Pertinent Voices

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Balram’s Bildungsroman
Posted on September 8, 2012 by gil4or
The Muslim Persian Poets in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

“I have no need for the ear of today —
I am the voice of the poet of tomorrow!”
(Muhammad Iqbal, see source citation at end of post)
“I am tomorrow.”
(Balram Halwai, aka The White Tiger and Ashok Sharma)

Aravind Adiga’s novel The White Tiger (New York: Free Press, 2008) has been discussed as much by our book club members in the weeks following our discussion meeting as perhaps any other work in our catalogue of readings. With serious intent Peter Farnum and other members have argued important points of meaning and usage in the RMBC’s blog you are reading this in (paradox of modern India, Indian Social Commentary). Listening to the coffee-shop engagements, I realized how many different thematic purposes readers could come up with. From whichever perspective one defines it, the theme, despite all the overlying ideas and information about global change, the mixed-up cultures of India, the dilemma of families caught between the past and the on-going present, the corruption of politics, etc., most certainly Balram Halwai is at the center of it: The White Tiger has to do with human survival and moral behavior in a dog-eat-dog world. To what ends must one go to escape imprisonment in the human zoo?

Some readers did not like the novel because Balram is “despicable.” Sure, Balram does not appear to be a very dignified hero at times, but protagonists of great literature are significant because they reveal the many-sidedness of mind, heart, and soul. One has to suspend one’s disbelief to take this roller-coaster ride for what it is. We do not stop reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment because Raskolnikov is such a horrible soul in his desire to kill for gain.

For starters, here’s a short list of descriptions Balram delivers about his nature in revealing himself to the Chinese Premier: He’s totally open about being a murderer, “…not just any murderer, but one who has killed his own employer (who is kind of a second father), and also contributed to the probable death of all his family members. A virtual mass murderer.”(Pagination from edition above, p.37) All he wanted “was to be a man—and for that one murder was enough.”(p.274) He says he’s not a brave man.(p. 235) He feels free because he has awakened from the Darkness, neither man or demon, but one who has woken up, while others still sleep.(p.271) To have executed his heinous deed to free himself, he admits he was a madman. (p.220) As one who has broken out of the Rooster Coop, to see his family destroyed, that is the act of “no normal human being, but a freak, a pervert of nature.” (p.150) He is a White Tiger. Such brazen honesty is a characteristic of the formerly lean, dark-skinned boy from Laxmangarh; now he is a prosperous entrepreneur, he has grown a belly (p. 196). “Anyone with a belly could rise up.” (p. 54)
For my part, though I agree there is much wit and humor in the writing, Balram is not a silly fellow. His quest for freedom is deadly serious. Ha! As humor goes, there is much that is sickening from the reader’s perspective, especially I mean the injurious type such as making sport of people, exploiting a person’s ignorance, etc. Balram, throughout his picaresque meanderings, had every reason to be sickened into rage and madness by the way he was treated by his family, his bosses, the authorities acquainted with Ashok, and by his colleague chauffeurs who take him for a country bumpkin. The element in the story I wish to focus on is the seemingly humorous set of statements about the world’s greatest Persian poets. This immediately caught my serious attention when I heard the story narrated, i.e. performed, by John Lee on audio discs. Hearing the passage repeated, I knew something was important in the list as a refrain. Ron Powers included one of the sentences in his set of quotes from the text, hoping someone might choose it to examine the story when he conducted the discussion: “I know by heart the works of the four greatest poets of all time—Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow whose name I forget. I am a self-taught entrepreneur.” (p. 4.) With some ambitious intentions, taking it a little more seriously than I probably should, I wish to make an investigation of this motif which shows up on several occasions in Balram’s accounting of his nature and identity.
The passages about the poets occur as follows:

1. as noted above (p. 4).
2. “Iqbal, who is one of the four best poets in the world—the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I have forgotten—has written a poem where he says about slaves: They remain slaves because they cannot see what is beautiful in this world”. (p. 34, verse italicized in text)
3. “You are familiar already with my love of poetry—and especially of the works of the four poets acknowledged to be the greatest of all time. Now Iqbal, who is one of the four, has written this remarkable poem in which he imagines that he is the Devil… .” (p. 74-75, where a long excerpt is explained in which God and the Devil engage conten- tiously with one another.)
4. “Now, the four greatest of these wise poets were Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, and another fellow whose name I was told but have forgotten. (Who was that fourth poet? It drives me crazy that I can’t recall his name. If you know it, send me an e-mail.)” (p. 217, italics in text)

It is early in his dictated confession to Premier Wen Jiabao that Balram first mentions the Persian poets, priding himself on knowing them by heart. Some have conjectured his inability to name the fourth world’s greatest poet is an indication that he really does not know them, has not read them, nor has he learned them by heart; otherwise, why would he not have remembered such a short list of them? To some readers, all of this an indication of his putting on airs. Is Balram merely bragging about his lofty taste in arts, attesting to his other self-taught interests like entrepreneurship? Of the poets, Muhammad Iqbal is the only one Balram quotes, but there are obviously several passages in which salient verses and a long allusion appear: a) The one noted above about slavery and beauty (p.34); b) the couplet, “You were looking for the key for years / But the door was always open.” (p. 216); and 3) Balram’s personalized version: I was looking for the key for years / But the gate was always open. (p.228) By this evidence, Balram does indeed have some familiarity with Iqbal’s works and can recite verses, as well as paraphrase a passage from a long poem. Knowing Persian and Urdu poetry was the mark of India’s highly educated elite, especially Muslim. Why then did Balram choose Muslim poetry? If he had acquired a serious interest and disciplined himself to memorize the poets, it would seem to have been for the sake of survival, and in what way he needed the knowledge of Persian poetry or used its influence, beauty, wisdom, and power in his life is something to ponder.

A superficial joke it may be that Adiga makes Balram repeat the poets’ names and the forgotten fourth like a refrain throughout the novel. But I don’t think so. Is this just a psychological tic? In his reference to the four men in history who have led successful revolutions, he can name three—Alexander the Great, Abraham Lincoln, and Mao Tse-tung–but the fourth he can’t seem to remember. He says, “It may have been Hitler.” (p. 260) Ha! Is this a joke? Normally a person will not admit over and over to forgetting an element in a short catalog of names, especially when the expression is about memory, i.e. learning by heart, and, furthermore, reciting the poets would naturally remind one of the name. Hafiz, for example, a well-known poet of 14th century Shiraz, would be a name familiar to those interested in Oriental poetry. Had Hafiz been the name Balram forgot, it is very strange he wouldn’t remember him, because Hafiz very often named, or addressed, himself in his verses. There are, of course, other choices for the fourth famous fellow. Be that as it may, many of us busy readers and film-goers can recall conversations during which we cannot remember some famous name we have often spoken about and are totally knowledgeable about or familiar with, and yet, the name refuses to come to mind.

As a self-taught entrepreneur, Balram intimates he has become an appreciator of poetry. It’s unlikely his inadequate education in Laxmangarh gave Balram a love of mystic Muslim poets whose works he learned by heart; although, the habit of memorizing and recitation was a major pedagogical discipline in schools. He does say he was aware of beauty from childhood and he heard discussions by eunuchs of the Kama Sutra. (Amusing?) The Indian mind is not perhaps logical or totally rational in the same way as some of us Westerners think the mind—i.e. heart, brain, liver, and the whole schmeer that makes up the mental toolkit–is made to function. However, the dichotomy of knowing by heart and forgetting in the brain is a fact I can attest to. One poem I learned hundreds of verses of in a German class in 1960, “Max and Moritz,” which I can rattle off to this day, is such an example. A decade or so ago someone mentioned who the famous German poet, popular with adolescents, was and from that time I thought I would remember it, but today, alas, I have again forgotten it. At any rate, the name of the poet, a bit of brain data, isn’t known by heart to me. He wasn’t a Goethe, a Hölderlin, or Stefan Georg, or any well-known name of Germanic poetic fame. Still, I do wonder why I didn’t recall the author. Hmm! Funny. So it does happen: one can remember much about something “by heart” but forget the title or the author.

Much speaks against the truthfulness of Balram’s assertion that he knows the great Persian poets’ works. Balram’s modern Hindu character, with his devotion to entrepreneurial success, did not appear to incline naturally towards serious study of Persian poetry from the Middle Ages (Rumi) to the twentieth century (Iqbal). After all, knowing the poetry would require serious study of Classical Persian and Urdu; also the foreign poems are fraught with complexity of musical values or quantities, figures of speech, and interpretive meanings. As I’ve noted earlier, the knowledge of them bears the stamp of high-class Muslim upbringing and education. With close reasoning, I will attempt to illustrate Balram’s serious purpose for learning by heart the writings of the great Persian poets and the positive results that come from disappearing into powerful poetry.
First, before I take up the matter of the Persian poets, I wish to consider the setting and audience for Balram’s saga, the revelation of his life’s career. Truthfulness is always suspect in epic stories, especially in those called autobiographies.
Confession and the lie are one and the same. In order to be able to confess, one tells lies. –Franz Kafka

Balram Halwai writes his narrative as though confessing the sorry yet successful career of his life to the Premier Wen Jiabao over seven nights of dictation. As in much autobiography and confessional literature, Balram’s stories, for the sake of interesting the audience, stray from strict recounting the facts of an incident or event into dramatic fictionalizing of events. Who can remember dialogue accurately? The young writer, for Balram cannot be much older than his thirties, is likely to have spun the anecdotes with fictional flair. Is he truly writing in e-mail form or dictating into a recording machine? Titling himself as “The White Tiger,” Balram’s formal epistolary opening address and salutation, and the closing, naming himself Ashok Sharma, imply certain pretensions of correspondence or communication that may, or may not, be responded to. Already the problem of names and identities is apparent. However, given the language difficulties, an Indian language and dialect, perhaps Hindi or that of Balram’s adopted Balgalore, and the necessary translation by a Chinese administrative linguist to then refer this long novelistic missive in Mandarin to the offices of the Premier’s flak-catchers, is it likely that this strange informational document would be read by Wen Jiabao and acted upon? Ha! What kind of joke is this?
Early in Balram Halwai’s dictation to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is purportedly expected to visit Bangalore to learn from some Indian entrepreneurs how entrepreneurship flourishes in the subcontinent, Balram intends beforehand to convince the Chinese premier that he is the man who can give him the scoop about business matters. Though, Balram hardly believes it is true, as the news reports issue forth, that the Chinese Premier will arrive for a lesson from trustworthy entrepreneurs, or that his own prime minister and government officials would allow the truth to be told. Nevertheless, in his tongue-in-cheek midnight fantasy, surely a witting deception of his own troubled psyche, he assumes the role of soothsayer, confessor and perhaps even prophet. As he says about most books of business advice, “… they are so yesterday.” Then he adds “I am tomorrow.” (p.4) Holding his audience in suspense of the one thing that can only be expressed in English about the reliability of Indian officialdom—in fact, about the morality and saintliness of Indians–he finally utters the phrase learned from his ex-employer’s ex-wife Pinky Madam: “What a fucking joke.” (p.5) Indeed, there is a good joke in Balram’s intention to inform Premier Wen Jiabao about how wicked one must be to succeed in gaining undeserved power and prosperity.

The very likelihood of this long narration, a conjectural biography at best, of ever reaching Premier Wen Jiabao has to be considered questionable; it is a far-fetched expectation. Balram’s personal Bildungsroman, the novel of a youth’s education and character development, is an elaborate fictional creation, at base, a therapeutic confession as were Augustine’s, Rousseau’s and Goethe’s (in his epistolary The Sorrows of Young Werther), drawn from autobiographical materials but told as a picaresque novel, and like early English novels, Richardson’s Pamela being a prime example, it tells in pseudo-epistolary form the trials and tribulations of an innocent. The White Tiger might very well have as an alternate title, Vice Rewarded, an ironic twist on Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.

In this modern hybrid form, the author Adiga has produced a richly embroidered novel, an amalgamation of several novelistic traditions—confessional, epistolary, picaresque. The intention of the informally educated Balram, who speaks openly of sexual feelings and deep psychological motivations, critical of Indian religion, of social mores, of corrupt politics, is to explore his escape from ignorance and poverty, his transformation from innocence to experience, his conversion to and acquisition of 21st-century values. A huge sack of truths are unloaded in this intimate saga of survival.

In its way, it has much in common with Dostoevsky’s novels of the dreadful strategies of an abject hero’s escape from misery and search for freedom. As many have noted, it has features in the hero’s quest that compare with Ralph Ellison’s protagonist in hiding in Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s desperate character of Native Son, and the hidden refugee in “The Man Who Lived Underground.” The inhumanity practiced in the human zoo of The White Tiger shows a craven and inadequate sapience of Homo sapiens, which irrationally keeps subjugated certain classes and ethnic groups to ensure their poverty and servitude.

Many readers will already have thought of such an expressive phrase as “What a fucking joke” as Balram pretends to wheedle his way into the good graces of the Chinese Premier. Take, for example, Balram’s display of rather common learning, when he says, curiously, he learned some useful information in a book of Chinese history, Exciting Tales of the Exotic East, “… that you Chinese are great lovers of freedom and individual liberty.” (p.3) Ha! Surely Balram’s irony implies he is joking! The pretext for his confession is highly questionable, hilariously imaginative, but the projection of his life story is one way, I imagine, he can vent his tormented soul of vexations, alone in his midnight office hideout, masked in a new identity as a prosperous business owner, reclining in comfort, his mind awhirl, in ecstasy, as he stares at the chandelier lights spun about the room by the ceiling fan blades.

[In a second posting, I take up the uses Balram discovered through learning about Persian poets]

• Quote at beginning of post taken from Annemarie Schimmel, “Iqbal’s Persian Poetry” in Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies: No. 3, 1988, p. 427.
  David Gilmour, September 2012.

Balram’s Bildungsroman Part 2

The Muslim Persian Poets in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Here’s a strange fact: murder a man, and you feel responsible for his life—possessive, even.  You know more about him than his father and his mother; they knew his fetus, but you know his corpse. Only you can complete the story of his life; only you know why his body has to be pushed into the fire before its time, and why his toes curl up and fight for another hour on earth. (Balram Halwai, The White Tiger, as Ashok Sharma, p.38-39)

In this section of my three-part essay I want to argue that Balram did actually become aware of Persian poetry and that his interest in the Muslim Persian poets—Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, et al.—is very serious, though the level of his knowledge is not extensive, given the few years he has been reading and memorizing.  The insights he has acquired by study are purposeful, not only for his edification and the illumination of his mind, but also for very practical reasons in light of his need of a new identity.  Furthermore, what he has learned by reading and educating himself since the break from servitude has considerably enabled him to elucidate his life experience, narrating that story with greater imagination.  The narrative is also enhanced by an eloquent philosophical and poetic style that is vastly more varied than he would have been able to accomplish in his naïve, youthful state of mind when he was shackled to the old cages of the chicken coop in the Darkness.  (Consider the passage in the heading)

At the time he was on the precipice prior to his murderous deed, he had been enraged, maddened to the point of holding discourse with gobs of paan spittle (p.210); he held discourse with a cockroach (p.195), he heard four dark fruits in a lady’s shopping back advise him to follow through with his plan to murder Ashok; and a major premonition came to him from a death-cart buffalo which spoke with the voice of his father.  So unhinged had he become, he was even able to conceive of abandoning or killing his young nephew Dharam.  Throughout, we are listening to/reading his record of confession some years after he had successfully vanished through poetry and established himself in Bangalore as a fairly well-off taxi-fleet entrepreneur.  Obviously there is still a PTSD syndrome working in his psyche, but he is pulling himself together, i.e. his many selves together. In his favorite poet Iqbal’s terms, his transformation or resurrection to a better soul and person is an ongoing and never-ending transcendence. Following Rumi, Iqbal’s message emphasized progress, constant growth, and revival of the self through love or compassion.  Middle-of-the dark-night taxi-service entrepreneuring isn’t the start-up he wants for the rest of his life.  “I’m a first-gear man, Mr. Premier. In the end I’ll have to sell this start-up to some other moron—entrepreneur, I mean—and head into a new line.” (p.274, italics in text)  He is still living in a darkness, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and waiting for a new leap into a brighter enlightened realm, stroboscopic chandelier lights helping him to lose the old self or to discover the new.  In fact, Balram uses the chandelier lights as a device for remembering:

“Now among the many uses of a chandelier, this most unsung and unloved object, is that, when you forget something, all you have to do is stare at the glass pieces shining in the ceiling long enough, and within five minutes you’ll remember exactly what it is you were trying to remember.” (p.98)

It’s a shame, you might be thinking, that he doesn’t spend five minutes and remember that fourth famous Persian poet he has forgotten.  Unfortunately, that mystery remains throughout the narration, allowing room for conjecture by the reader.

