Country Mouse or Hidden Dragon?

 “White Tiger,” film directed by Ramin Bahrani, 2021

This white tiger is no Slumdog Millionaire.  There are no lucky breaks on TV here.  This is a different kind of Horatio Alger story. Nor is anyone optimistically selling aging Brits on a run-down retirement home in Rajasthan.  Balram’s a broke but clever country mouse from rural India who travels to Delhi and talks his way into becoming the #2 driver for a wealthy family. Even though this same family of masters loots his village, repeatedly, taking 1/3^rd of the rupees the destitute village earns.  This “most holy of the landlords” includes a young son and his American wife.  These two aren’t as crude and backward as the father and other brother, the Mongoose, but eventually they are shown to be no different.  Ah, rich young liberals…

Driving the Nice Masters

Balram knows “not to be a poor man in a free democracy.”  Not to be a “rooster in a coop” ready to have his head chopped off.  Being a rooster is like the threats high caste masters have against poor, low caste (class) families if their employees or servants go astray.  To become less of a poor man, Balram pulls a Parasite and gets the #1 driver fired.  And what a ‘free democracy’ it is!  The central transactions in the film involve bribes paid to politicians, including ‘The Great Socialist,’ a female taking millions of rupees from the wealthy so they can avoid taxes on their profits.  She is probably a member of the Congress Party.  (This is 2007.) 

The film is narrated by Balram as a letter to Chinese Premier Jingtao, a ‘Naxalite” visiting India and Bangalore.  It is from the point of view of Balram’s newfound success and his poverty-stricken background.  He narrates his hatred for the masters and his abandonment of his stultifying family.  He knows “There is no Servant without a Master” and he’s made his choice in a society that only contains both.

The key event is like something out of Bonfire of the Vanities, the death of an innocent poor man Balram the servant is forced to take the blame for.  Like the Peaky Blinders, money, not justice, is the payment for manslaughter.  Balram takes his revenge on the master and becomes the white tiger in this social jungle.  By the way, white tigers are heavier and larger than normal Bengals.  In reality, many are cruelly locked in zoo cages – they never escape ‘the rooster coop.’

Indian Farmers, low caste and not, rebel

This is a film of caste rebellion, of class rebellion, of a virtual slave’s rebellion, but only on an individual level and eventually not even that.  It is a singular reflection of the conflict that is going on in the rest of India.  Balram joins the masters, trying to be a good one, as he knows “crime or politics” is the only way to the top.  Thinking about Premier Jintao, he says now is the time of the “brown and yellow man,” no longer the time of the white man.  Perhaps a statement of the rising Indian bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie.  The only penalty is the retribution murders of 17 in a small village in northern India, his own extended family. 

This film is based on the 2008 Booker Prize novel by Aravind Adiga, who also wrote Last Man in Tower, another political book about gentrification in Mumbai.  Adiga also wrote Between the Assassinations, a fragmented book set in Bangalore which is not as good as White Tiger.   

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left: Last Man in Tower (Adiga); Walking With the Comrades, Field Notes on Democracy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Capitalism a Ghost Story (all by Roy); The God Market; Celebrate Indian Women; Annihilation of Caste (Ambedkar/Roy); Arundhati Roy; Behind the Beautiful Forevers; The Story of My Assassins; Factory Days or type “India”.

The Kulture Kommissar

January 25, 2021