological, power-based, and social connections in which the caste- and class-privileged and unprivileged are determined and possibly unsettled. More widely than just as a relation of power, these relations between the individuals in the novel are also ones of ethics (for instance, as questions of identity, and of how individuals and groups should relate to one another). This is where we can draw a connection between a philosophy of auto-heteronomy and one of justice. Just as a sense of self can be heterogenized through unsettlement by the other (showing the inextricability of all peoples with each other), the work of justice also brings to the forefront that there is an interconnectedness between individuals (whether those relations are equal, equitable, oppressed, privileged, unmerited, and otherwise): a pluralized self is also the self of justice. How exactly Adiga shows through literary space the relations and aspirations of justice shares similarities with and differences from Derrida’s theorizations of justice.

Justice and the limitations of law

I argue in what follows that analysing the role of justice in this novel can shed light not only on the challenges of literary representation that Adiga faces, but also on his ethical commitment to representing the subaltern agent of justice. On one hand is the ideal of justice, and on the other hand is the translation and practice of that ideal within social institutions and the law. The novelist can translate the ideal of justice by depicting and thematizing justice, including its limits and impossibilities, through character, plot, and events in the novel. Derrida has argued that the decision involved in realizing justice is haunted by undecidability:

The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between two decisions, it is the experience of that which, though heterogeneous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obliged — it is of obligation that we must speak — to give itself up to the impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. (1990: 963)

It is that experience of giving up to a process, one that will entail both the impossibility of a decision and the consideration of law and rules, that Adiga gives flesh to through fictional form. Using character development allows Adiga to enact, in literary space, justice as a process; to emphasize that it is a judgement that must decide and weigh the commensurability of acts and objects. But against any notion of justice as, in Wai Chee Dimock’s phrase, “the dream of objective adequation” (1996: 6), Dimock argues that literature (and thus “literary justice”) shows the limits of commensurability, how two terms cannot be perfectly recuperative of or corrective to each other. Dimock’s notion of a “dream” as something imagined and envisioned, perhaps even unattainable, echoes Derrida’s notion of undecidability.

By representing justice in literary form, Adiga complicates the relations between justice and crime and at the same time unsettles the ideological division between “master” and “servant”. The flexibility of literary representation — the multiplicity and nuance of character and perspective — allows Adiga to show, for example, the constructedness of social positions, and even their arbitrariness. It is in the oppressed’s interest to see the disappearance of inequity and the emergence of social entrepreneurship as the determinant of a person’s success, thus fostering opportunity, inventiveness, resourcefulness, and drive. This emergence of social entrepreneurship sets the playing field for Balram’s murder of Ashok. Class and caste ideology would depict the murder as between upper-class and lower-class (and highest caste and middling caste), but Balram would also see it as “man against man”, which expresses Adiga’s ethical and humanist position to show the oppressive violence of class and caste ideology, that there is a “human” behind the construct of “lower”, and that that humanity can heterogenize the sense of self across class and caste divisions. Some Brahmins might seek to naturalize caste as “natural difference”, whereas some writers can expose caste as an ideology. That exposure itself can be a step toward realizing justice.

Balram’s murdering Ashok can be seen as an act of rectificatory justice, to make loss equal to gain. Balram is both “criminal” and “judge”, the judge that takes away from Ashok to give back to himself:

The strangest thing was that each time I looked at the cash I had made by cheating him, instead of guilt, what did I feel?

Rage.

The more I stole from him, the more I realized how much he had stolen from me.

To go back to the analogy I used when describing Indian politics to you earlier, I was growing a belly at last. (196)

Balram’s stealing is literal (petrol, whiskey), whereas Ashok’s stealing, as one part of class and caste oppression, is far more damaging, robbing Balram not only of his physical comforts (fair wages, health), but also of his humanity, freedom, dignity, and self-respect. Growing a belly is for Balram a sign of justice.

