India Rising

Indian author has a tryst with Booker glory

Aravind Adiga, the 33-year-old Indian-born author, has shot to the Booker literary stardom with his debut novel The White Tiger that shines an ironic light on the dark underbelly of India’s much-trumpeted growth story. With the 50,000-pounds Man Booker Prize under his belt, Adiga has become the fifth Indian to win the Anglophone literary world’s most coveted trophy after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and the legendary V.S. Naipaul, who has also won the Nobel Prize.

Michael Portillo, a former cabinet minister and the chairman of this year's panel of judges, praised Adiga's novel and said The White Tiger had prevailed "because the judges felt that it “shocked and entertained in equal measure."

Portillo said the book's originality, a witty story of a village boy who becomes a successful entrepreneur through devious means, in showing "the dark side of India" had set it apart from the others. "My criteria were 'does it knock my socks off?', and this one did," he said. It’s an "unadorned portrait" of India seen "from the bottom of the heap," said a trenchant reviewer.

Born in Chennai and raised partly in Australia, Adiga, who always wanted to be a novelist since he was a boy, studied at Columbia and Oxford universities and was a former correspondent for Time magazine in India. He is the second youngest writer to win the Booker; Ben Okri was 32 when his book "The Famished Road" won in 1991. Adiga is also only the third debut novelist to win after DBC Pierre in 2003, for "Vernon God Little", and Roy in 1997 for "The God of Small Things".

Adiga, who beat off competition from five other authors, including Amitav Ghosh, nominated for his "Sea of Poppies", dedicated the prize to New Delhi where he has lived for many years. "It's a city that I love and a city that's going to determine India's future and the future of a large part of the world. It's a book about Delhi, so I dedicate it to the people that made it happen," he said.

"It is a fact that for most of the poor people in India there are only two ways to go up - either through crime or through politics, which can be a variant of crime," Adiga told the BBC.

"These people at the bottom have the same aspirations as the middle class - to make it in life, to become businessmen, to create business empires. They need to be given their legitimate needs - the schooling, the education, the health care - to achieve those dreams. If not, as I said, there are only two ways up: crime or politics."

The author said his book was an "attempt to catch the voice of the men you meet as you travel through India — the voice of the colossal underclass." "This voice was not captured and I wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually."

When asked what he would do with the money, Adiga joked, "The first thing I am going to do is to find a bank that I can actually put it in."

The other books on the shortlist were "Sea of Poppies" by Amitav Ghosh, "The Clothes on Their Backs" by Linda Grant, "The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher and "A Fraction of the Whole" by Steve Toltz.

The Man Booker prize, Britain's best-known and most generous literary award, is given annually to a novel written by an author from Britain, Ireland or the Commonwealth nations and is accompanied by a check for £50,000 — about $86,000 — as well as a quantum increase in sales.

Back home, his alma mater St. Aloysius High School in Karnataka's coastal city of Mangalore, where he was a top-ranking student, rejoiced. "We are extremely happy. We congratulated him Wednesday morning as soon we learnt he has been chosen for the award. We hope he will make it to the Oct 18 meeting so that we can honour him," Fr. Denzil Lobo, a former Aloysian who now teaches there, said over phone from Mangalore. "He was a quiet student. Well disciplined and among the best in his class," recalled Sambu Shetty, who was assistant head master of the school when Adiga was a high school student in the late 1980s.

Students and teachers at the James Ruse Agricultural High in north-west Sydney, Adiga's other alma mater, also celebrated. "We are very proud of Adiga's wonderful achievement. It is amazing for someone so young at 34 to receive one of the highest awards in literature. It reinforces the view of our school as a wonderful place of learning," James Ruse principal Larissa Treskin said.

Some critics are, however, not exactly impressed. Writing in The Guardian. Kevin Rushby observed: “My hunch is this is fundamentally an outsider's view and a superficial one. There are so many alternative Indias, uncontacted and unheard. Adiga is an interesting talent. I hope he will immerse himself deeper in that country, then go on to greater things.”

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