Readers have a great need to suspend disbelief if they think Balram’s narrative eloquence has always been his style.  The high style, drawn from Persian poetry or general poetic intuitions, is naturally not found everywhere in the composition, but it is prevalent as a summing up.  For example:  “I can’t live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh.  I am in the Light now.” (p.269, italics in text)  The poetic vein is especially in evidence in the description of beautiful scenes where colors, natural shapes and flora, and interesting objects are named, but also when mystical or dense psychological insights are detailed.  One could say Adiga is the poet, and of course he is, but it’s his persona’s character we must believe as the story-teller.  In pulling off this conceit with refined, subtle artistry, let alone the hilarity, wit, absurdity and rollicking entertainment that many critics and reviewers have commented on, Aravind Adiga deserved to be chosen among the ranks of great writers by the Man Booker jury.

These days we read so quickly and after a discussion of a work, we book clubbers are on tracks for the next selected work in line.  How much we can miss!  As I’ve noted, listening to the audio-book version of The White Tiger, I could not have stopped to question much as I continued to enjoy the story.  Only by reading, highlighting and making marginal notes in the paperback book I read at leisure could I have come to these thoughts and wished to express the ideas I present in this essay.   And, I add, to have devoted myself to a brief study of Persian poetry, the thousand-year-long classical tradition of things lost or abandoned through the technological change and mercenary haste of the twentieth century.  Of course, I may be way off the mark by looking at the work as so deeply interpretive.   But I don’t feel I have been wasting my time.  In his artistic way, Adiga is, I believe, hoping to tease some readers into a remembrance of poetic wisdom and perhaps to reignite an interest in revered Persian, especially Indo-Persian, poetry, of which Iqbal was perhaps the last great representative.  For what does the world need Persian poetry, you might ask.  For the same reasons Balram discovered: to find himself, to lose the self, to escape the idols of the marketplace, and generally to re-enchant daily life.

Whatever I say will not change some readers’ attitudes to the story they read and found appalling in the devil-may-care attitude of its murderer protagonist.  Balram is a composite of many people, and Adiga, as he says in his interview in the Free Press 2008 edition, doesn’t necessarily want the reader to identify with Balram. (p.286)  In the same way some of the Indian gods and goddesses—creators, destroyers, and destructive creators and creative destroyers– required fifty arms to cope with their powers, Balram juggles several psychic personalities as he explains himself.  He’s high and he’s low and everywhere in between.  Even sociopaths are struggling to find the better self.  However, it will not be fair, after what I present, to argue that Balram is a charlatan about his knowing Persian poets.  No one can assert that our hero came across a few verses of Iqbal, Rumi, or Mirza Ghalib on some greasy text-book paper that had been used for selling a fast-food aloo samosa or that he is now just boasting of learning and knowing such poetry.  His learning in such high-minded arts has only just begun and through poetic devices he wishes to pour forth some insights he has gathered, like brilliant treasures from a broken, charred clay vessel.

There are, of course, instances where Balram admits to finding information on such a used textbook page in a tea stall—a list of the four revolutionary figures who freed slaves and killed their masters. (p.260)  These data are rather faulty and part of Balram’s “half-bakedness” in accepting facts because he read about them.  Another instance, however, is more telling of his new-found poetic awareness of the dark and the light, a result of his ruminating on his complicity in wicked human behavior.  Towards the end of his long seven-night saga, he imagines, rhetorically, the Premier might think him “a cold-blooded monster.”  Balram’s response comes from a story he might have read on a torn page used to wrap an ear of corn he bought at a stall—the origin he cannot clearly remember.  In it, a cunning Brahmin asks the Buddha, in an attempt to trick the Enlightened One, “Master, do you consider yourself a man or a god?” The Buddha answered, “Neither. I’m just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.” (p.270)   To his own question—whether Balram is a man or a demon?—the newly enlightened Balram responds: “Neither, I say, I have woken up, and the rest of you are still sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.” (p.271)  This kind of awareness and the magic of the psychological antithesis have been derived from Balram’s interest in mystical poetry as I will illustrate more fully in a moment.  For now, it is enough to say that such a contrast of ideas was a favorite device of the classical poets.

Signs of the simple villager he was as Munnu still show up. Balram in his half-baked state is a man susceptible to sexual folklore of the street; for example, he believes the retention of semen in the lower body leads “to evil movements in the fluids of the upper body.”(p.213)  Therapy for this is found in red-light districts.  He also explained to the Chinese Premier, who surely knew it anyway, [Ha!] that young girls tasted like watermelon and that diseases of mind and body get cured when a man penetrates a virgin. “These are known facts.”(p.165)  Ha!  But besides all this nonsense, he can also make astute comments about the importance of the mind, even when they are combined with modern folklore: for example, he thinks cell-phones destroy the brain, and so he uses expensive land lines: “It hurts my business, but my brain is important, sir; it’s all that a thinking man has in this world.” (p.262)

* * * * *
The Power of Poetry:  Images that Stick

“I had a vision of a pale stiff foot pushing through a fire.”

‘No,’ I said.”  (Balram Halwai, the White Tiger, as Ashok Sharma: p. 165)

At a crisis of recognition as the slave to family, landlords, and master, and as the mocked sport of the chauffeur Rooster Coop, Balram remembers the fiery fate of his mother, whose “pale stiff foot” was the symbol of resistance: “As the fire ate away the silk, a pale foot jerked out, like a living thing; the toes which were melting in the heat, began to curl up, offering resistance to what was being done to them. Kusum shoved the foot into the fire, but it would not burn.  My heart began to race. My mother wasn’t going to let them destroy her.”(p.14)  Thus, his own “No!” At all costs Balram was not going to allow them, the family, to destroy him nor the black mud of the Ganga to swallow him up.  Yes, the desire to be a servant had been bred into him; he reveals:  [It was] “hammered into my skull, nail after nail, and poured into my blood, the way sewage and pollution had poured into Mother Ganga.”(p. 165)   At this thought, it is here he utters the resounding “No,” remembering his mother’s foot jerking in the pyre.  A refuge out of the Darkness of the Rooster Coop and an escape into enlightenment beyond undignified servitude were deep desires borne in upon Balram through his experiences away from the village and among the elites.  To read many passages (like those in the headings above) of his life’s reminiscences he is supposedly narrating for Wen Jiabao’s edification. Any reader who pays close attention to the language, the phrases, the careful description, replete with analogies and various poetic figures of speech, must question how Balram the tea-shop coal-smasher became the new “Ashok Sharma,” a literary artist and taxi-service entrepreneur.

Balram did not stay in formal schooling long enough to become the stylist in composition that we encounter in his confessional writing of his life story.  True, he was a bright child, literate from his early years, the smartest child in his school.  In Granny Kusum’s letter to Balram, when he had been away for many months chauffeuring for Ashok in Delhi, the cunning Kali-like matriarch used persuasive rhetoric of familial connection and “food-is-love” sentimentality mostly to seduce her grandson to send money home; she writes:

“You are different from the others [other family members].  You are deep, like your mother.  Even as a boy you were so; when you would stop near the pond and stare at the Black Fort with your mouth open, in the morning, and evening, and night. (p.163)

His father, a lowly rickshaw-puller, was for Balram “a man of honor and courage” (p. 19) and he “was a man with a plan.  I was his plan.” (p.23)  Part of the plan was for Balram, as Munnu the child, to complete his education.  The father, along with his mother, instilled the value of education in the boy, but their early deaths allowed the Rooster Coop to exploit Munnu before he realized the full importance of formal education and was forced to find learning and knowledge by his own wits.  A smart cookie, he had all the ingredients for becoming fully baked, but as he describes the vicissitudes of his picaresque life in the Indian “Satyricon,” he remained “half-baked” to a point.  His psyche is still in the baking pan, no matter how successful, secure, and enlightened he might think he is.  Even here, the “baking” metaphor stands for a degree of self-analysis and rise of consciousness beyond his youthful verbal ability.   Consider what he says about his donkey-whipped father, “The story of a poor man’s life is written on his body, in a sharp pen.” (p.22)  How impressive are his poetic turns of language, with a striking paired contrast of rich cushioned softness and skeletal vulnerability, in the following careful description of his father’s body:

“A rich man’s body is like a premium cotton pillow, white and soft and blank. Ours is different.  My father’s spine was a knotted rope, the kind that women use in villages to pull water from wells; the clavicle curved around his neck in high relief, like a dog’s collar, cuts and nicks and scars, like little whip marks in his flesh, ran down his chest and waist, reaching down below his hip bones into his buttocks.” (p.22)

The Animal in Man

As a literate young boy, he was able to impress the visiting school inspector with his learning.   It was in the schoolhouse from the inspector he acquired first his identification as “the white tiger,” “the rarest of animals, a creature that comes along once in a generation.” (p.30)  Symbolic or analogical thinking was thus instilled in Balram’s impressionable mind at an early age.  Even so, the language of the village was rife with such imagery in children’s minds to describe the exploitative landlords who kept the peasant castes in bondage; the people had nick-named them as animals: Stork, Ashok’s father; Wild Boar, Ashok’s uncle; Raven and Buffalo were others.  Mukesh, Ashok’s brother, the villagers called the Mongoose.  So already the symbolizing of a human being as an animal was part of Balram’s imaginative life; other analogies, sophisticated figures of speech, would follow in time.  But first he had to find the key to unlock his own cage.

In the red-light district of Old Delhi, confronted with beautiful, jeering prostitutes, Balram is unable to raise his erotic ardor.  The stigma of the cage comes to mind as he views the women:  “…sometimes what is most animal in a man may be the best thing in him.  From my waist down, nothing stirred.  They’re like parrots in a cage.  It’ll be one animal fucking another animal.” (p.214, italics in text)   The white tiger in Balram is beginning to awaken to the secret of his self.  No longer is the cry of “Them, them, them!” important to his nature.  He sees the prostitutes’ incarceration for what it is, a cage of another “Darkness.”  He has changed greatly in his preference for women: “(That’s right, Mr. Jiabao: I don’t go to ‘red-light districts’ anymore.  It’s not right to buy and sell women who live in birdcages and get treated like animals.  I only buy girls in five-star hotels.)” (p.261)

Finding the Key

In the present time of Balram’s narration, he constantly emphasizes that he is a transformed character in his awakened state. Where did he first encounter Rumi, Iqbal, and Mirza Ghaleb, let alone that fourth fellow?  His awakening came in a district of Old Delhi, in the book market of Darya Ganj, where he ran crazy through the streets to escape the pimps who chased after him.  In the red light district on G.B. Road, he had tussled with a midget pimp who tried to bully him into choosing a prostitute, one of the “parrots in a cage.” Escaping this sordid affair, beside himself, he made his way to the area of the Delhi Gate where books of the sellers are laid out on the street up to the market by the Red Fort.  It is here that Balram is first introduced to Muslim Persian poetry.

Old Delhi is a place “full of things the modern world forgot about—rickshaws, old stone buildings, the Muslims.”(p. 215)  In the market of Darya Ganj, among the smell of books and paper, Balram suffered a revelation that led him first toward the mystical power of poetry, its ambiguity and secret knowledge: “I went amid the books and sucked in the air; it was like oxygen after the stench of the brothel.”  Working with antithesis, juxtaposition and coincidence of diction, he describes his escape from the putrid, brothel cages, the streets of the red-light district into the vicinity of the Red Fort, where the books gave off a refreshing air, metaphorically termed “oxygen.”  This is very sophisticated poetic language for a poorly educated youth, but it is now stated by the older Balram who has matured, or has seen the light, since his days in the Darkness.   Through his manipulation of symbols, similes and metaphors—and, indeed, they are apt–he is perhaps attempting to impress the Chinese Premier with his acquired wisdom.  The Persian poets of old were accustomed to finding positions of prestige by courting great kings, sultans, sheikhs, and potentates; they dwelt in luxury and found protection by pleasing their masters with ideas expressed in fine language—beautiful, wise, and philosophical.

In the streets of the bookshops, Balram initially pretended to browse, flipping through many books, some written in Urdu– “…the language of the Muslims which is all just scratches and dots, as if some crow had dipped its feet in black ink and pressed them to the page.” As he flipped through an Urdu book, he was stopped short by a bookseller, an old Muslim, “with a pitch-black face that was bedewed with sweat, like a begonia leaf after the rains, and a long white beard.”  Thinking him an ignoramus, the bookseller wonders why he has chosen such a book: “Can you read Urdu?”(p. 216)   Balram shot back, “Can you read Urdu?” The old bookman calling Balram’s bluff, translated the enigmatic couplet of Iqbal: “You were looking for the key for years / But the door was always open!”  Then he told Balram, obviously an innocent to such curious language, “That’s called poetry.  Now get lost.” (p. 216)   From this moment, Balram, realizing his ignorance of something truly intellectual and strangely beautiful in its philosophical, psychological meaning, wanted to hear more.  He was enchanted to learn about this poetry and who wrote the verses.  After some cajoling, the old man read other verses and explained “the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men.” (p. 217)

Through this engagement in the heart of the Muslim district of Old Delhi, Balram had been captured and lured out of his mental cage from the Darkness.  The knowledge he had happened upon, though he knew of the caste and class inequalities, was “the ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor,” and so by this wonderful accident his spiritual-intellectual learning turned toward Persian poetry.  In a significant way he took Iqbal’s verses to have meaning for him, for certainly he had been searching for a way out of his cages— the Darkness, the village Rooster Coop, the gang of vulgar adolescent drivers, and his job as flunky driver for a corrupt, influence-peddling, weak-willed “boss,” son of the dictatorial landlord and member of the “mafia” family.  Balram realized from the verse of Iqbal that the door to freedom has been unlocked all the time; he had merely to open it, following through with his rage to execute the deed he had been contemplating, as he sensed the possibility of stealing the red bribe bag of Ashok when it bulged with hundreds of thousands of rupees.  The symbolism of the verses, “looking for keys” must have impressed him; but now no lock or latch needs to be opened.  The door or gate is already open, ready to be tried.

Color and paired contrasts are vividly displayed in his recollection of the bookseller.  The pitch-black Muslim bookseller was a face “bedewed with sweat, like a begonia leaf after the rain, and a long white beard.”  Particularly here in narrating his introduction to Persian poetry, Balram has used poetic imagery in his simile.  Besides the contrast of “pitch-black face” and “long white beard,” he described the sweat bedewed face, not just as dripping with sweat drops, but enhanced the imagery for those who can imagine a dark begonia leaf after raindrops have spotted it.   He is now practicing the art of poetry. Balram’s description of the significance of poetry shows, as he has demonstrated in the diction and composition of his narration, he realizes there are hidden meanings and beautiful ideas to be learned.  For example:

[The rich have won the war with brains, leaving the poor helpless and impotent]  “That’s why, one day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself.  Now, the four greatest of these wise poets were Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, and another fellow whose name I was told but have forgotten.”

