readers were people who read English, but lived their personal and emotional lives, like I did, in their own languages.”18
Although she writes in English, Deshpande draws on different linguistic realities to create her literary world. She is also informed by the thought worlds of those languages and that knowledge, and those realities become part of her literary fiction. What is also significant for Deshpande is that her audience is chiefly based in India. Hers is not a Western based readership but one composed of fellow Indians who have a relationship to the English language similar to hers. Some would say she is less successful because she is not known abroad, while others claim she has a more organic and grounded relationship to things Indian, even though she writes in English.
It is often these gradations of alleged insider- and outsider-ness that animate Indian cultural debates. An Indian author may write in English, but then, what is her perceived proximity to other languages, and by implication, to other social worlds and ways of thinking? Whether a writer has a “foreign” audience often becomes yet another part of the debate over a text's—and often an author's—cultural authenticity. If one has a non-Indian audience, there is sometimes an assumption that one must be writing “further away” from Indian social worlds and concerns. When is one an “Indian” writer, and when does one become an NRI (nonresident Indian) or “foreigner”? The latter term, in popular parlance, connotes someone whose interests, and not only geographic location, may no longer “favor” India.
It should come as no surprise in a world of grossly uneven development that there is a moral dimension and sensitivity to how “India” is portrayed.19 It is in these circumstances where the English language is at once seen as the language of the world literary stage and as a language that has over time come to represent complex, multilingual social worlds. It is no longer a question whether English is an Indian language; what is at issue is the moral dimension of its use and position.
THE REALITY OF FICTION
In fall 2008 I attended a book club meeting at the Habitat Centre in Delhi. Built by an array of corporations, the Habitat Centre is a major cultural venue for the city's elite. It is a vast, airy space near the India Islamic Cultural Centre, the Ford Foundation, UNICEF, the India International Centre, and other venues linking Indian cultural worlds to those abroad. Auto rickshaw—the ubiquitous three wheel “scooter”—drivers tend to know it only as “vah badi lal imarat Lodhi Road par” (that big red building on Lodhi Road). That night at the book club meeting, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger was being discussed. The novel had won the Man Booker Prize the previous month, and Adiga had publicly dedicated his prize “to the people of New Delhi.”20
The novel was heralded by some critics and derided by others for its recounting of the stark social divides between rich and poor and one poor man's growing resentment of his place in this schema. Adiga is a Chennai born Indian who was brought up partly in Australia and educated at Oxford and Columbia, details that inevitably became part of his “cultural cache” or, depending on his reviewer, evidence of his “foreignness.”
That evening at the book club meeting, about twenty-five people, ranging in age from mid-thirties to mid-seventies, gathered to discuss the novel. After introductions over tea and biscuits in the foyer, we moved to a small auditorium and sat in clusters in the front center section. The two leaders of the group, an older man with short white hair and a woman in her late forties, sat up front facing the small group. They began by reading from Amitava Kumar's review of the novel that had appeared earlier that week in the English daily The Hindu. Kumar criticizes the novel for grossly misrepresenting the realities of everyday life and speech—not because it was written in English but because Adi ga's style distances the first person narrator from the harsh realities of what he sees and describes. Kumar essentially argues that the real people behind Adiga's novel—the underclass that he is heralded for having represented—are in fact disrespected. The book club leaders raised some general questions for the group to consider: To what extent was Adiga's perspective that of an insider or outsider? Was his vision of the “underbelly” of Delhi life authentic or inauthentic? Was Adiga's novel, as Kumar had stated in his review, merely a “cynical anthropology”?21
About a third of the group had read the novel, and others said they were planning to, but everyone seemed to have an opinion. The hosts then alternated reading from parts of the beginning of the novel to give the flavor of the text. Written as a series of long letters from the protagonist, Balram Halwai, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, they explained, the novel begins:
Mr Premier,
Sir.
Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.
My ex-employer the late Mr. Ashok's ex-wife, Pinky Madam, taught me one of these things; and at 11:32 P.M. today, which was about ten minutes ago, when the lady on All India Radio announced, ‘Premier Jiabao is coming to Bangalore next week', I said that thing at once.
In fact, each time when great men like you visit our country I say it. Not that I have anything against great men. In my way, sir, I consider myself one of your kind. But whenever I see our prime minister and his distinguished sidekicks drive to the airport in black cars and get out and do namastes before you in front of a TV camera and tell you about how moral and saintly India is, I have to say that thing in English.
They continued for a few pages and then came to another section:
I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.22
For some, Adiga's style and portrait of Indian social realities was a timely unveiling of the real social divides in India, a counter to the “India Shining” slogan of the past decade that has trumpeted the roaring GDP and the rising disposable incomes of well employed urbanites. Others saw the book as a crass diatribe based on Adiga's widely reported journalistic forays into “village India” when he was a reporter for Time magazine. Some said that his use of English did not convey the pain of the oppressed but mocked them by making them sound like American teenagers. Were his perceptions in fact “researched” and based on “truth,” or were they a “foreigner's” view of what one expected “India” to look like?
In what is essentially an amoral morality tale, the servant-driver Balram eventually kills his rich employer, absconds with a bag of cash, and starts anew as an entrepreneur in Bangalore. He is never caught, nor does he feel remorse, he tells us, even with the knowledge that his extended family in his village would have surely been killed as punishment for his own deed.
The crux of the book club debate that evening—for it turned into a debate—was whether the novel revealed something true about the perpetual state of unease between the haves and have-nots in Delhi or whether it was merely sensationalistic. And if it was sensationalistic, as three quarters of the people in attendance seemed to think, why did it win the Booker?
The younger host asked, “Did the Western mind enjoy the sensationalism of an emerging nation? This award was given by a Western agency after all.”
The white haired man posed another leading question when he suggested we compare The White Tiger to other Booker Prize winning novels the club had read, such as J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Yann Martel's The Life of Pi. “What is the literary merit of