In another instance of stealing, Adiga represents the multiple factors and attitudes that animate Balram as he considers whether it would be just or unjust to steal a briefcase of money that he must deliver on behalf of Ashok. Adiga presents us with a table of two columns (210). The left column lists reasons not to steal the money (morality, fear, honour, counting one’s blessings), reasons informed by what Balram calls the Rooster Coop. This coop is the cage of fear, powerlessness, and intimidation that prevents servants from cheating their masters, from even wanting their own freedom (the threat is that the masters can murder the servants’ families, with family loyalty itself becoming another coop). The right column lists past events and gives reasons that provoke anger and rage, justifying taking the money: destroying the Rooster Coop. This reflective process is no rarefied moment of meditation for Balram as he looks upon a sublime landscape. Instead, Balram is looking at two puddles of red spit, red from the betel juice of paans. In the end, while Balram does not steal the money, he does steal from his masters, taking alcohol and, ultimately, Ashok’s life. Is murdering Ashok a crime? From the perspective of criminal law: yes. From Balram’s subaltern perspective, it is an act of rectificatory justice and part of achieving his emancipation. Yet it is not simply an either/or proposition. At the end of the novel, Balram states that he knows murdering Ashok was “a wrong thing to do” (220). He then asks, “isn’t it likely that everyone who counts in the world … has killed someone or other on their way to the top?” (220), and concludes, “All I wanted was the chance to be a man — and for that, one murder was enough” (220). These are the non-binary possibilities that Adiga is able to raise using literary means, and thereby ethically provoke some readers. Adiga places this reflection at the end of the novel, by which point readers have become well acquainted with Balram’s suffering, character, and perspective, thus further complicating for some readers any easy ethical conclusions or an easy dismissal of Balram. The novel therefore reproduces for readers the experience of undecidability that decisions of justice themselves entail. The novel removes any certainty of meaning and interpretation, and in doing so destabilizes the meaning of “crime” and “justice”.

But that “justice” is individualistic, not concerned with the social or collective good, or caste and class upliftment. Balram’s is an individual journey; the novel does not show the group or collective realization of caste and class justice. Distributive justice would give all members of a subordinated group equality and opportunity. Balram’s intelligence distinguishes him in his village, making him as rare as a white tiger, the name given to him by his teacher. At the ideological and psychological levels, his daring to see himself as equal to the highest caste and class also makes him a white tiger, becoming the agent of his own justice, which includes planning and executing Ashok’s murder. But Balram’s justice would appear more rectificatory than distributive or social. In this liberal, highly individualistic notion of the self, we can read Adiga’s Western diasporic upbringing and education (across Australia, the US, and the UK). I endorse Toral Gajarawala’s argument that this individualism goes hand in hand with the novel’s use of English (2009: 22). The sense of distributive justice is not entirely absent in Balram; he exercises this virtue in relation to his employees:

Once I was a driver to a master, but now I am master of drivers. I don’t treat them like servants — I don’t slap, or bully, or mock anyone. I don’t insult any of them by calling them my “family,” either. They’re my employees, I’m their boss, that’s all. I make them sign a contract and I sign it too, and both of us must honor that contract. (259)

The chiasmus of “driver to master/master of driver” rhetorically parallels the philosophical conception of justice as an equality of ratios, as a symmetrical proportion. Balram affirms his virtuous treatment of his employees, but that virtue is negatively defined; he does not treat them like servants and does not slap, bully, or mock them. This rhetorical structure shows the depth and freshness of pain and suffering that Balram has endured. It also shows that they are what have come first before this affirmation of his virtue.

This historical antecedence parallels the structure of some articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which state “no one shall be” subject to a range of unequal, unfair, and violent practices, such as slavery (Article 4), servitude (Article 4), torture (Article 5), inhuman treatment or punishment (Article 5), and arbitrary detention (Article 9). Operating in both the novel and the UDHR is the historicization of history. The novel is a flashback, with Balram saying “let me tell you my history”, and then showing how that history is necessary to the exercise of virtue. The UDHR speaks of the history of injustices and inequities without naming any specific nations or peoples. That political, necessary, tactful erasure of specificity — how could a million injustices be represented? — adds force to the generality of affirmations and shows how that history has led to affirmations of the human and to affirmations of justice. (The enforcement of human rights is entirely another matter, chiasmatically returning us to the inequalities that inspired the pursuit of justice.) In this specified and unspecified remembrance of inequalities and suffering, law and literature can emerge as correctives. Balram still retains a respect for the law, by making his employees sign and honour a contract. This is a law that Balram defines and exercises in a one-to-one, humanistic fashion (just as the letters to the Premier narrate a singular, human story of “India” that brochures for a national visit cannot represent). However, while Balram’s relationship with his workers is an improvement from his non-contractual and informal work for Ashok, it does not necessarily erase the social structure of exploitation that Balram suffered under Ashok. Such exploitation can continue because Balram can now mask it by arguing that his employees have freely and voluntarily chosen their conditions of work.