“(Who was that fourth poet? It drives me crazy that I can’t recall his name.  If you know it, send me an e-mail.)”  (p. 217)

After having recited the incantatory catalogue yet again, with a slight variation, naming them “wise poets,” he still cannot call the fourth name out of memory.  At this point of claiming his advanced learning, he apostrophizes about the matter and even asks Wen Jiabao to engage upon the subject, as if the Premier could suggest the fourth or name any other Persian poet of great fame.  At the same time Balram tests the Premier, Adiga, through his persona, may be asking the reader whether anyone can even name a fourth world famous Persian poet.  At this point, it is less certain that Balram is merely putting on airs by name dropping.

Returning to the scene with the bookseller: Balram persists in pursuing poetic meaning and purpose, endearing himself to the old bookseller by addressing him courteously: “Muslim uncle, I have another question for you?” To this, the old man, perturbed by Balram’s intrusion into his business, snaps: “What do I look like?  Your schoolteacher? Don’t keep asking me questions.” (p. 217)

Vanishing with Poetry

With the bookseller, Balram becomes quizzical and mystical in his language, as though the metaphors of Persian poetry had transported him to another psychic realm: “Tell me, Muslim uncle, can a man make himself vanish with poetry?”  Seeing Balram now as quite balmy, touched, or inclined to voodoo, the bookseller drops back to practical business: “What do you mean—like vanish through black magic? … Yes, that can be done.  There are books for that.  You want to buy one?” (p.217)   “No,” pleads Balram, “not like that.  I meant can he … can he … .”  Interesting: it is left to the reader to fill in what Balram means by “vanish with poetry.” This is worth a little thought.

The answer, or answers, to this may be found in the scene when Balram conducts Dharam through the Old Fort which houses the National Zoo of Delhi.  Beforehand we learned how the Black Fort of Laxmangarh was Munnu’s place for escape into beauty; the Red Fort was the vicinity of his discovery of Persian poetry; now another fort has appeared as a place of revelation.  Though for most people, as Balram describes it, the zoo is a place for family outings and for young people to have romantic dates, ogling, laughing, and throwing objects at the caged animals.  For Balram, it is place for enlightenment:

“If it is enlightenment you have come to India for, you people, forget the Ganga—forget the ashrams—go straight to the National Zoo in the heart of New Delhi.

“Dharam and I saw the golden-beaked storks sitting on the palm trees in the middle of an artificial lake.  They swooped down over the green water of the lake, and showed us traces of pink on their wings.  In the background you could see the broken walls of the Old Fort.” (p.236)

Once again, just as his Granny’s letter had reminded him of childhood awe in the face of beauty, where he escaped from the sordidness of Laxmangarh, now the Old Fort of New Delhi is having such an effect upon him. Earlier he described the beauty of the Black Fort in terms poetically comparable to those at Old Fort’s zoo experience:

“The long loopholes turned into lines of burning pink at sunrise and burning gold at sunset; the blue sky shone through the slits in the stone, while the moon shone on the ragged ramparts, and the monkeys ran wild along the walls, shrieking and attacking each other, as if they were the spirits of the dead warriors reincarnated, refighting their final battles”. (p.34)

Having followed in his mother’s steps in appreciation of nature’s beauty, he had discovered awe-inspiring enchantment in the ruins of the Black Fort; now he sees a reflection of that magical beauty and wishes Dharam to glimpse it.   With mentioning of the Old Fort, Iqbal’s verses come to mind: “They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.”(p.34)

Balram remembers, “Even as a boy I could see what was beautiful in the world: I was destined not to stay a slave.”(p.35)   After he chose to take Dharam under his wing rather than to abandon him, Balram wished to apply Iqbal’s secret wisdom—now also his own—to his innocent ward.

“Iqbal, the great poet was so right.  The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.  … If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.

“I made sure Dharam appreciated the georgeous rise and fall of the fort’s outline—the way its loopholes filled up with blue sky—the way the old stones glittered in the light.”  (p. 236-237)

Vanishing White Tigers

Following the line of animal enclosures, Balram and the boy come upon the cage of a tiger. “Not any kind of tiger.  The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle.” Namely, the white tiger:

“I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars.  Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film.  He was walking in the same line, again and again—from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell.
He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this—this was the only way he could tolerate his cage.
Then the thing behind the bamboo bars stopped moving.  It turned its face to my face.  The tiger’s eyes met my eyes, like my master’s eyes met mine often in the mirror of the car.
All at once, the tiger vanished.” (p.237, italics mine)

At this moment of identification, Balram swoons, suffers a rapture, and the world goes dark for him.  In this way, two “white tigers” vanish.  Just as the zoo’s white tiger is able to tolerate the incarceration of his cage through a spell of ecstasy through motion, Balram realizes in the welling up of overwhelming emotions and lightning bolt of consciousness that he too can vanish.  Just as he had once vanished in the beauty of the old Black Fort, he had discovered in the vicinity of the Red Fort of Old Delhi the Persian poetry through which he could now escape, as if under a spell, and through the poems he learned several ways of “vanishing,” transporting himself out of the putrid, mercenary world and periodically into a realm of enlightenment.  In another sense of vanishing, Balram has disappeared from Delhi and in Bangalore he has taken on new identities, through which Balram Halwai is unidentifiable, unless he should go home to Laxmangarh.  For all intents and purposes he has disappeared, gone underground, undercover, lives incognito, in disguise:

“Here is a little souvenir of your [the Premier’s] Indian visit to keep with you.  Balram Halwai is a vanished man, a fugitive, someone whose whereabouts are unknown to the police, right?
Ha!” (p.85)

Balram has acquired an awareness of various meanings of words through interpretation of Persian poetry; the classical poets prided themselves on the use of coded or double meanings.  Consider Balram’s use of the analogy of the belly:

[Re. his cheating of Ashok]  “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 describing Indian politics to you earlier [namely, “That was all that counted now, the size of your belly.” And “These days there are just two castes: Men with Big Bellies and Men with Small bellies.” (p.54)]   “I was growing a belly at last.” (p. 196)

Now to interpret this, one might take “belly” as another feature of the skinny Balram’s disguise—he’s prosperous and shows the rich man’s paunch.  This is another mystical aspect of his “disappearing,” i.e. “concealing his identity” as he grows fatter.  But there’s another sense he intends, just as he used the expression of his father weakness or submission as lacking “belly”:

It didn’t matter whether you were a woman, or a Muslim, or an untouchable: anyone with a belly could rise up.  My father must have been a real Halwai, a sweet-maker, but when he inherited a shop, a member of some other caste must have stolen it from him with the help of the police.  My father had not had the belly to fight back. (p.54)

Balram’s belly, besides the literal meaning “growing fat,” is his new strength by which he has evaded the law, escaped the Rooster Coop, and has risen in status.  Growing a belly is his acquisition of guts, fortitude, or bravado.  Now he can stomach the world and instead of being eaten up, he is the one who eats.  His reference to the “analogy he used” and his word play are characteristics of an appreciator or interpreter of poetry.  By being a reader or reciter of the Persian poets, Balram is hiding his Laxmangarhian fate-appointed identity; he has taken on the personality and character of one of India’s elite.  Thus he has vanished with poetry.

Attention to the wise poets, several of them, although Iqbal is the only poet we have direct evidence of, had taught Balram to develop a greater appreciation of the world, freeing him intellectually and spiritually in ways his mundane freedom from poverty through murder, theft, and entrepreneurship could never have accomplished.  Among other things, it had enhanced his imagination and linguistic ability so that he might describe the white tiger of the Delhi Zoo in a poetic manner, rich in metaphor and simile, as seen above: “Black stripes and sunlit fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it is like watching the slowed-down reels of an old black-and-white film.”

Other Poetic Examples

When I want scent, you are color; when I want
peace, you are war,
When I go straight, you are lame—what kind
of character have you got? (Abu’l-Faraj Runi, Muslim Indian poet (d.1091))
(Excerpt from “Persian Poetry in the Indo-Pakistani Subcontinent” by Annemarie Schimmel, in Persian Literature, edited by Ehsan Yarshater, Columbia Lectures on Iranian Studies: no. 3, 1988, p. 406)

The secret wisdom of escape, of vanishing, and of disappearing, which Balram has inculcated in himself through reading and learning the Persian poetry shows up periodically in lines that strike one just as inventive and mystical, even humorously antithetical, as those of the Persian poets’ examples (see, above and following).  For example, paired contrasts, closely juxtaposed or patterned, which was a favorite mannerism of Persian verse, can be noticed in the following example from The White Tiger, playing on the dark and the light, hiding in brilliant light, the blind and the enlightened:

“I don’t understand why other people don’t buy chandeliers all the time, and put them up everywhere. Free people don’t know the value of freedom, that’s the problem.
Sometimes in my apartment, I turn on both chandeliers and then I lie down amid all that light, and I just start laughing.  A man in hiding and yet he’s surrounded by chandeliers!
There, I’m revealing the secret to a successful escape.  The police searched for me in the darkness; but I hid myself in light.” (p.97-98)

Another example of strange or unusual contrast: upon his killing of Ashok, blood spurting into his face, Balram cries out: “I was blind.  I was a free man.” (p.246)   That one has an opposition worth further interpretation. As does the following:

(I confess, Mr. Premier: I am not an original thinker–but I am an original listener.) (p.39, italics in text)  Then what is an “original listener”?  That’s a contrast worth discussing.

How does Balram grow with every experience?  Because he’s a sponge.  While he was soaking and massaging the Stork’s feet, taking a knock on the head from time to time when the old man became irritated with his servant’s rough manner, Balram explains the knack of entrepreneurs:  “I absorbed everything—that’s the amazing thing about entrepreneurs.  We are like sponges—we absorb and grow.” (p.60)

Mystical lines are thrown in effectively.  When Munnu was beaten by the foreman of the work gangs, he sat stunned:  “The shadow of an eagle passed over my body.  I burst into tears.” At this instant, his brother Kishan came by, proclaiming: “White Tiger! There you are!”(p.46)   Was his exploitative brother Kishan the eagle, a predator, whose shadow passed over his body?  If so, one can see a quite subtle metaphoric effect at work in his imagery.

Another example:  Coal becomes ice. The old driver of Dhanbad, a hookah-smoking man in a brown army uniform who taught Balram how to drive, was a presentiment of the bookseller of Old Delhi.  The gruff man felt it was an impossible transformation for a Halwai to become a driver: “That’s like getting [burning] coals to make ice for you.  Mastering a car…–it’s like taming a wild stallion—only a boy from the warrior castes can manage that.”(p.47)   To this challenge, Balram responded:  “Coal was taught to make ice, starting the next morning at six.”  Further poetic language of transformation is used when Balram was made to repair the engines to learn the how they worked:

“I emerged from under the taxi like a hog from sewage, my face black with grease, my hands shiny with engine oil.  I dipped into a Ganga of black—and came out a driver.”(p.47-48)

Use of animal imagery and states of transformation were phrased artistically in the best of the Moghul Indian era poets.  Consider this passage of the poet ‘Orfi, a competitor for excellence with Akbar’s court poet Fayzi. [Remember the great Akbar of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence?]  He offers a comparable example of such turns of fortune, or rather misfortune, in the tension of hope and despair:

From my friend’s door—how can I tell how I went?
Having come there all longing, I went, all deprivation….

I came in the morning like a nightingale in the meadow of Nowruz [Persian Vernal                                                  New Year]
In the evening I went like one who mourns, from the dust of the martyrs….
(Excerpt from Persian Literature, in Schimmel, as above, p. 414)

This is perhaps sufficient, but I could compare many other examples that show the characteristics of Balram’s new poetic inclination.  Besides his ordinary life of business start-ups, the peasant of Laxmangarh has miraculously been transformed into a poetical raconteur.  Knowing poetry, and especially knowing Persian poetry, a highly intellectual and esthetic discipline, has the power to mask the peasant of the streets, to help conceal the identity of the “half-baked” Indian.  Concealing his identity and escaping the rat-race of the fucking-joke human zoo, Balram will cloak himself in dignity through some knowledge of the Persian poetic tradition.  In attempting to disappear from the world as Balram, murderer of his master, through the Persian poets he will add an intellectual alibi to his transformed character.  A man who knows the Persian poets and the mystical wisdom could not be the perverted, wicked murderer from the backwoods village of Laxmangarh. No, not at all. Not at all.

[In Part 3 of this series, I will detail Balram’s new-found inclination towards Muslim personalities and provide some brief illustrations of Rumi’s, Iqbal’s, and Mirza Ghalib’s poetry.]

David Gilmour, (January 27, 2025)

Part 3: The Muslim Persian Poets of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Posted on November 1, 2012 by gil4or

[NOTE: This is my third and final post about The White Tiger. To visit my second post click here. For the first post click here.]

“I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.”  (Balram Halwai, aka the White Tiger, Ashok Sharma, p.276)

In this section, I will discuss the Muslim aspect in Balram’s choice of the Persian poets.  The highest regard for Muslims is found in Balram’s admiration for the poets; otherwise Balram is mixed in his regard for the modern Indian Muslims who struggle to survive in the largely inimical Hindu states.  Ashok speaks about Muslims with surprising tolerance and broad-mindedness, attempting at times to correct his family’s ingrained prejudices against them as a despised sectarian class of Indians.  At the conclusion of the second part, in regard to Balram’s alias or disguise, I might have simply added that the Muslim element of the Persian poets compounded Balram’s cover.  The intellectual high-mindedness of knowing Persian poetry of various Muslim writers put Balram’s identity at a distance from his Hindu background.  Balram’s fondness for the great Muslim Persian poets, or his ability, however slight, to recite from memory some verses of their poems, implied that Mr. Ashok Sharma, proprietor of the White Tiger taxi fleet, had Muslim sympathies and perhaps even an inclination towards Islam or had come from a Muslim background.

In the discovery of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry in the Muslim book market, Balram found himself caught in a moment of crisis.  He had run helter-skelter into the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi.  In terms of Balram’s character development, Adiga has used a coincidence for his protagonist’s discovery of the key to secret wisdom.  Balram found the key when he was least intent on looking for it. It was a phenomenon; it happened to him.  Rumi likewise found his moment of discovery from a chance engagement with a stranger, his mentor Shams-i-Tabriz.  Rumi firmly believed in the rise of consciousness as a change that comes about magically without deliberately being sought.  Finding the Islamic philosopher-poet Iqbal through the bookseller’s reading of a couplet in a book randomly picked out, a magical and serendipitous choice of verses, Balram experienced by chance the spark, the lightning bolt, of recognition for himself.  With the sudden opening of his mind, Balram awakened to the resolution of his vision for a change of life.

Mystical as the initial effect might have been, Balram’s strategy for change turned on an essentially egoistic motivation to better his station by going through the forbidden doors of murder and grand theft.  Had he read further, and deeply, in Iqbal’s verse and come to believe the philosophy of that Muslim poet, Balram might have thought twice about his wicked plan.  Also, he would have been persuaded to think about the sorry plight of Islam and its role in Indian history.  There is, I believe, no possibility from his learning, upbringing, and social climate, though, that Balram would see Islamic faith, as Iqbal envisioned it, as a means of resolving the inequalities of India’s classes and the world’s iniquity.  The course of the 20^th century and certainly the first years of the twenty-first have shown impossible-to-reconcile divisions in Muslim unity.  Political ideologies rather than spiritual compassion drive so much of present-day Muslim divisiveness.  Undoubtedly, however superficially he delved into the any of the poets’ philosophies or religious mysticism, the veneer of his Muslim literary affections and his choice of Muslim drivers for his fleet show an effect at work in concealing Balram’s poorly-educated Hindu identity.  This was his practical aim.

