Description

Over seven nights, in a 150-watt-bulb-lit office in Bangalore, a man called Balram Halwai sits down at a computer and writes a series of letters to the Premier of China, who is about to visit India.

His subject is himself.

Balram is the son of a rickshaw puller from the village of Laxmangarh in the Darkness — the name he gives the vast, river-fed, electricity-deprived hinterland of the Ganga. He has, through cunning, servitude, ambition, and finally murder, ascended into the Light. He is now, he proudly informs the Premier, an entrepreneur in Bangalore.

What follows, in a voice unlike any in modern Indian fiction — sly, brutal, blackly comic, refusing every sentimentality of the New India narrative — is the inside story of how a country boy becomes a master of his country. A driver who slits his employer’s throat. A self-made man whose self was made by the choices nobody wanted him to be able to make.

Sharp, savage, and impossible to forget, *The White Tiger* is the great Booker-winning novel of the early 21st century — and a Bangalore-set indictment of the India a hundred million Indians are quietly tired of celebrating.

Later adapted as a major Netflix film.