In contrast to this individual sense of the law, the novel shows the limits of legal justice by exposing legal corruption. Adiga thematizes legal corruption in the passage when Balram’s masters force him to confess that he killed the small girl in a hit-and-run car accident, when in fact it was an inebriated Pinky who was driving the car. The “criminal justice system” is that process of justice made static by those who set the priorities, interpret the law, and enforce the law; and historical distance clearly shows us this underbelly of “justice” as it operates in colonial law (see Baxi, 1997; Guha, 1987). The law attains a certainty, even a kind of aura, occluding its interpretive status and fallibility. The White Tiger’s exposing of corruption, in the blatant form of Balram’s forced confession, points to the constructedness of legal meaning, that which seeks to define the very content and character of Balram. In the case of Balram, he is “sentenced” before any trial can begin. It is not only Balram’s meaning as a legal object that is weighted and overdetermined by his masters. This legal construction pales in comparison to the weighting and overdetermining of Balram’s subjectivity, humanity, and dignity by his masters. But Balram is no saintly figure either. At the end of the novel, one of Balram’s employees murders a child, implicating Balram, who then bribes the child’s family. The literariness of Adiga’s text permits the entry of the complexity and multifacetedness of Balram, simultaneously showing the multiple faces and processes of justice, and that Balram cannot be an unproblematic figure of justice. As Wai Chee Dimock argues, this literary justice is the “textualization of justice, the transposition of its clean abstractions into the messiness of representations” (1996: 10). Adiga shows that the work of justice must emerge through and among the moral heterogeneity of people.

In another instance showing the hegemony of the law, Balram is at a train station and uses a weight machine that tells fortunes. The machine emits the following chit: “Respect for the law is the first command of the gods” (212). Balram laughs, for he quickly sees this as state hegemony, keeping the (subalternized) masses, particularly servants, inside the Rooster Coop. The fortune machine’s prediction is, of course, the opposite of the future: Balram murders Ashok. It also emphasizes the active process of judgement and reflection that Balram undergoes before he commits the murder, which complicates Derrida’s notion of an abstract undecidability by contrasting it with a real and present, historically-charged subaltern decidability.

Derrida’s notion of the heterogeneity that must give itself up to the decision of justice parallels Spivak’s argument (1988: 284) that the colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous, with Spivak’s invocation of heterogeneity unsurprising given Derrida’s and Guha’s influence on her work. Heterogeneity in both contexts entails an unrepresentability, and that impossibility of representation haunts both the act of legal decision (legal justice) and the act of literary representation (literary justice). How could a single decision, any decision do justice to justice? How could a novel, any novel, represent the subaltern? The reality and injustice of pain, suffering, and oppression overwhelm, for Adiga, any representational reticence, hesitation, and scepticism, so that the act of writing the novel can hopefully be a step toward justice, taking the risk of expressing an ethical position even as the field of heterogeneity haunts that practice of ethics. For Derrida, an “infinite” idea of justice, one that is irreducible, is what deconstructs the certainty of a present justice:

the deconstruction of all presumption of a determinant certitude of a present justice itself operates on the basis of an infinite “idea of justice”, infinite because it is irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other, owed to the other, before any contract, because it has come, the other’s coming as the singularity that is always other. (1990: 965)

I would add that the irreducibility of justice is symmetrical to the irreducibility of the other, who is singular. The White Tiger takes the risk of negotiating between reducibility (a specific representation) and irreducibility (an infinity of representation). The specific reduced representation that is “Balram Halwai” might not be accurate, plausible, or realistic, but, as with undecidability, readers’ experience of the oscillation between the specific and the infinite can inspire ethical action, as it can inspire the author’s ethical act of writing the novel. The act of writing becomes an affirmation of justice, however impossible it might be to realize that justice. Derrida argues that the idea of justice is “irreducible in its affirmative character, in its demand of gift without exchange, without circulation, without recognition or gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality” (1990: 965). Justice’s affirmativeness lies in a certain largesse and generosity (although even these terms assume a calculability and discreteness) that fully and powerfully exceed and do not seek or ask to circulate among particular manifestations of economy, reason, recognition, and rules. Derrida calls this justice a madness, a kind of mystique. This justice “which isn’t law, is the very movement of deconstruction at work in law and the history of law, in political history and history itself, before it even presents itself as the discourse that the academy or modern culture labels ‘deconstructionism’” (1990: 965). It is this justice that novels can build themselves around and thematize, represent, affirm, speak with, and negotiate. This madness of justice is symmetrical to the rage at particular injustices — casteism, classism, colonialism — in the sense that that rage will inspire literary representation and ethical action.