For a higher purpose, Balram’s emergence into the greater community, a mixture of quarreling faiths and contending classes, will be determined by the deepening of his compassion for human nature and the degree to which he can re-enchant and revivify his morbid soul.  The revival of life’s spark is often lighted in the imagination from strange visitations of things missed and long past, such as the arts.  Choosing the Persian poets for contemplation was a useful path toward a re-enchantment of life, but it is one that will require the diminishing of attention to materialist, capitalist values that are still necessary for surviving successfully in the modern day.  Faith and virtues alone will not help Balram improve his station, nor will they help ghettoized Muslims to improve their lot among the Hindu majority.  In matters of thematic interpretation, the prevalent prejudice against Muslims among Hindus (and vice versa) is I believe an underlying motif Adiga wished to expose and mitigate through his writing.  Therefore, I will take time to emphasize the role of this aspect of Indian life.  Finally I will consider the effects of the Persian poets in helping Balram to deal with life’s fortunes.

******

A) “Have you noticed that all of the four greatest in the world are Muslim?”(p.35)

Whether Avarind Adiga intended his readers to take Balram at his word and realize that the Persian poets had made a profound impression on his protagonist’s sensibilities is something that other critics might want to challenge or enlarge upon.  That his psyche was influenced by poetry was the argument of my previous posting.  Mostly we know Iqbal, the father of Pakistani Muslim nationhood, had impressed him with some thoughtful aphorisms about slavery and beauty, and about testing gates or doors that appear locked shut.  Beyond that, the persuasive power of Rumi’s or Ghalib’s verse is to be guessed by intuition, for no direct allusion to their poems or ideas is expressed in the narration.  Through the willing suspension of disbelief, most readers can enjoy The White Tiger as an entertainment, indeed a rollicking good story, though a serious one for the truths exposed, about a scoundrel’s life.  My criticism, venturing out onto a limb that might break from slimness of evidential strength, intends to take the work as an interpretive novel of subtle artistry, employing poetic elements relevant to Balram’s development, and, as with most great novels, a humanistic theme is developed for readers to learn from.  Balram is a scoundrel, half-baked in his development and rise of consciousness, but he has begun a rite of passage towards a change of social conscience.  Over the seven days and nights of his dictation, we find him at a time of crisis when, without a friend or loved one to divulge his career to in safety, he ventures to explain his life to China’s Premier Wen Jiabao.  As prisoners once wrote upon the walls to mark their being, Balram, imprisoned in his office cell, needs to assert his full being.  Perhaps he does this for want of interiority of his self, an idea the Persian poets would have addressed a need for in their verses; often their poems were self-oriented deliberations or meditations.

In Bangalore, still in limbo, living outside of a society or community whom he cannot fully accept and who could never fully accept him as Balram the Thug, he is nevertheless a partially transformed individual.  In Iqbal’s philosophy, the individual is always unfolding and transforming.  From “The Dividing Line”:

Fools…

take their pride

in their origins, accidents of birth.

The wise

seek their talent, potent worth

and –off to a lightning start, lo, go

—fate fashioners in their own [way].[1]

Having shaken off his old Laxmangarh skin, Balram hibernates nightly in his 150-square-foot office, laughing ecstatically beneath the twirling illuminations of his fan-whipped chandelier, narrating what he has learned about the Darkness he emerged from and the truth of darkness within himself.  Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in his electrically illuminated basement, Balram might say: “The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.  Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the patterns of your certainties I must come out, I must emerge.”[2]  Both Balram and Invisible Man use technologies to effect their enlightenment.  Until they can stand freely in wonder under the celestial cosmos, it is all practice of soul making.  Rumi was the exemplar of the ecstatic experience:

a) A night full of talking that hurts,

my worst held back secrets. Everything

has to do with loving or not loving.

This night will pass.

Then we have work to do.

b) Inside water, a waterwheel turns.

A star circulates with the moon.

We live in the night ocean wondering,

What are these lights?[3]      

After his nights of talking, Balram must emerge from his chandelier-lit glory-hole into the daylight of nature where he has greater work to do.

B. Aren’t we all just people here?

Though he did not make a full transformation from his biases acquired in the Darkness, it is clear Balram had moved closer in his identification with his former boss Ashok through an acceptance of Muslim personalities.  Furthermore, the conscience he adopted was that of the American Pinky Madam in realizing the gravity of his actions.  When the whole Stork family held back from informing Balram he would not go to jail for the accident committed by his master and mistress, Pinky Madam alone spoke for him:

“Has no one told him?  What a fucking joke!  He was the one who was going to jail!” (p.153)

Later, when the Stork resumes the cruel head knocking of Balram for the slightest splash of his foot-bath water, Pinky Madam left the room aghast:

“(Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao, that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with a conscience?)

The Stork watched her go into her room and said, ‘She’s gone crazy, that woman.  Wanting to find the family of the child and give them compensation—craziness.  As if we were all murderers here.’” (p.153)

Nevertheless, Balram is still half-baked in complete renunciation of his bigotry.   He admits in his confession to the Chinese Premier:

“I’ve come to respect Muslims, sir.  They’re not the brightest lot, except for those four poet fellows, but they make good drivers, and they’re honest people, by and large, although a few seem to get the urge to blow trains up every year.” (p.267)

He has, after all, chosen only Muslim drivers for his taxi service; no Hindus are employed.  Calling himself an original listener (p.39), Balram had heard his master call him ignorant and half-baked when he failed to answer correctly a number of general knowledge questions, one of which was “What’s the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim?” (p.7)  This test turned embarrassing and humiliating for the young chauffeur in front of Ashok’s wife Pinky Madam. (p.7-8)  On another occasion, refusing his servant’s foot massage when Balram insisted he give him one, Ashok kicked the wash bucket and scolded angrily: “How stupid can you people get?” (p.164)  Again, later, after Pinky Madam, very unhappy with Indian life, had left her husband for good, Balram heard another humiliating insult, one that could jeopardize his chauffeur position.  While driving Ashok and his former lover, the exotic Uma, around Delhi, Balram listened to prejudicial remarks about his backwoods character.  Uma rejected Balram as her driver because she wanted nothing of the services of “his kind, the village kind.”  Ashok countered that Balram was family, not one of the rotten kind who sells drugs and prostitutes. “Not this one.  He’s stupid as hell, but he is honest.” (p.179)  How much of this nastiness can one take?  Balram had heard bigoted slurs from all sides, and though he had awakened his mind, he still harbored a degree of bigotry against the Muslims, imitating Ashok’s words: “not the brightest lot” but “they’re honest people, by and large.”  Generalizations such as these are at the root of prejudice.

Ashok, too, was himself still carrying much of the prejudicial baggage of his family upbringing, but, whether from experience or education, he had acquired a more open mind regarding the fallacious side of prejudice against Muslims.  When Balram had been put into service to play bowler at cricket with the Mongoose’s son, Roshan, the boy shouted out, “I’m Azharuddin, captain of India.”  The Stork was upset at Roshan’s choice of hero: “Call yourself Gvaskar.  Azharuddin is a Muslim.” The educated Ashok spoke against the religious prejudice: “Father, what a silly thing to say!  Hindu or Muslim, what difference does it make?” (p.59)  To the Stork this openness was a fad of the younger generation and his son’s modern ideas.

At times enlightened, Ashok frequently dropped back into prejudice against his “stupid driver from the village.”  Even to the point of exploiting Balram as a scapegoat, using him to take the fall for the driving accident committed by Pinky Madam.  He was complicit in planning to ship Balram down the river, falsely accused as the culprit of manslaughter.  This was a degree of wickedness in Ashok beside which the corrupt practices of bribing politicians pales. The lowly servitude of Balram and the shameful slights he had to suffer without recourse were punitive and unjust; but the criminal use of a servant for the master’s benefit was tantamount to enslavement.  And yet, in his benighted state, impotent Balram would likely have suffered this indignity of enslavement, which his greedy Granny Kusum had given assent to and endorsed as a worthy sacrifice for suitable payment.

Fortunately, because no report of a death had been recorded, Balram escaped the imprisonment.  Nevertheless, the very thought of the indignity of having been used enraged Balram to the extreme: “Even to think this again makes me so angry I might just go out and cut the throat of some rich man right now.” (p.145)   Once the innocent Munna, now the daimonic Balram: this combination of innocence and powerlessness begets violence and murder.  Stripped of his worth and being, Balram had been pushed into thuggery by Ashok and the landlords—and not to forget Granny Kusum, avatar of the Hindu goddess Kali.  The now almost-forgotten ritual of the Thug, a professional assassin, had been insidiously inculcated in our scoundrel hero.[4]  When the daimonic spirit of the incarcerated White Tiger has been loosed, no telling what mayhem can result.

C) “I have switched sides; I am now one of those who cannot be caught in India.” (p.275)

“I have given myself away.”  “Getting caught—it’s always a possibility.” (p.275)

As life’s fortune had changed once for the good, Balram has awareness that possible misfortune lay ahead.  For Balram to have changed sides, to have joined the ranks of the elite, a transformation of some complexity had taken place.  Aravind Adiga, speaking against religious prejudices, has Balram’s character develop with some mitigation of his bigotry regarding the Muslims.  Not only does he acquaint himself with Muslim Iqbal’s Urdu and Persian literature but also, going over to the other side, he seems to redeem himself of his earlier exploitation of the hapless Muslim driver Ram Persad.  Sir Muhammad Iqbal was himself a strange side-switcher.  Though a severe critic of British rule in India, he accepted, in an about turn, the British imperialistic knighthood.  Even so, Iqbal would have been saddened by Balram’s hypocrisy as a pseudo-Muslim capitalist entrepreneur.  Likewise, he would have been deeply aggrieved by Ram Persad, the undercover chauffeur of the Stork, for his pseudo-Hindu hypocrisy.  Both of the servants had adopted a morality of materialist values rather than choosing a more spiritual kind, an honesty which the Persian poets since medieval times had sought to practice and espouse.  But what counted for the pious Iqbal as Muslim morality and purity of faith in the first quarter of the twentieth century had drastically changed in India by the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Survival at all costs was the name of the game.

Iqbal, in his idealistic philosophy, proposed, first, that an individual must come to grips with the self, ridding oneself of fear and despair, and understanding one’s uniqueness and worthwhile strength of soul.  Then one can choose to lose the self by joining the social river of life and participating to form a harmony of souls in the larger community.  For Iqbal this meant devotion to the Prophet’s precepts and Allah the All-Merciful.  Balram, a modern cynic about religion as another brand of enslavement, would never see the light in accordance with Iqbal’s religious dogmatism, no matter how benign it seemed.  One cannot give oneself up—or away—unless the community or society is accepting of the selfless individual.  Friendless and loveless, Balram, as Ashok Sharma, is unable as his true self to join the common society, the miserably corrupt one he understands it to be.  This would entail an emergence into a stage of higher consciousness toward unity with, and harmony within, the commonwealth. As Iqbal expresses it:

The link that binds the Individual

To the Society a Mercy is;

His truest Self in the Community

Alone achieves fulfillment.  Whereof be

So far as in thee lies close rapport

With thy Society, and lustre bring

To the wide intercourse of free-born men.

Keep for thy talisman these words he spoke

That was the best of mortals [i.e. Mohammad]: “Satan holds

His furthest distance where men congregate.”

The Individual a Mirror holds

To the Community, and they to him;

He is a jewel threaded on a cord,

A star that in their constellation shines;

He wins respect as being one of them,

And the Society is organized

As by comprising many such as he.[5]

Balram, in his partially enlightened character, is still finding himself and coming to his senses.  However esoteric he is in his leanings, Indian society is still far away from accepting him as he is.  Could he imagine China as the mass society in which he can blend as his true self and thereby lose himself in it?  Does Balram imagine (fantasize?) Premier Wen Jiabao as his potential patron who might introduce him to the echelon of Chinese society that best suits a self-taught entrepreneur?  By exposing himself through his confessions, Balram is risking a great deal if there are ears to hear his saga; his utterances are tantamount to his own “outing.”  Searching for his outlet, Balram is expressing himself through utterance.  “Utter” and “vent” have very similar meanings.

D) The Outing of Ram Persad

Balram had exploited Ram Persad, number one driver who was a closeted Muslim among the Stork’s family, when he caught him out through Persad’s observance of the food restrictions during Ramadan.  In the servants’ Rooster Coop, Balram had a hatred for his colleague: “Is there any hatred on earth like the hatred of the number two servant for the number one?” (p.66)  The Nepalese boss of the servants, Ram Bahadur, had no knowledge of Ram Persad’s Muslim nature. Had he allowed Persad to work by exacting a bribe from him, this would seriously have endangered Bahadur’s job security in the Stork’s service, revealing his slipshod management of his underling servants.  For subsistence’s sake, Ram Persad could not have enjoyed his chauffer position except through his Hindu disguise.  Both the Nepalese and the disguised Muslim shared prejudices when they spoke disparagingly of Ashok.  They clucked in mock-horror that Ashok had married the Christian woman, Pinky Madam.  But, then, in his daily life, the number one driver camouflaged his religious belief through ritual “Om” prayers before an array of Hindu idols.  Wishing to become Ashok’s driver in Delhi, Balram’s willingness to “out” his rival driver had few restraints.  The pressure was put on Ram Bahadur, who would have been fired or demoted if the Stork’s family knew of the Muslim hire.  In one day Balram had become number one driver; Ram Persad had been unceremoniously dispatched.

The irony in this action is found in Balram’s twinge of conscience, imagining the “miserable life he’s [Persad] had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job as a driver.” (p.93)  Balram had no idea in those dog-eat-dog days that he, too, would eventually be hiding his religion and name for survival and a share of the better life.  His cover could be blown, perhaps by the boy Dharam whom Balram felt he had to please and give in to.  That someday the game would be up was a distinct possibility.

E) “The blood is on my hands, not his.” (p.264)

As a form of atonement for his past exploitation—i.e. for having used Muslim Ram Persad as an instrument for his own mercenary advantage—Balram shows his rise of consciousness not only in the protection of a Muslim driver but in the more or less ethical action of compensating a poor family for their son’s death beneath the wheels of one of his Toyota Qualis taxis.  His driver Mohammad Asif had owned up to the accidental death and felt deeply chagrined.  When Balram urged his driver to call the police, Muhammad said, “But sir—I am at fault.  I hit him, sir.” (p. 263) In quite the opposite of the same kind of situation when Balram had found himself made culprit of an accidental death, the driver Asif was allowed to continue his work driving his customers home, while Balram took responsibility as the proprietor of the taxi service for the dead youth.  To the enraged brother of the dead man—a rage he admired and respected—Balram responded: “Look here, son.  I am the owner of the vehicle.  Your fight is with me, not with this driver.  …The blood is on my hands, not his. …–I offer myself as your ransom.” (p.263-64)

Balram acts magnanimously here.  How different the moral stand is here from that similar crisis of his past in which his master and family had intended to indict their servant for a death he did not commit.  Balram has changed for the better, setting an example of sorts towards a more balanced, just response to the dilemma.  But we must not forget that he was still executing the procedures of a man who knew the corrupt bribing techniques by which he and his driver would go free, with no repercussions from the police or courts.  What is a life worth in India?  How can such a society be improved?  What can stem the cataract of chaos into which society has plunged?