Adiga might endorse Derrida’s view that because justice “exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresentable exceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an institution or a state or between one institution or state and others” (1990: 971). The call for ethical commitment emerges even more clearly in Derrida’s view that

incalculable justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we associate with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one cannot isolate within sure frontiers; but also in all the fields from which, we cannot separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer simply fields: ethics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, literature. (1990: 971)

Justice can exceed law, and thus point to the limits of law, which literature can capture, as something which is not merely a “field”, but as a form of cognition, as ethical practice. Literature, however, cannot fully capture the infinite idea of justice. I do not intend this section as an uncritical celebration of Adiga’s ethical commitment. I have intended to show how the structuring of justice into particular calculations is parallel to the structuring of literary representation from an infinity of possibilities, particularly when that literary representation is informed by the pressures of representing subalternism and the agency of subaltern justice.

Literary justice and the human: Symmetry and asymmetry

Adiga’s invocation of subaltern agency is simultaneously the question of self-identity and how that identity can be constructed and refracted in relation to another person or group of people. In arguing that postcolonial studies rethink the category of the other, Robert Young draws upon the work of Giorgio Agamben (1993), the later Levinas (1981), and Jean-Luc Nancy (1991) in their arguments that, in Young’s words, “alterity is […] fundamental to being itself, which must always involve ‘being singular plural’” (2012: 39). Where legal discourses of justice and human rights can conceptualize equality, in this section I demonstrate how Adiga represents and pursues equality — as an element of justice — through fictional form, through such devices as characterization, voice, plot, and perspective.

Derrida’s criticism of Levinas’s original conception of the self–other relation prompted Levinas to propose the idea of auto-heteronomy as a revision of his earlier position. Levinas had originally argued that the other is absolutely outside of oneself. If that is so, Derrida questioned how one could know that the other even exists. For Levinas, this recognition of the difference of the other is necessary for a fundamentally ethical relationship to obtain between subject and other, whose “inviolable exteriority the face states in uttering the ‘you shall not commit murder’: the essence of discourse is ethical” (1969: 216). And this ethics contains, for Levinas, an ethical asymmetry between subject and other, for there to be respect and openness toward the other, and for equality to be manifest between subject and other, instead of exoticizing or sentimentalizing the other.

Drucilla Cornell’s interpretation of Levinas and Derrida, in which she reads them with an awareness of the workings of domination and inequality, can offer useful theoretical parallels to the othered identities of caste and class. Expanding on the idea of asymmetry, Cornell has argued that the other “cannot be grasped only in a relationship to the subject or in a conceptualization of her as like the subject who examines her, because such knowledge would ultimately only be derivative of the subject’s own self-conception” (1992: 802). The subject, however, must also recognize a certain form of sameness in the other. In Derrida’s view, “the other is absolutely other only if he is an ego, that is, in a certain way, the same as I” (1978: 159). Situating Derrida’s ideas within a feminist context, Cornell argues that recognizing phenomenological symmetry “demands the specific recognition of the symmetry of woman as ego” (1992: 802), which is essential for a theory of equality. In Cornell’s words, for Derrida, ethical asymmetry must be based on a phenomenological symmetry “if it is not to be reduced to another excuse for domination and, thus, for violation of the Other” (1992: 802). In other words, the other is different from me, with his or her own identity (ethically asymmetrical), but has ego, volition, and agency, like myself (phenomenologically symmetrical).

If it is Balram’s sense of personal justice that is central in this novel, I turn to analysing how Adiga humanizes Balram, and here is where the literariness of fictional representation, especially when it represents suffering and violence, gives special force to Adiga’s novel in ways that theoretical and philosophical work cannot capture, showing the limits of such work. For Adiga to show that Balram is human involves a humanization on at least two levels. One, it humanizes the worker, showing that workers are not machine-like, sub-human automatons but actually humans who endure suffering, injustice, and pain. Second, Adiga shows Balram to be not just a human worker but also a human human being, that is, someone with agency, volition, and ambition. Adiga hopes his novel shows “evidence of servants cheating the masters systematically […] to suggest a person’s capacity for evil or vice is to grant them respect — is to acknowledge their capacity for volition and freedom of choice” (Sawhney, 2008: n.p.). Adiga’s representation of evil and vice is not a promotion of those qualities per se, but they provoke readerly attention, perhaps empathy and sympathy, for the human qualities in the “servants”, making them less other, and showing their phenomenological symmetry — for readers.