Balram sets another example by his honesty, demonstrating how one can take a higher moral stance, though always with some risk.  He followed up his covering for Mohammad Asif, who looked “devastated,” burning with shame for the accident and the death the next day when he came to Balram’s office.  Balram wasn’t going to fire Asif as Ram Persad had suffered just for being Muslim.  The explanation to Premier Wen is that in Laxmangarh he would have had no choice to act in a way moral or otherwise. (p.266)  In Bangalore, in his new life, he had a choice.  Even against Asif’s protestation that his boss was going to pay recompense for the accidental death–(“Why go, sir?  We don’t have to fear anything from the parents.  Please don’t do this.”(p.267))—Balram offered 25,000 rupees cash, expressed sorrow for the family’s loss and asked forgiveness.  He also showed favor to the family’s other son, who had behaved bravely before the investigating police, demanding justice for his brother’s death.  To the resistant mother, Balram offered to grant the remaining son a driving position.  All of his gestures might have been refused if the mother had had her way, but the father accepted the money.

The problem that now confronted Balram was how he might save face before his Muslim drivers who would think him impiously weak for acting subordinately before the dead man’s mother; perhaps they would attempt to cheat their boss now he’d shown the chinks in his armor.  Trying to correct or balance the mistakes of his past, Balram insisted he had acted in a way different from that expected of him, as the rich landlords of his village had lived.  He had set an example; he had learned much from his past.  But, still, he was not totally free; without bags of money, he could not flourish with his new morality.  One slip of arrogance and the game would be up: “Times up, Munna.” (p.276)

F) Iqbal’s Influence

Muhammud Iqbal (1879-1938), the last great Indo-Persian poet, following the fame and reputation of Mirza Ghalib in the 19^th century (1797-1869), had perhaps also attracted Balram’s attention through his attacks on the Hindu capitalist elites of past times. The elites flourished in imitation of the British imperialist invaders who had put Muslims into servile underclass penury.  Iqbal expressed a Jobian anger at his God in his complaining poems about Allah’s betrayal of the people of Muslim India and elsewhere.   He despised the despotism that came with imperialist democracy; he condemned exploitation of the weak and poor:

Colossal oppression

Masquerades in the robes

Of democracy, and with iron

Feet it tramples down the

Weak without remorse.[6]

Another example:

One nation pastures on the other,

One sows the grain which another harvests.

Philosophy teaches that bread is to be pilfered from the hands

of the weak,

And his soul sent from his body.

Extortion of one’s fellowman is the law of the new civilization.

And it conceals itself behind the veil of commerce.[7]

The following is a stanza from the Shikwa, “The Complaint”:

Why amongst Muslims is worldly wealth rarely found?

Great is Your power beyond measure, without bound,

If it were Your will, water would bubble forth from the bosom of arid land,

And the traveller lashed by waves of mirages in the sand.

Our lot is strangers’ taunts, ill repute and penury;

Must disgrace be our lot who gave their lives for You?[8]

For the most part, Balram had come to comprehend those passages of the Urdu and Persian poets that in some way connected with his own circumstances; interpreting difficult poetry depends upon how one applies one’s own experience and understanding.  Whether he had comprehended them as the poet meant them is another matter.  In the use of much Persian poetry, often learned as aphoristic couplets, it was quite usual, as it still is for Western readers of famous English poems, that a few salient verses of the whole poem might be memorized rather than the complete poem.  Particularly this is the nature of the form known as ghazal; several couplets make up the ghazal, but each set or shermay be taken as a separate thought to ponder without thematic connection or unity with the others.  Furthermore, having read several poetic translations of Iqbal’s and Ghalib’s poetry, I have found it surprising how vastly different representations of the same poem can be.  In Urdu or in Persian, the degree of difficulty of very compact verses made precise translation nearly impossible. Verses can be quite abstract, with sometimes intricate play of arcane or archaic diction meant to be interpreted with various meanings.[9]  Regarding such difficulties, consider the following Ghazal of Iqbal, a translation of the verses of the ghazal from which, I believe, Adiga’s lines about beauty and freedom arise:

Slavery—exile from the love of beauty:

Beauty—whatever free men reckon so;

Trust no slave’s eyes, clear sight and liberty

Go hand in hand.  His own resolves bestow

The empire of To-day on him who fishes

To-morrow’s pearl up from Time’s undertow.[10]

Balram’s earliest introduction to Iqbal’s verses renders the idea about slavery and beauty as follows:

“Iqbal who is one of the four best poets in the world—the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten—has written a poem where he says this about slaves:

They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

That’s the truest thing anyone ever said.

A great poet, this fellow Iqbal—even if he was a Muslim.”  (p. 34-35)

Comparing Iqbal’s ghazal verses, as translated in lines 1-2, (above p. 9) with the coherent line rendition (in italics) of the couplet Balram had learned from translation, one can see the freedom of interpretation that is needed to express that poetic idea from the original Urdu verses.  It is a cliché of criticism of translated poetry that much of the poetry gets lost—the meter and music, and often content through approximating diction. Urdu Indian or the Classical Persian poets presents a formidable challenge to translators, which difficulty the example above illustrates.

Closing his mention of Iqbal’s verses (quoted above) which impressed him, Balram engages the Premier in a snide aside about Iqbal’s greatness, “even though he was a Muslim.”  Following that remark, Balram further differentiates the character of those Muslims he finds in his present world from that of the wise poets he admires.  And he even wants the Premier to offer his opinion of “these people,” echoing his former master Ashok’s derogatory phrase toward Balram, “You people”:

“(By the way, Mr. Premier: Have you notice that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim?  And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered from head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up?  It’s a puzzle isn’t it?  If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.)” (p.35)

Purblind still, Balram comes off as quite barmy, fluctuating between the specific and sublime and generalized fallacies.  Here again he shows his slack understanding, his inability to grasp the contrasts that he might understand more reasonably if he read further the life and works of Iqbal, as well as the history of Hindu-Muslim India.  Though some of the esthetic beauty of poetic rhetoric might have enchanted Balram if he truly devoted himself to reading Rumi, Ghalib, and Iqbal, as well as the fourth whether it be Attar, Hafiz, Saadi, or Sanai, it appears the major influence of the poetry for Balram was through a personal identification in relevant ideas that rang true.  Iqbal, though he had moments of lyrical flourishes and strove for beautiful imagery, in the manner of Rumi who was a model for beatific verse, as the latter-day Indian Urdu and Persian poet, he practiced a poetry of philosophical flights of thinking.  Furthermore, he expressed political and philosophical ideas even in the poetic styles, such as ghazals, that were normally reserved for expressions of love and sensuality.

G) The Devils’ Defiance

At this point, and in conclusion of this investigation of the Muslim motif, I would like to consider the longest allusion to Iqbal’s poetry that Balram relates, by which I might explicate the fascination the Indian poet’s work had on him.  The following focuses on Balram’s identification with Iqbal’s Devil:

“Now Iqbal … has written this remarkable poem in which he imagines that he is the Devil, standing up for his rights at a moment when God tries to bully him.  The Devil, according to the Muslims, was once God’s sidekick, until he fought with him and went freelance, and ever since, there has been a war of brains between God and the Devil.  This is what Iqbal writes about.  The exact words of the poem I can’t remember, but it goes something like this.

God says: I am powerful.  I am huge.  Become my servant again.

Devil says: Ha!

When I remember Iqbal’s Devil, as I do often, lying here under my chandelier, I think of a little black figure in a wet khaki uniform who is climbing up the entranceway to a black fort.

There he stands now, one foot on the ramparts of the Black Fort, surrounded by a group of amazed monkeys.

Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, and its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, billion such people.  And God asks this little man:

Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand?  Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?  

And I see this small black man in the wet khaki uniform start to shake, as if he had gone mad with anger, before delivering to the Almighty a gesture of thanks for having created the world this particular way, instead of all the other ways it could have been created.

I see the little man in the khaki uniform spitting at God again and again, as I watch the black blades of the midget fan slice the light from the chandelier again and again.” (p.74-75)

This passage contains the sort of surprise that was one of the rhetorical figures found in much Persian poetry: in a place of mysterious beauty as the Black Fort was once upon a time for Balram, anger and confused emotions give rise to a gesture that is the antithesis of “thanks to the Almighty”; instead, the little devil offers a gesture of utter defiance.  Manichean Balram, named after the sidekick of Krishna, will not be fooled into seeing the Darkness called Light.  His meditation and contemplation beneath the whirling lights set the image in his heart.

Here, through Iqbal, another door to self is opened.  In conceiving the imagery in his allusion, Balram has woven a reprise of his visit to the Black Fort that he had experienced a few years ago, prior to leaving Dhanbad.  Up until the time he returned with Ashok to Laxmangarh, Balram had been scared away in his boyhood attempts to gain full appreciation of the Black Fort and its magical environment.  The attraction had been there, but his entrance into the fort had been forbidden.  Before he entered the doorway, he had been chased off in fear at some spectral shape, in reality just a cow.  At an early age his witch-like Granny Kusum had instilled in the boy’s psyche a horror of entering the Black Fort; she told Balram he was a coward and would die of fright for a monstrous lizard guarded the fort. (p.34)  Kusum had planted this apotropaic symbol in her grandson’s heart.  Under this spell, thereafter, he always lost nerve to enter the fort.  But, at last, at age twenty-four, he succeeded in breaking the neurosis and entered the fort’s inner sanctum:

“I swam through the pond, walked up the hill, went in the doorway and entered the Black Fort for the first time.  There wasn’t much around—just some broken walls and bunch of frightened monkeys watching me from a distance. Putting my foot on the wall, I looked down on the village from there.  My little Laxmangarh.  I saw the temple tower, the market, the glistening line of sewage, the landlords’ mansions—and my own house, with that dark little cloud outside—the water buffalo.  It looked like the most beautiful sight on earth.

I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction of my village—and then I did something too disgusting to describe to you.

Well, actually, I spat.  Again and again.  And then whistling and humming, I went back down the hill.

Eight months later I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.”(p.35-36)

Beauty, disgust, murder—sensitive and lyrical appeals to the romantic senses give way to the thuggish, visceral and horrific.  Such antithesis is the surprise in literary art.  What it means to live like a man is a mystery.

H) Breaking Bounds

Mirza Ghalib of Agra, Ghalib (“victorious”) being the nom de plume of Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, like Iqbal, was an Indian Urdu (and Persian) poet who espoused a unity of Islamic virtues,  More intimately personal than Iqbal, Ghalib’s verse lies beyond any concern for nationalism.  A poetic philosophy outside politics charged his verse, though he made striking comments about the radical changes in civilization because of the British imperialistic dominance.  In his day in the early 19^th century, when Ghalib lived in Delhi, what had been the Classical tradition in the long line from Rumi through Hafiz was coming to its end, with Ghalib and his era’s poets considered the last of the best.  Classical poets could no longer depend on prosperous stipends of patrons nor on adequate compensation for their published verse.  Ghalib struggled to make ends meet, and, Muslim though he was, he squandered much of money on drinking.  The Moghul court survived and he was employed by the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, but the British invaders had set their stamp on the trends in India, brutally quashing resistance as in the Revolt of 1857 when 27,000 Indians were hanged in Delhi.  The impending chaos must have impressed Ghalib and despair of a better age to come is emphasized in many of his verses:

When I look out, I see no hope for change.

I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.

I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.

Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.[11]

The sadness and depression in Ghalib’s verse from a past age would be relevant to the state of affairs in India’s modern culture infected by another wave of Western invasion through electronic engineering.  Balram is doing his best to adopt the new technologies in his life, but, as with Ghalib, a lonely night fire inhabits his heart in his shadow world.  A complete ghazal follows about the fading distant frontiers for the stranger’s refuge:

Ghazal 19

With every step I took, my goal seemed farther away.

I ran my fastest, but the desert ran faster.

That lonely night fire inhabited my heart

And my shadow drifted from me in a thin cloud of smoke.

Because my feet were blistered in the desert

Of my madness, my wake shone like a chain of [ruby] pearls.

Because of you the goblet had a thousand faces;

Because of me it was mirrored in a single eye.

Fire runs from my burning eyes, Asad!

I light up the soil and dead leaves in the garden.[12]

Balram might have enjoyed the following with its reference to a caged bird (two couplets from Ghazal 16):

Now I am behind bars, go ahead, tell me the story—

that nest the lightning shriveled last night—why do you think it was mine?

What I’m living through now could smash my house to pieces:

My friend, with you on earth I don’t need enemies in the clouds.[13]

Whatever poetic thoughts, like those illustrated, Balram might have found relevant to and sympathetic with his own circumstances, could they not have been a salve to his darkened soul?  Just to know another person in the world had suffered as he.  In this final example from Ghalib, one can perhaps sense Balram’s yearning to tell his story, to face himself, see himself for who he is, and to become an intrinsic part of the whole:

He has no image:  outside, everywhere, so distinctly

himself that even a mirror couldn’t reflect him.

Held behind lips, lament burdens the heart; the drop

held to itself fails the river and is sucked into dust.

If you live aloof in the whole world’s story,

the plot of your life drones on, a mere romance.

Either one enters the drift, part and whole as one,

or life’s a mere game:  Be, or be lost.[14]

The verses illustrate the great Ghalib in the India of his day, a pensioned poet but never prosperous nor a favorite of the Emperor’s court.  He persisted in writing about the importance of love, not a specific love, a love for someone, but of the morality of love in the face of chaos.  Did Balram understand such love; did he have love in his being?  He said he loved Ashok, but he murdered him.  Did he love his nephew Dharam?  Conditionally, perhaps.  As he says, Dharam is not going to give him up at present: “Little blackmailing thug. He’s going to keep quiet so long as I keep feeding him.” (p.271)  Yet, at a point when he could have gotten away alone, Balram did not give Dharam up; he did take him with him to share his new life.

I) Divine Insight

In the decision-making about the nephew Dahram, sent to him in difficult circumstances —whether to abandon him or to take him under his wing—there was one crisis Balram solved based on an emotional and, one might say, spiritual impulse.  No other insights seem to arise from the divine moment in the actions of Balram as much as this one.  It happened when he was considering his getaway after murdering Ashok.  He asked himself: “Should I go back to get Dharam?” (p.246)   If Balram went back to the apartments, the police might catch him and the cash in the bag would have been stolen for naught.  However, if Dharam were caught, he would be the sport of those in the poorhouse or prison.  Here is the moment of decision:

“I squatted on the floor of the [railway] station, pressed down by indecision.  There was a squealing noise to my left.  A plastic bucket was tumbling about, as if it were alive: then a grinning black face popped out of the bucket.  A little creature, a baby boy.  A homeless man and woman, covered in filth, sat on either side of the bucket, gazing blankly into the distance.  Between the fatigued parents, this little thing was having the time of his life, playing with the water and splashing it on passersby.  ‘Don’t do it little boy,’ I said.  He splashed more water, squealing with pleasure each time he hit me.  I raised my hand.  He ducked back into his bucket and kept thrashing from the inside.

I reached into my pockets, searched for a rupee coin, checked to make sure it wasn’t a two-rupee coin, and rolled it towards the bucket.

Then I sighed, and got up, and cursed myself, and walked out of the station.

Your lucky day, Dharam.”(p.247)

This is Balram’s recognition that he need not act like Ashok and kick the child splashing his shoes.  He sees himself in the child, innocent and happy in the midst of filth and deprivation.  In the midst of his mercenary aims, Balram is stopped in his tracks and responds to the child with no idea of gain.  It is a moment of virtue.  But he has also taken into himself some of Ashok’s soul.  The beggar child agitates Balram’s soul, pulling the best senses about humanistic survival out of him.  Nevertheless, Balram halves his charitable offering, just as Pinky Madam, the Mongoose and others had all his life.  The point is: if this little chap can squeal with pleasure in his utter indigence, then Balram has half a chance to carry his nephew and help him in their striving for a better life.  Balram risked much to rescue Dharam.  Emotion and heart to join the struggle were driving this moment, not selfish egoism.  Mirza Ghalib would have encouraged this motivation in a God-forsaken entropic world.  Balram’s moment of compassion is a telling anecdote as poetically worthy as any recounted by the renowned Persian poets.