I am not sure that Ashok or any of Balram’s masters has any epiphanies about the auto-heteronomousness of their identities. This recognition would require humility and strength on their part, and an admission that they have obtained their privilege, including their self-conceptions of “superior” benevolence, civility, and intelligence, through coercion and oppression, and perhaps not through merit. Balram’s forced confession, and thus the corruption of the legal system, becomes a metaphor for the constructedness and coerciveness of class and caste privilege. Ashok makes an effort to understand and empathize with Balram’s suffering, such as through his visit to Balram’s squalid sleeping quarters, but it is paradoxically through his death that Ashok most “understands” Balram. It is his death that unsettles Ashok, a death determined by Balram, with Balram’s physical dominance over Ashok heterogenizing and entering the purity of Ashok’s class and caste identities. Balram has shown Ashok the full force of his agency and his phenomenological symmetry, but now Ashok cannot speak. It is instead the spectre of what Ashok might have been, the haunting of that realized justice of equality and humanity between him and Balram, that constitutes the horizon against which the novel writes with such urgency and excoriation. Sundhya Walther analyses the relation between Ashok and Balram through the lenses of power and animalization, arguing that “the life of the animalized subaltern [Balram] is written by those placed higher in the hierarchies of human power [Ashok]” (2014: 590). The novel is of course also about what Balram becomes, using murder to exercise his power and wrestle that power away from Ashok, moving out of subalternism and writing his own life, literally as letters to the Chinese premier, metaphorically as self-determination. After absconding to Bangalore, Balram names himself Ashok Sharma, with Adiga’s suggestion of symmetry’s becoming complete identity serving as yet another moral provocation of the hunger for justice.

For Ashok, Balram was never fully symmetrical to him. Ashok never expects that Balram will murder him, or even have rage building inside of him:

To have a madman with thoughts of blood and theft in his head, sitting just ten inches in front of you, and not to know it. Not to have a hint, even. What blindness you people are capable of. Here you are, sitting in glass buildings and talking on the phone night after night to Americans who are thousands of miles away, but you don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening to the man who’s driving your car!

What is it, Balram?

Just this sir — that I want to smash your skull open! (220; emphasis in original)

Adiga’s image of physical distance is effective in creating the contrast between knowledge and blindness, that a group of people can have the power to speak and engage with those halfway around the world, yet know little about the servant next to them. The second-person voice adds to the directness of this excerpt. The contradiction between the calmness of Balram’s exterior and the violence of his thoughts adds to the contrasts in this passage, serving as a sharp commentary on appearance versus reality, the disjuncture between which can constitute hypocrisy, like the slogans of “Shining India”. In Balram’s case, the disjuncture between appearance and reality is a self-protecting strategy, one familiar to the oppressed. Adiga gives readers the opportunity to appreciate Balram’s self-protectiveness, perhaps even empathizing with Balram’s rage, because Adiga humanizes Balram, narrating the novel from Balram’s perspective. Balram does not say “what is happening to me”, but instead “what’s happening to the man who’s driving your car”. He is able to see himself through Ashok’s eyes, having the insight that Ashok sees him merely as a driver, without any deeper connection with him.

Ashok’s death is a provocation for readers to recognize the interconnectedness between “master” and “servant”, which is also the connection between human and human. The novel invites readers to see that interconnection, and in that sense there is the possibility that justice can unfold in and through the readerly experience and readers’ emotional engagement with Balram.

There is a scene in the novel that shows the constructedness and arbitrariness of the roles of master and servant. Ashok discovers that Balram has driven Pinky to the airport, and that Pinky has effectively abandoned Ashok, leaving India for the US. He questions Balram until finally — “the landlord inside him wasn’t dead, after all” (155) — Ashok physically attacks Balram, trying to force him over the balcony. To question Balram would engage with at least some modicum of his humanity, but it is the privilege of power and the power of privilege to use violence whenever desired, at times with impunity. Balram fights back. He kicks Ashok in the chest, and Ashok slams into the balcony door: “I slid down against the edge of the balcony; he sat down against the glass door. The two of us were panting” (155).