As I have said, it is pure conjecture on my part what it was that enchanted Balram in the Muslim Persian poets, other than in Iqbal, whom he says he has read and knows by heart.  Nevertheless, if poetry can save lives or direct one’s life in a meaningful direction, perhaps it was Ghalib who had good advice for struggling, gravely distressed, desperate souls.  Aijaz Ahmad in his introduction to the Ghazals of Ghalib, from which several of the verse illustrations above are taken, has this to say about the poet’s expectations:

“He [Ghalib] expects that you will read these couplets as impressions of a man who sought wholeness at a time when wholeness was difficult—as it always is, but more so.  Also a man who needed love, knew it, knew its failures, yet sought for it always—in himself, and in his loveless times.  Ghalib was a man who wrote poetry because poetry was necessary, the times were inauspicious and poetry alone had the power to save what could be saved in a portrait of a man that was fast disappearing.  Ghalib’s poetry is a work of restoration on that portrait.” (p. xxv)

J) “There was a deep hole, but no bucket and no rope.” [From “A Story Shams Told” by Rumi][15]

If Balram had read about Rumi’s life, he would have learned about his mentor Shams-i-Tabriz, a wandering stranger who taught Rumi the wisdom of his life.  It was not a formal teacher from whom Rumi learned his philosophy but a ragged beggar he happened upon.  Shams was like a phantom Rumi took for God on earth.  In the strange way Balram was awakened by Iqbal’s poetry read by the old Muslim bookseller in the slum of Old Delhi, so Rumi was awakened, his consciousness opened to seeing life with new eyes.   Balram’s education and mind-opening experiences also came from strangers he happened upon:  the old hookah-smoking man who taught him car engines and driving; especially the black-faced Muslim bookseller with the white wisp of beard near the Red Fort market.

Rumi’s powerful poetry of self-consciousness must have had a significant effect on Balram’s self-awareness:

It’s the same with anything.

You don’t understand until you are

what you’re trying to understand.

Listen to what anyone says

As though it were the last words

Of a father to a son.[16]

Jalal ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was an original listener, the first poet in Balram’s list, and the earliest in the Classical poetic tradition named by him.  From Rumi’s works I will apply the same treatment of conjecture to consider what might have been significant for the sake of Balram’s survival and edification.  Rumi was a Persian by birth and later settled as a dweller in the South central Turkish town of Konya (Roman Iconium).  Rum was the Arabic term for Roman Byzantium from which he got his nickname.  He was famous as the Sufi mystical poet of a whirling Dervish school.  His poetry is beatific, full of love and longing, of the wonder of stars and the night, of turning wheels, and of beautiful dreams.  The idea of a union with God was for Rumi what we might call the ecstatic losing of oneself, forgetting the ego and libido, the escape from mundane rationality.  Balram wanted escape from the mundane, from the hum-drum, and for a breakthrough into a new perspective.  Rumi would have fit the bill.  For example:

Friends, last night I carefully watched my love

sleeping by a spring encircled with eglantine.

The houris of paradise stood around him,

their hands cupped together

between a tulip field and jasmine.

…

From the beginning of this dream, I told myself

go slowly, wait

for the break into consciousness.  Don’t breathe.[17]

Finally, another piece by Rumi on night and sleep, with imagery from a hilltop view upon the lower land and the transformation of animals into men, perhaps reminiscent of Laxmangarh and the spirits of the Black Fort:

Night and Sleep

At the time of night-prayer, as the sun slides down,

The route the senses walk on closes, the route to the invisible opens.

The angel of sleep then gathers and drives along the spirits;

just as the mountain keeper gathers his sheep on a slope.

And what amazing sights he offers to the descending sheep!

Cities with sparkling streets, hyacinth gardens, emerald pastures!

The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men,

Men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal.

I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home; it no longer remembers where it lives, and loses its fatigue.

It carries around in life so many griefs and loads

And trembles under their weight; they’re gone [in sleep]; it is all well.[18]

The problem of losing the self is Balram’s problem, everyone’s problem.  The world of the entrepreneur is a material world of gain.  Being drawn into the selfish desires for gain is the opposite of losing the self, the “I.”  Rumi constantly urges the loss of self, into which vein of philosophical wisdom both Ghalib and Iqbal insinuated themselves, though perhaps less successfully because of the exigencies of civilization’s trends.  Through meditation, through Zen exercises, through yoga, through hypnosis, and many divinational practices, people the world over attempt to escape the certainties of rational, logical awareness.  Through intuitive practices, we begin to learn how music, poetry and painting can improve our awareness and knowledge. Through the arts we can come to grips with an awareness of self.  For Balram, the Persian poets are like diviners, poetic seers, through whom he could intuit ideas clearer than those of his rational mind from the reports of modern media. They are like the Magi of Persian Zoroastrianism who were a priestly class, possessed of powerful visions and insights.[19]  The enchantment of the poets allowed Balram to live outside the closed coops of fruitless existence.  Comfort also comes to Balram in escape from the mundane, as he loses himself in the transcendent vision and sensual dreams of Rumi.  The awareness of grief and sinful baggage allows him to own up to his past.  Who doesn’t wish to sleep and dream in the darkness? The twirling chandelier lights and Balram’s laughter are the echoes of cycling nighttime stars and the ecstatic escape one might also experience through Rumi’s magical verse.

K) The forgotten fourth: Hafiz, Saadi, Sanai—who can it be?

Finally, I think it’s only fair—who, though, really gives a fig for fairness?—that I conjecture who the fourth forgotten Muslim Persian poet was.  Crazy, you say!  Balram doesn’t show he remembers even Iqbal’s words—in translation, that is—he just gives a rough estimate, which is after all what any translation could be of a Persian poet’s original words.   My guess is—and here you might well say, “What a fucking joke!—he has forgotten Hafez or Hafiz (1320-1389), whose very name means “The Rememberer,” “he who has memorized the Qur’an.” (Could this be Adiga’s personal secret joke?)  Like Balram, Hafiz was, in the words of translator Coleman Barks, “a shape-shifter,” one in whom “the conventional divisions of awareness do not apply.” “Hafiz says, ‘How can you walk the true path unless you step out of your own nature?’  This is the paradox he embodied.”[20]   Furthermore, the strait-laced Iqbal, though he once had favored Hafiz’s verse, eventually found him a poor model—drunken, hedonistic, unpredictable–of the morality for turning Muslims toward the true path of Allah.  Since Balram, the White Tiger, never seemed to have a true friend, consider the following short poems of Hafiz:

Each “friend” turned out to be an enemy,

Corruption rotted all their “purity”;

They say the night is pregnant with new times,

But since there are no men here, how can that be?

Desire’s destroyed my life; what gifts have I

Been given by the blindly turning sky?

And, such is my luck, everyone I said

“Dear Friend” to loathed me by and by.[21]

Hafiz, with his merciless squibs and acute criticism of human failings, might have warned Balram about the reality of life just beyond the cockpit of the Rooster Coop. Perhaps Balram didn’t want to remember the Rememberer and his cutting diatribes against human dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Most of you who know some Persian poets might think my choice of Hafiz of Shiraz is really too easy, too important, not to remember.  Taunting perhaps, Adiga is having fun with his character and with his audience. However, the puzzle of the fourth poet may be solved yet.  Balram may have at some point in his youth favored Saadi, or Sa ‘di, the short name he goes by, but whose full name is extremely long and quite forgettable; namely Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī.  Would that have been the name to boggle Balram’s memory?  Consider the following short poem and replace Ashok and Pinky Madam for the names Azra and Laila. Finally, Balram might write in tears before his life is done:

This I write, mix ink with tears,

and have written of grief before, but never so grievously,

to tell Azra Vaquim’s pain,

to tell Laila Majnun’s plight,

to tell you my own

unfinished story.

Take it.  Seek no excuse.

How sweetly you will sing what I so sadly write.[22]

In case you think me totally balrammy from this investigation, this will do for now. However, as Adiga set me on the trail to things forgotten, arts that can enchant a magic-starved existence, I must read more poetry from the Persian poets to find other voices of enlightenment and self-discovery that may pertain to Balram’s plight.  The poets must be legion and it will take a lifetime to cover them.  Many aesthetes believe poetry can save lives.  If Balram remains unrepentant for his crimes, his act of soul restoration may benefit from taking poetry to heart.  Some readers who found The White Tiger too cynical and morbid for appreciation as high art and saw Balram as a despicable hero may still prefer that he punish himself by being hooked on poetry of pain and remorse.  I think sympathy for him is better, more humane, and the hope that he will find a morality that will help his ward and the next generation to flourish without having to peck, claw, or murder their way out of the Rooster Coop.

David Gilmour, October 2012.

---

[1] Iqbal and his Poems (A Reappraisal) by K. N. Sud with aforeward by Omar Abou Riche, Poet Laureate of India (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, Ltd, 1969), p. 134.

[2] Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 567. 

[3] From “Four Poems on the Night” translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, in World Poetry: an Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Katherine Washburn, John Major, and Clifton Fadiman (gen. ed.) (New York:  QPBC, 1998), p. 478.

[4] In Indo-European linguistic etymology, a thug is “one who goes undercover”: *steg is the Proto-Indo-European root word, from which Sanskrit sthagati, “he covers,” shows an early formation of the term “thug.”  (See in Appendix of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, in which Pokorny’s Proto-Indo-European roots have become a prized section for amateur and professional etymologists, p. 1543.)

[5] From “Prelude” of The Mysteries of Selflessness: a Philosophical Poem, by the late Sir Muhammad Iqbal, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Arthur J. Arberry (London: John Murray Publ., (1^st ed.) 1953) p.5, vv. 1-17.

[6] Translated by Freeland Abbott, in the Foreward by Rafiq Zakariah of Muhammad Iqbal: Shikwa and Jawab-i-Shikwa: Complaint and Answer: Iqbal’s Dialog with Allah, translated from the Urdu, with an introduction, by Khwant Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 12.

[7] Ibid., translated by Allah Allah, p. 12.

[8] Ibid., translated by K. Singh, p. 44

[9] A very thoughtful introduction to the style and content of the ghazal in Mirza Ghalib’s poetry can be found in Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1971), p. vii-xxviii.  He employs several translations from Western poets (Adrienne Rich, M.S. Merwin, William Stafford, et al.) who based their verses on a quite strict literal translation from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad.  I have used some of these passages of couplets as examples of Ghalib’s verse and thought.

[10]Poems from Iqbal, translated by V. G. Kiernan (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 30.

[11] The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib, Translated from the Urdu by Robert Bly and Sunlil Dutta (Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1999), from “My Spiritual State,” p. 13.

[12] Translated by Mark Strand, in Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 93.

[13] Translated by Adrienne Rich, Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 83.

[14]Translated by William Stafford, Ghazals of Ghalib, from Ghazal 9, p. 47.

[15] The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, translations from the poems of Sanai, Attar, Rumi, Saadi and Hafiz by Coleman Barks ( New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1993), p. 87.

[16] From “Dying,” by Rumi in The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, vv. 13-15, p. 89.

[17] From “Caring for My Lover,” tr. by Willis Barnstone and Reza Baraheni. This and the following verses are quoted from World Poetry: an Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Katherine Washburn, John Major, and Clifton Fadiman (gen. ed.)(New York:  QPBC, 1998) p. 478.

[18] From “Night and Sleep,” tr. Robert Bly in World Poetry, p. 479.

[19] Magus is old Persian from Proto-Indo-European *magh- meaning “having ability or power.”  Iqbal used the term Magian to refer to Persian religious priests and poets.  The magician or mage is one who has special powers.  (See American Heritage Dictionary (3^rd ed.), p. 1527)

[20] Quotes from The Hand of Poetry, p. 145-147

[21] Translated by Dick Davis, World Poetry, p. 482.

[22] Translated by Basil Bunting, World Poetry, p. 480.

Related

Balram’s BildungsromanIn “2012 Selections”

Balram’s Bildungsroman Part 2Part 3: The Muslim Persian Poets of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Posted on November 1, 2012 by gil4or

[NOTE: This is my third and final post about The White Tiger. To visit my second post click here. For the first post click here.]

“I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant.”  (Balram Halwai, aka the White Tiger, Ashok Sharma, p.276)

In this section, I will discuss the Muslim aspect in Balram’s choice of the Persian poets.  The highest regard for Muslims is found in Balram’s admiration for the poets; otherwise Balram is mixed in his regard for the modern Indian Muslims who struggle to survive in the largely inimical Hindu states.  Ashok speaks about Muslims with surprising tolerance and broad-mindedness, attempting at times to correct his family’s ingrained prejudices against them as a despised sectarian class of Indians.  At the conclusion of the second part, in regard to Balram’s alias or disguise, I might have simply added that the Muslim element of the Persian poets compounded Balram’s cover.  The intellectual high-mindedness of knowing Persian poetry of various Muslim writers put Balram’s identity at a distance from his Hindu background.  Balram’s fondness for the great Muslim Persian poets, or his ability, however slight, to recite from memory some verses of their poems, implied that Mr. Ashok Sharma, proprietor of the White Tiger taxi fleet, had Muslim sympathies and perhaps even an inclination towards Islam or had come from a Muslim background.

In the discovery of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry in the Muslim book market, Balram found himself caught in a moment of crisis.  He had run helter-skelter into the Muslim quarter of Old Delhi.  In terms of Balram’s character development, Adiga has used a coincidence for his protagonist’s discovery of the key to secret wisdom.  Balram found the key when he was least intent on looking for it. It was a phenomenon; it happened to him.  Rumi likewise found his moment of discovery from a chance engagement with a stranger, his mentor Shams-i-Tabriz.  Rumi firmly believed in the rise of consciousness as a change that comes about magically without deliberately being sought.  Finding the Islamic philosopher-poet Iqbal through the bookseller’s reading of a couplet in a book randomly picked out, a magical and serendipitous choice of verses, Balram experienced by chance the spark, the lightning bolt, of recognition for himself.  With the sudden opening of his mind, Balram awakened to the resolution of his vision for a change of life.

Mystical as the initial effect might have been, Balram’s strategy for change turned on an essentially egoistic motivation to better his station by going through the forbidden doors of murder and grand theft.  Had he read further, and deeply, in Iqbal’s verse and come to believe the philosophy of that Muslim poet, Balram might have thought twice about his wicked plan.  Also, he would have been persuaded to think about the sorry plight of Islam and its role in Indian history.  There is, I believe, no possibility from his learning, upbringing, and social climate, though, that Balram would see Islamic faith, as Iqbal envisioned it, as a means of resolving the inequalities of India’s classes and the world’s iniquity.  The course of the 20^th century and certainly the first years of the twenty-first have shown impossible-to-reconcile divisions in Muslim unity.  Political ideologies rather than spiritual compassion drive so much of present-day Muslim divisiveness.  Undoubtedly, however superficially he delved into the any of the poets’ philosophies or religious mysticism, the veneer of his Muslim literary affections and his choice of Muslim drivers for his fleet show an effect at work in concealing Balram’s poorly-educated Hindu identity.  This was his practical aim.

For a higher purpose, Balram’s emergence into the greater community, a mixture of quarreling faiths and contending classes, will be determined by the deepening of his compassion for human nature and the degree to which he can re-enchant and revivify his morbid soul.  The revival of life’s spark is often lighted in the imagination from strange visitations of things missed and long past, such as the arts.  Choosing the Persian poets for contemplation was a useful path toward a re-enchantment of life, but it is one that will require the diminishing of attention to materialist, capitalist values that are still necessary for surviving successfully in the modern day.  Faith and virtues alone will not help Balram improve his station, nor will they help ghettoized Muslims to improve their lot among the Hindu majority.  In matters of thematic interpretation, the prevalent prejudice against Muslims among Hindus (and vice versa) is I believe an underlying motif Adiga wished to expose and mitigate through his writing.  Therefore, I will take time to emphasize the role of this aspect of Indian life.  Finally I will consider the effects of the Persian poets in helping Balram to deal with life’s fortunes.

******

A) “Have you noticed that all of the four greatest in the world are Muslim?”(p.35)

Whether Avarind Adiga intended his readers to take Balram at his word and realize that the Persian poets had made a profound impression on his protagonist’s sensibilities is something that other critics might want to challenge or enlarge upon.  That his psyche was influenced by poetry was the argument of my previous posting.  Mostly we know Iqbal, the father of Pakistani Muslim nationhood, had impressed him with some thoughtful aphorisms about slavery and beauty, and about testing gates or doors that appear locked shut.  Beyond that, the persuasive power of Rumi’s or Ghalib’s verse is to be guessed by intuition, for no direct allusion to their poems or ideas is expressed in the narration.  Through the willing suspension of disbelief, most readers can enjoy The White Tiger as an entertainment, indeed a rollicking good story, though a serious one for the truths exposed, about a scoundrel’s life.  My criticism, venturing out onto a limb that might break from slimness of evidential strength, intends to take the work as an interpretive novel of subtle artistry, employing poetic elements relevant to Balram’s development, and, as with most great novels, a humanistic theme is developed for readers to learn from.  Balram is a scoundrel, half-baked in his development and rise of consciousness, but he has begun a rite of passage towards a change of social conscience.  Over the seven days and nights of his dictation, we find him at a time of crisis when, without a friend or loved one to divulge his career to in safety, he ventures to explain his life to China’s Premier Wen Jiabao.  As prisoners once wrote upon the walls to mark their being, Balram, imprisoned in his office cell, needs to assert his full being.  Perhaps he does this for want of interiority of his self, an idea the Persian poets would have addressed a need for in their verses; often their poems were self-oriented deliberations or meditations.

In Bangalore, still in limbo, living outside of a society or community whom he cannot fully accept and who could never fully accept him as Balram the Thug, he is nevertheless a partially transformed individual.  In Iqbal’s philosophy, the individual is always unfolding and transforming.  From “The Dividing Line”:

Fools…

take their pride

in their origins, accidents of birth.

The wise

seek their talent, potent worth

and –off to a lightning start, lo, go

—fate fashioners in their own [way].[1]

Having shaken off his old Laxmangarh skin, Balram hibernates nightly in his 150-square-foot office, laughing ecstatically beneath the twirling illuminations of his fan-whipped chandelier, narrating what he has learned about the Darkness he emerged from and the truth of darkness within himself.  Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in his electrically illuminated basement, Balram might say: “The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for societies as well as for individuals.  Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the patterns of your certainties I must come out, I must emerge.”[2]  Both Balram and Invisible Man use technologies to effect their enlightenment.  Until they can stand freely in wonder under the celestial cosmos, it is all practice of soul making.  Rumi was the exemplar of the ecstatic experience:

a) A night full of talking that hurts,

my worst held back secrets. Everything

has to do with loving or not loving.

This night will pass.

Then we have work to do.

b) Inside water, a waterwheel turns.

A star circulates with the moon.

We live in the night ocean wondering,

What are these lights?[3]      

After his nights of talking, Balram must emerge from his chandelier-lit glory-hole into the daylight of nature where he has greater work to do.

B. Aren’t we all just people here?

Though he did not make a full transformation from his biases acquired in the Darkness, it is clear Balram had moved closer in his identification with his former boss Ashok through an acceptance of Muslim personalities.  Furthermore, the conscience he adopted was that of the American Pinky Madam in realizing the gravity of his actions.  When the whole Stork family held back from informing Balram he would not go to jail for the accident committed by his master and mistress, Pinky Madam alone spoke for him:

“Has no one told him?  What a fucking joke!  He was the one who was going to jail!” (p.153)

Later, when the Stork resumes the cruel head knocking of Balram for the slightest splash of his foot-bath water, Pinky Madam left the room aghast:

“(Who would have thought, Mr. Jiabao, that of this whole family, the lady with the short skirt would be the one with a conscience?)

The Stork watched her go into her room and said, ‘She’s gone crazy, that woman.  Wanting to find the family of the child and give them compensation—craziness.  As if we were all murderers here.’” (p.153)

Nevertheless, Balram is still half-baked in complete renunciation of his bigotry.   He admits in his confession to the Chinese Premier:

“I’ve come to respect Muslims, sir.  They’re not the brightest lot, except for those four poet fellows, but they make good drivers, and they’re honest people, by and large, although a few seem to get the urge to blow trains up every year.” (p.267)

He has, after all, chosen only Muslim drivers for his taxi service; no Hindus are employed.  Calling himself an original listener (p.39), Balram had heard his master call him ignorant and half-baked when he failed to answer correctly a number of general knowledge questions, one of which was “What’s the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim?” (p.7)  This test turned embarrassing and humiliating for the young chauffeur in front of Ashok’s wife Pinky Madam. (p.7-8)  On another occasion, refusing his servant’s foot massage when Balram insisted he give him one, Ashok kicked the wash bucket and scolded angrily: “How stupid can you people get?” (p.164)  Again, later, after Pinky Madam, very unhappy with Indian life, had left her husband for good, Balram heard another humiliating insult, one that could jeopardize his chauffeur position.  While driving Ashok and his former lover, the exotic Uma, around Delhi, Balram listened to prejudicial remarks about his backwoods character.  Uma rejected Balram as her driver because she wanted nothing of the services of “his kind, the village kind.”  Ashok countered that Balram was family, not one of the rotten kind who sells drugs and prostitutes. “Not this one.  He’s stupid as hell, but he is honest.” (p.179)  How much of this nastiness can one take?  Balram had heard bigoted slurs from all sides, and though he had awakened his mind, he still harbored a degree of bigotry against the Muslims, imitating Ashok’s words: “not the brightest lot” but “they’re honest people, by and large.”  Generalizations such as these are at the root of prejudice.

Ashok, too, was himself still carrying much of the prejudicial baggage of his family upbringing, but, whether from experience or education, he had acquired a more open mind regarding the fallacious side of prejudice against Muslims.  When Balram had been put into service to play bowler at cricket with the Mongoose’s son, Roshan, the boy shouted out, “I’m Azharuddin, captain of India.”  The Stork was upset at Roshan’s choice of hero: “Call yourself Gvaskar.  Azharuddin is a Muslim.” The educated Ashok spoke against the religious prejudice: “Father, what a silly thing to say!  Hindu or Muslim, what difference does it make?” (p.59)  To the Stork this openness was a fad of the younger generation and his son’s modern ideas.

At times enlightened, Ashok frequently dropped back into prejudice against his “stupid driver from the village.”  Even to the point of exploiting Balram as a scapegoat, using him to take the fall for the driving accident committed by Pinky Madam.  He was complicit in planning to ship Balram down the river, falsely accused as the culprit of manslaughter.  This was a degree of wickedness in Ashok beside which the corrupt practices of bribing politicians pales. The lowly servitude of Balram and the shameful slights he had to suffer without recourse were punitive and unjust; but the criminal use of a servant for the master’s benefit was tantamount to enslavement.  And yet, in his benighted state, impotent Balram would likely have suffered this indignity of enslavement, which his greedy Granny Kusum had given assent to and endorsed as a worthy sacrifice for suitable payment.

Fortunately, because no report of a death had been recorded, Balram escaped the imprisonment.  Nevertheless, the very thought of the indignity of having been used enraged Balram to the extreme: “Even to think this again makes me so angry I might just go out and cut the throat of some rich man right now.” (p.145)   Once the innocent Munna, now the daimonic Balram: this combination of innocence and powerlessness begets violence and murder.  Stripped of his worth and being, Balram had been pushed into thuggery by Ashok and the landlords—and not to forget Granny Kusum, avatar of the Hindu goddess Kali.  The now almost-forgotten ritual of the Thug, a professional assassin, had been insidiously inculcated in our scoundrel hero.[4]  When the daimonic spirit of the incarcerated White Tiger has been loosed, no telling what mayhem can result.

C) “I have switched sides; I am now one of those who cannot be caught in India.” (p.275)

“I have given myself away.”  “Getting caught—it’s always a possibility.” (p.275)

As life’s fortune had changed once for the good, Balram has awareness that possible misfortune lay ahead.  For Balram to have changed sides, to have joined the ranks of the elite, a transformation of some complexity had taken place.  Aravind Adiga, speaking against religious prejudices, has Balram’s character develop with some mitigation of his bigotry regarding the Muslims.  Not only does he acquaint himself with Muslim Iqbal’s Urdu and Persian literature but also, going over to the other side, he seems to redeem himself of his earlier exploitation of the hapless Muslim driver Ram Persad.  Sir Muhammad Iqbal was himself a strange side-switcher.  Though a severe critic of British rule in India, he accepted, in an about turn, the British imperialistic knighthood.  Even so, Iqbal would have been saddened by Balram’s hypocrisy as a pseudo-Muslim capitalist entrepreneur.  Likewise, he would have been deeply aggrieved by Ram Persad, the undercover chauffeur of the Stork, for his pseudo-Hindu hypocrisy.  Both of the servants had adopted a morality of materialist values rather than choosing a more spiritual kind, an honesty which the Persian poets since medieval times had sought to practice and espouse.  But what counted for the pious Iqbal as Muslim morality and purity of faith in the first quarter of the twentieth century had drastically changed in India by the first decade of the twenty-first century.  Survival at all costs was the name of the game.

Iqbal, in his idealistic philosophy, proposed, first, that an individual must come to grips with the self, ridding oneself of fear and despair, and understanding one’s uniqueness and worthwhile strength of soul.  Then one can choose to lose the self by joining the social river of life and participating to form a harmony of souls in the larger community.  For Iqbal this meant devotion to the Prophet’s precepts and Allah the All-Merciful.  Balram, a modern cynic about religion as another brand of enslavement, would never see the light in accordance with Iqbal’s religious dogmatism, no matter how benign it seemed.  One cannot give oneself up—or away—unless the community or society is accepting of the selfless individual.  Friendless and loveless, Balram, as Ashok Sharma, is unable as his true self to join the common society, the miserably corrupt one he understands it to be.  This would entail an emergence into a stage of higher consciousness toward unity with, and harmony within, the commonwealth. As Iqbal expresses it:

The link that binds the Individual

To the Society a Mercy is;

His truest Self in the Community

Alone achieves fulfillment.  Whereof be

So far as in thee lies close rapport

With thy Society, and lustre bring

To the wide intercourse of free-born men.

Keep for thy talisman these words he spoke

That was the best of mortals [i.e. Mohammad]: “Satan holds

His furthest distance where men congregate.”

The Individual a Mirror holds

To the Community, and they to him;

He is a jewel threaded on a cord,

A star that in their constellation shines;

He wins respect as being one of them,

And the Society is organized

As by comprising many such as he.[5]

Balram, in his partially enlightened character, is still finding himself and coming to his senses.  However esoteric he is in his leanings, Indian society is still far away from accepting him as he is.  Could he imagine China as the mass society in which he can blend as his true self and thereby lose himself in it?  Does Balram imagine (fantasize?) Premier Wen Jiabao as his potential patron who might introduce him to the echelon of Chinese society that best suits a self-taught entrepreneur?  By exposing himself through his confessions, Balram is risking a great deal if there are ears to hear his saga; his utterances are tantamount to his own “outing.”  Searching for his outlet, Balram is expressing himself through utterance.  “Utter” and “vent” have very similar meanings.

D) The Outing of Ram Persad

Balram had exploited Ram Persad, number one driver who was a closeted Muslim among the Stork’s family, when he caught him out through Persad’s observance of the food restrictions during Ramadan.  In the servants’ Rooster Coop, Balram had a hatred for his colleague: “Is there any hatred on earth like the hatred of the number two servant for the number one?” (p.66)  The Nepalese boss of the servants, Ram Bahadur, had no knowledge of Ram Persad’s Muslim nature. Had he allowed Persad to work by exacting a bribe from him, this would seriously have endangered Bahadur’s job security in the Stork’s service, revealing his slipshod management of his underling servants.  For subsistence’s sake, Ram Persad could not have enjoyed his chauffer position except through his Hindu disguise.  Both the Nepalese and the disguised Muslim shared prejudices when they spoke disparagingly of Ashok.  They clucked in mock-horror that Ashok had married the Christian woman, Pinky Madam.  But, then, in his daily life, the number one driver camouflaged his religious belief through ritual “Om” prayers before an array of Hindu idols.  Wishing to become Ashok’s driver in Delhi, Balram’s willingness to “out” his rival driver had few restraints.  The pressure was put on Ram Bahadur, who would have been fired or demoted if the Stork’s family knew of the Muslim hire.  In one day Balram had become number one driver; Ram Persad had been unceremoniously dispatched.

The irony in this action is found in Balram’s twinge of conscience, imagining the “miserable life he’s [Persad] had, having to hide his religion, his name, just to get a job as a driver.” (p.93)  Balram had no idea in those dog-eat-dog days that he, too, would eventually be hiding his religion and name for survival and a share of the better life.  His cover could be blown, perhaps by the boy Dharam whom Balram felt he had to please and give in to.  That someday the game would be up was a distinct possibility.

E) “The blood is on my hands, not his.” (p.264)

As a form of atonement for his past exploitation—i.e. for having used Muslim Ram Persad as an instrument for his own mercenary advantage—Balram shows his rise of consciousness not only in the protection of a Muslim driver but in the more or less ethical action of compensating a poor family for their son’s death beneath the wheels of one of his Toyota Qualis taxis.  His driver Mohammad Asif had owned up to the accidental death and felt deeply chagrined.  When Balram urged his driver to call the police, Muhammad said, “But sir—I am at fault.  I hit him, sir.” (p. 263) In quite the opposite of the same kind of situation when Balram had found himself made culprit of an accidental death, the driver Asif was allowed to continue his work driving his customers home, while Balram took responsibility as the proprietor of the taxi service for the dead youth.  To the enraged brother of the dead man—a rage he admired and respected—Balram responded: “Look here, son.  I am the owner of the vehicle.  Your fight is with me, not with this driver.  …The blood is on my hands, not his. …–I offer myself as your ransom.” (p.263-64)

Balram acts magnanimously here.  How different the moral stand is here from that similar crisis of his past in which his master and family had intended to indict their servant for a death he did not commit.  Balram has changed for the better, setting an example of sorts towards a more balanced, just response to the dilemma.  But we must not forget that he was still executing the procedures of a man who knew the corrupt bribing techniques by which he and his driver would go free, with no repercussions from the police or courts.  What is a life worth in India?  How can such a society be improved?  What can stem the cataract of chaos into which society has plunged?