Adiga assembles a striking visual scene, virtually symmetrical, with the two men sitting on the floor, perhaps as if each were looking into a mirror. If nothing was spoken between Balram and Ashok, and if we had no knowledge of their histories, they would appear to us as simply two people: both men, both human. It is the exhaustion from physical violence that “restores” these men as simply two men, and not master and servant. That restoration signifies an exhaustion as well from ideological violence, from the oppression of both slavehood and masterhood, momentarily freeing both men from the pressure to be master and servant (and casteized and classed). We can read that deep physical engagement with each other as a metaphor for the psychological and philosophical enmeshment of the one in the other, that the two are inseparable. As Spivak has stated in a public lecture at Cornell University, the ethical task is not only to recognize that subalterns are like us, but that we are like them (Spivak, 2017).

If the subject can understand and recognize the other as symmetrical — as having an I, an ego, a humanity — then the other can also understand and recognize the subject as similarly constituted. This mutuality of awareness can inform the relationship as ethical, as one sensitive to and respectful of the other. Could the servant ever be an example to the master, of creativity and agency? I agree with Sneharika Roy’s observations:

While it is ironical that the drivers whose lot Adiga describes may never be able to read his novel, except in translation, their neo-colonial masters certainly will. These anglophone Indian readers will find not the hybrid reflections of themselves and India that they have come to expect from Indian postcolonial fiction, but an ironical appraisal of the contradictions and inequalities that mark the neocolonial condition. (2009: 6)

Given the history and presence of subalternism in India, the act of granting respect and a confident, creative voice to Balram could be a provocation. In this risk of provoking thought, Adiga’s commitment is ethical, perhaps making some of his readers no longer at ease. The White Tiger is certainly not the first Indian novel to represent subalternism (including caste and class suffering). Ulka Anjaria has argued that while an earlier novel such as Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable (1935) presents a time-enclosed world from which “the middle-class reader remains safe from implication” (2015: 117), The White Tiger’s directness to the middle-class reader is constituted by its use of an open temporality, “a diegetic time that is unfolding simultaneously in the time of reading the text” (2015: 118). The implication here is that a reader can recognize him or herself in Ashok, and thus in relation to Balram, so that the novel, according to Anjaria, “presents the possibility of the contemporaneous unfolding of subaltern insurrection at the very moment of being read” (2015: 118). I would add that the novel also unsettles some readers’ psychological privilege of feeling separate, different, and disconnected from the subaltern. At the beginning of The White Tiger, the opening sentence of Balram’s letter to the Chinese premier is “I am tomorrow” (4). This claim immediately establishes the importance of time in the novel, with time exerting a certain pressure on narrated events, but the “tomorrow” is unknown, because readers do not know whether it is hopeful, optimistic, threatening, or otherwise; after finishing the novel, some readers might add fear to that list. The novel’s use of the directness of time is another way of literarily expanding the limits of the philosophical notion of heterogenizing and pluralizing the self. The fear and the shock of recognition enabled by literature enrich and extend the concept of “being singular plural”. Such emotive engagement brings alive for readers (as knowledge, or as an unsettling reminder of) the relational aspect of justice (and, by implication, oppression and privilege), bringing something as “foreign” or “other” as subalternism close to one’s sense of self, status, security, and privilege. It could be argued that for Adiga to even imagine the murder (from his position of privilege, especially his class privilege) is a paranoia, because of the extreme inequality in India, not unlike the British imagining the “Mutiny” of 1857. The conflict is thus not only at a group and class level but also at an individual one. The novel is from Balram’s perspective, but it is ultimately from Adiga’s perspective. His novel could thus reinforce middle-class paranoia and stigmatization of the poor as the source of murder and crime. This prejudice stems from and breeds fear and suspicion of the poor, perhaps because the privileged classes fear they will be replaced by a new bourgeoisie. If this replacement symmetrically reproduces the privileged–oppressed pattern, then it calls into question whether or to what extent this pattern is justice. Indeed, there is a certain symmetry in the novel, with Balram’s literally becoming his master by adopting his name, Ashok Sharma. This symmetrical reproduction suggests that embourgeoisement — becoming the master class — is the only path toward humanization. For the privileged, it is only they who are human, or most human, which shows the poverty of their epistemic and ethical imagination, able only to “see” those who embody their position. While we can read the novel as satire, with a narrative voice tinged with cynicism, the justice it does imagine can also be seen as limited, through a reactive, individualistic reversal of power relation that reinforces neoliberalism, from its winning end (for more on the novel’s fraught relationship with neoliberalism, see Gui, 2014; Nandi, 2017; Shingavi, 2014). The justice that Adiga imagines is in fiction, and only in fiction, not in history. How fiction influences history is itself a measure of justice.

The novel as site of literary justice

The White Tiger paradoxically seeks ethical impact through the impossibly representable dimensions of justice and subalternism, either legally or literarily. The postcolonial Indian novel can foster respect for the human and a recognition of sameness in difference by encouraging empathy and ethical self-reflection in readers, in the tradition of the eighteenth-century European novels representing the marginal, outcaste, and the subaltern, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana (1724). Adiga problematizes the distinction between crime and justice in order to provoke awareness about the injustices of caste and class in India. In her reading of The White Tiger, Barbara Korte argues that “postcolonial novels have a potential to challenge their readers’ imaginations of poverty quite beyond their immediate ‘postcolonial’ context” (2010: 296). Justice is central to Adiga’s representation of poverty and oppression. The rage and suffering that Adiga depicts promote empathy in readers for peoples afflicted by poverty, whether at home or abroad, but more importantly invite readers to understand and accept those subaltern others as human beings. This is not the programmatic “human being” qualifying for human rights intervention, but the phenomenologically symmetrical subject with the capacity for agency, including having ambition, desires, proclivities, and volition. Joseph Slaughter argues that “the novel emerged with modern human rights, and it publicizes in imaginative terms the emergent social possibilities and boundaries of the emancipation of the individual in the new political formation of the rights-bound nation-state” (2008: 156). This could not be more true of The White Tiger. The novel is concerned with imagining and disseminating new social possibilities that will emerge after emancipation as the nation-state continues to develop a democracy that will deliver legal justice to all its peoples. Balram is sensitive to these limitations of rights given his criticism of the corruption of the Indian police (85), the Indian political system (115), and Indian democracy (145), all of which are essential actors in a rights-bound nation-state. This acute sensitivity enables and strengthens Balram’s critique of his oppression at the hands of his masters. This is the subject and agency that Adiga depicts in his novel, the human agency oppressed by orientalizing, stereotyping, invisibility, and marginalization, and the human agency that can right wrongs and strive for justice.

The White Tiger is not simply a meditation on justice. Rather, it is justice sought through violence and murder. It seems ironic that it is Ashok, the most liberal one of Balram’s masters (both human and ideological), who succumbs to Balram’s deadly rage. It is significant that Balram does not only use blackmailing, theft, or lies to gain revenge on Ashok, but goes so far as to murder him. This fact adds not just a “human interest” element to the plot, but the violence defamiliarizes readers from any ethical complacency or quietude. The intensity of the act of murder parallels both the intensity of the protagonist’s suffering and the novelist’s criticism of systemic caste- and class-based injustice (and corollary demands for justice and equality). It is this horizon of commensurability, between injury and redress, that justice ideally incorporates. Justice becomes a structuring device in the novel. As justice depends on time — it must be decided and delivered — so too Adiga leads readers to anticipate what will happen next as Balram’s frustration and rage increase. In this sense, literary justice can be an experiment, constituting for the novelist an “extralegal imaginary” in contrast to where law fails ordinary people. Wai Chee Dimock argues that literary justice can produce an “image of justice […] rendered back to us, most often with a shock of recognition” (1996: 10). The shock of The White Tiger is the suggestion of murder as justice, with the processes leading to it showing the collision of any abstractions of justice with the literariness of representation, including Adiga’s limits in fully representing the heterogeneous subaltern subject. Adiga’s textualization of justice is an experiment with the subalternization of justice. Where postcolonial theory and philosophy can call for auto-heteronomy and “being singular plural” in a search for equality, Adiga turns to animating, heterogenizing, and problematizing justice with subaltern agency as a force for shaking the foundations of both ethical and existential complacency.

Like the delivery of justice, Adiga’s literary representation of justice, through voice and an envisioned future time, promises some measure of relief and hope in the wake of oppression. Analysing Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) through the lenses of tort law and corrective justice, Trinyan Mariano argues that the novel “offers access to arguments facilitated by legal frameworks but unavailable in the legal archive” (2013: 560). Similarly, through the multiplicities of character, plot, and thematizations, Adiga’s novel, not unproblematically, offers readers access to and visions of arguments about “justice”, “subalternism”, and the “human” unable to be fully represented by legal-juridical discourse.