Balram sets another example by his honesty, demonstrating how one can take a higher moral stance, though always with some risk.  He followed up his covering for Mohammad Asif, who looked “devastated,” burning with shame for the accident and the death the next day when he came to Balram’s office.  Balram wasn’t going to fire Asif as Ram Persad had suffered just for being Muslim.  The explanation to Premier Wen is that in Laxmangarh he would have had no choice to act in a way moral or otherwise. (p.266)  In Bangalore, in his new life, he had a choice.  Even against Asif’s protestation that his boss was going to pay recompense for the accidental death–(“Why go, sir?  We don’t have to fear anything from the parents.  Please don’t do this.”(p.267))—Balram offered 25,000 rupees cash, expressed sorrow for the family’s loss and asked forgiveness.  He also showed favor to the family’s other son, who had behaved bravely before the investigating police, demanding justice for his brother’s death.  To the resistant mother, Balram offered to grant the remaining son a driving position.  All of his gestures might have been refused if the mother had had her way, but the father accepted the money.

The problem that now confronted Balram was how he might save face before his Muslim drivers who would think him impiously weak for acting subordinately before the dead man’s mother; perhaps they would attempt to cheat their boss now he’d shown the chinks in his armor.  Trying to correct or balance the mistakes of his past, Balram insisted he had acted in a way different from that expected of him, as the rich landlords of his village had lived.  He had set an example; he had learned much from his past.  But, still, he was not totally free; without bags of money, he could not flourish with his new morality.  One slip of arrogance and the game would be up: “Times up, Munna.” (p.276)

F) Iqbal’s Influence

Muhammud Iqbal (1879-1938), the last great Indo-Persian poet, following the fame and reputation of Mirza Ghalib in the 19^th century (1797-1869), had perhaps also attracted Balram’s attention through his attacks on the Hindu capitalist elites of past times. The elites flourished in imitation of the British imperialist invaders who had put Muslims into servile underclass penury.  Iqbal expressed a Jobian anger at his God in his complaining poems about Allah’s betrayal of the people of Muslim India and elsewhere.   He despised the despotism that came with imperialist democracy; he condemned exploitation of the weak and poor:

Colossal oppression

Masquerades in the robes

Of democracy, and with iron

Feet it tramples down the

Weak without remorse.[6]

Another example:

One nation pastures on the other,

One sows the grain which another harvests.

Philosophy teaches that bread is to be pilfered from the hands

of the weak,

And his soul sent from his body.

Extortion of one’s fellowman is the law of the new civilization.

And it conceals itself behind the veil of commerce.[7]

The following is a stanza from the Shikwa, “The Complaint”:

Why amongst Muslims is worldly wealth rarely found?

Great is Your power beyond measure, without bound,

If it were Your will, water would bubble forth from the bosom of arid land,

And the traveller lashed by waves of mirages in the sand.

Our lot is strangers’ taunts, ill repute and penury;

Must disgrace be our lot who gave their lives for You?[8]

For the most part, Balram had come to comprehend those passages of the Urdu and Persian poets that in some way connected with his own circumstances; interpreting difficult poetry depends upon how one applies one’s own experience and understanding.  Whether he had comprehended them as the poet meant them is another matter.  In the use of much Persian poetry, often learned as aphoristic couplets, it was quite usual, as it still is for Western readers of famous English poems, that a few salient verses of the whole poem might be memorized rather than the complete poem.  Particularly this is the nature of the form known as ghazal; several couplets make up the ghazal, but each set or shermay be taken as a separate thought to ponder without thematic connection or unity with the others.  Furthermore, having read several poetic translations of Iqbal’s and Ghalib’s poetry, I have found it surprising how vastly different representations of the same poem can be.  In Urdu or in Persian, the degree of difficulty of very compact verses made precise translation nearly impossible. Verses can be quite abstract, with sometimes intricate play of arcane or archaic diction meant to be interpreted with various meanings.[9]  Regarding such difficulties, consider the following Ghazal of Iqbal, a translation of the verses of the ghazal from which, I believe, Adiga’s lines about beauty and freedom arise:

Slavery—exile from the love of beauty:

Beauty—whatever free men reckon so;

Trust no slave’s eyes, clear sight and liberty

Go hand in hand.  His own resolves bestow

The empire of To-day on him who fishes

To-morrow’s pearl up from Time’s undertow.[10]

Balram’s earliest introduction to Iqbal’s verses renders the idea about slavery and beauty as follows:

“Iqbal who is one of the four best poets in the world—the others being Rumi, Mirza Ghalib, and a fourth fellow, also a Muslim, whose name I’ve forgotten—has written a poem where he says this about slaves:

They remain slaves because they can’t see what is beautiful in this world.

That’s the truest thing anyone ever said.

A great poet, this fellow Iqbal—even if he was a Muslim.”  (p. 34-35)

Comparing Iqbal’s ghazal verses, as translated in lines 1-2, (above p. 9) with the coherent line rendition (in italics) of the couplet Balram had learned from translation, one can see the freedom of interpretation that is needed to express that poetic idea from the original Urdu verses.  It is a cliché of criticism of translated poetry that much of the poetry gets lost—the meter and music, and often content through approximating diction. Urdu Indian or the Classical Persian poets presents a formidable challenge to translators, which difficulty the example above illustrates.

Closing his mention of Iqbal’s verses (quoted above) which impressed him, Balram engages the Premier in a snide aside about Iqbal’s greatness, “even though he was a Muslim.”  Following that remark, Balram further differentiates the character of those Muslims he finds in his present world from that of the wise poets he admires.  And he even wants the Premier to offer his opinion of “these people,” echoing his former master Ashok’s derogatory phrase toward Balram, “You people”:

“(By the way, Mr. Premier: Have you notice that all four of the greatest poets in the world are Muslim?  And yet all the Muslims you meet are illiterate or covered from head to toe in black burkas or looking for buildings to blow up?  It’s a puzzle isn’t it?  If you ever figure these people out, send me an e-mail.)” (p.35)

Purblind still, Balram comes off as quite barmy, fluctuating between the specific and sublime and generalized fallacies.  Here again he shows his slack understanding, his inability to grasp the contrasts that he might understand more reasonably if he read further the life and works of Iqbal, as well as the history of Hindu-Muslim India.  Though some of the esthetic beauty of poetic rhetoric might have enchanted Balram if he truly devoted himself to reading Rumi, Ghalib, and Iqbal, as well as the fourth whether it be Attar, Hafiz, Saadi, or Sanai, it appears the major influence of the poetry for Balram was through a personal identification in relevant ideas that rang true.  Iqbal, though he had moments of lyrical flourishes and strove for beautiful imagery, in the manner of Rumi who was a model for beatific verse, as the latter-day Indian Urdu and Persian poet, he practiced a poetry of philosophical flights of thinking.  Furthermore, he expressed political and philosophical ideas even in the poetic styles, such as ghazals, that were normally reserved for expressions of love and sensuality.

G) The Devils’ Defiance

At this point, and in conclusion of this investigation of the Muslim motif, I would like to consider the longest allusion to Iqbal’s poetry that Balram relates, by which I might explicate the fascination the Indian poet’s work had on him.  The following focuses on Balram’s identification with Iqbal’s Devil:

“Now Iqbal … has written this remarkable poem in which he imagines that he is the Devil, standing up for his rights at a moment when God tries to bully him.  The Devil, according to the Muslims, was once God’s sidekick, until he fought with him and went freelance, and ever since, there has been a war of brains between God and the Devil.  This is what Iqbal writes about.  The exact words of the poem I can’t remember, but it goes something like this.

God says: I am powerful.  I am huge.  Become my servant again.

Devil says: Ha!

When I remember Iqbal’s Devil, as I do often, lying here under my chandelier, I think of a little black figure in a wet khaki uniform who is climbing up the entranceway to a black fort.

There he stands now, one foot on the ramparts of the Black Fort, surrounded by a group of amazed monkeys.

Up in the blue skies, God spreads His palm over the plains below, showing this little man Laxmangarh, and its little tributary of the Ganga, and all that lies beyond: a million such villages, billion such people.  And God asks this little man:

Isn’t it all wonderful? Isn’t it all grand?  Aren’t you grateful to be my servant?  

And I see this small black man in the wet khaki uniform start to shake, as if he had gone mad with anger, before delivering to the Almighty a gesture of thanks for having created the world this particular way, instead of all the other ways it could have been created.

I see the little man in the khaki uniform spitting at God again and again, as I watch the black blades of the midget fan slice the light from the chandelier again and again.” (p.74-75)

This passage contains the sort of surprise that was one of the rhetorical figures found in much Persian poetry: in a place of mysterious beauty as the Black Fort was once upon a time for Balram, anger and confused emotions give rise to a gesture that is the antithesis of “thanks to the Almighty”; instead, the little devil offers a gesture of utter defiance.  Manichean Balram, named after the sidekick of Krishna, will not be fooled into seeing the Darkness called Light.  His meditation and contemplation beneath the whirling lights set the image in his heart.

Here, through Iqbal, another door to self is opened.  In conceiving the imagery in his allusion, Balram has woven a reprise of his visit to the Black Fort that he had experienced a few years ago, prior to leaving Dhanbad.  Up until the time he returned with Ashok to Laxmangarh, Balram had been scared away in his boyhood attempts to gain full appreciation of the Black Fort and its magical environment.  The attraction had been there, but his entrance into the fort had been forbidden.  Before he entered the doorway, he had been chased off in fear at some spectral shape, in reality just a cow.  At an early age his witch-like Granny Kusum had instilled in the boy’s psyche a horror of entering the Black Fort; she told Balram he was a coward and would die of fright for a monstrous lizard guarded the fort. (p.34)  Kusum had planted this apotropaic symbol in her grandson’s heart.  Under this spell, thereafter, he always lost nerve to enter the fort.  But, at last, at age twenty-four, he succeeded in breaking the neurosis and entered the fort’s inner sanctum:

“I swam through the pond, walked up the hill, went in the doorway and entered the Black Fort for the first time.  There wasn’t much around—just some broken walls and bunch of frightened monkeys watching me from a distance. Putting my foot on the wall, I looked down on the village from there.  My little Laxmangarh.  I saw the temple tower, the market, the glistening line of sewage, the landlords’ mansions—and my own house, with that dark little cloud outside—the water buffalo.  It looked like the most beautiful sight on earth.

I leaned out from the edge of the fort in the direction of my village—and then I did something too disgusting to describe to you.

Well, actually, I spat.  Again and again.  And then whistling and humming, I went back down the hill.

Eight months later I slit Mr. Ashok’s throat.”(p.35-36)

Beauty, disgust, murder—sensitive and lyrical appeals to the romantic senses give way to the thuggish, visceral and horrific.  Such antithesis is the surprise in literary art.  What it means to live like a man is a mystery.

H) Breaking Bounds

Mirza Ghalib of Agra, Ghalib (“victorious”) being the nom de plume of Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan, like Iqbal, was an Indian Urdu (and Persian) poet who espoused a unity of Islamic virtues,  More intimately personal than Iqbal, Ghalib’s verse lies beyond any concern for nationalism.  A poetic philosophy outside politics charged his verse, though he made striking comments about the radical changes in civilization because of the British imperialistic dominance.  In his day in the early 19^th century, when Ghalib lived in Delhi, what had been the Classical tradition in the long line from Rumi through Hafiz was coming to its end, with Ghalib and his era’s poets considered the last of the best.  Classical poets could no longer depend on prosperous stipends of patrons nor on adequate compensation for their published verse.  Ghalib struggled to make ends meet, and, Muslim though he was, he squandered much of money on drinking.  The Moghul court survived and he was employed by the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, but the British invaders had set their stamp on the trends in India, brutally quashing resistance as in the Revolt of 1857 when 27,000 Indians were hanged in Delhi.  The impending chaos must have impressed Ghalib and despair of a better age to come is emphasized in many of his verses:

When I look out, I see no hope for change.

I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.

I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.

Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.[11]

The sadness and depression in Ghalib’s verse from a past age would be relevant to the state of affairs in India’s modern culture infected by another wave of Western invasion through electronic engineering.  Balram is doing his best to adopt the new technologies in his life, but, as with Ghalib, a lonely night fire inhabits his heart in his shadow world.  A complete ghazal follows about the fading distant frontiers for the stranger’s refuge:

Ghazal 19

With every step I took, my goal seemed farther away.

I ran my fastest, but the desert ran faster.

That lonely night fire inhabited my heart

And my shadow drifted from me in a thin cloud of smoke.

Because my feet were blistered in the desert

Of my madness, my wake shone like a chain of [ruby] pearls.

Because of you the goblet had a thousand faces;

Because of me it was mirrored in a single eye.

Fire runs from my burning eyes, Asad!

I light up the soil and dead leaves in the garden.[12]

Balram might have enjoyed the following with its reference to a caged bird (two couplets from Ghazal 16):

Now I am behind bars, go ahead, tell me the story—

that nest the lightning shriveled last night—why do you think it was mine?

What I’m living through now could smash my house to pieces:

My friend, with you on earth I don’t need enemies in the clouds.[13]

Whatever poetic thoughts, like those illustrated, Balram might have found relevant to and sympathetic with his own circumstances, could they not have been a salve to his darkened soul?  Just to know another person in the world had suffered as he.  In this final example from Ghalib, one can perhaps sense Balram’s yearning to tell his story, to face himself, see himself for who he is, and to become an intrinsic part of the whole:

He has no image:  outside, everywhere, so distinctly

himself that even a mirror couldn’t reflect him.

Held behind lips, lament burdens the heart; the drop

held to itself fails the river and is sucked into dust.

If you live aloof in the whole world’s story,

the plot of your life drones on, a mere romance.

Either one enters the drift, part and whole as one,

or life’s a mere game:  Be, or be lost.[14]

The verses illustrate the great Ghalib in the India of his day, a pensioned poet but never prosperous nor a favorite of the Emperor’s court.  He persisted in writing about the importance of love, not a specific love, a love for someone, but of the morality of love in the face of chaos.  Did Balram understand such love; did he have love in his being?  He said he loved Ashok, but he murdered him.  Did he love his nephew Dharam?  Conditionally, perhaps.  As he says, Dharam is not going to give him up at present: “Little blackmailing thug. He’s going to keep quiet so long as I keep feeding him.” (p.271)  Yet, at a point when he could have gotten away alone, Balram did not give Dharam up; he did take him with him to share his new life.

I) Divine Insight

In the decision-making about the nephew Dahram, sent to him in difficult circumstances —whether to abandon him or to take him under his wing—there was one crisis Balram solved based on an emotional and, one might say, spiritual impulse.  No other insights seem to arise from the divine moment in the actions of Balram as much as this one.  It happened when he was considering his getaway after murdering Ashok.  He asked himself: “Should I go back to get Dharam?” (p.246)   If Balram went back to the apartments, the police might catch him and the cash in the bag would have been stolen for naught.  However, if Dharam were caught, he would be the sport of those in the poorhouse or prison.  Here is the moment of decision:

“I squatted on the floor of the [railway] station, pressed down by indecision.  There was a squealing noise to my left.  A plastic bucket was tumbling about, as if it were alive: then a grinning black face popped out of the bucket.  A little creature, a baby boy.  A homeless man and woman, covered in filth, sat on either side of the bucket, gazing blankly into the distance.  Between the fatigued parents, this little thing was having the time of his life, playing with the water and splashing it on passersby.  ‘Don’t do it little boy,’ I said.  He splashed more water, squealing with pleasure each time he hit me.  I raised my hand.  He ducked back into his bucket and kept thrashing from the inside.

I reached into my pockets, searched for a rupee coin, checked to make sure it wasn’t a two-rupee coin, and rolled it towards the bucket.

Then I sighed, and got up, and cursed myself, and walked out of the station.

Your lucky day, Dharam.”(p.247)

This is Balram’s recognition that he need not act like Ashok and kick the child splashing his shoes.  He sees himself in the child, innocent and happy in the midst of filth and deprivation.  In the midst of his mercenary aims, Balram is stopped in his tracks and responds to the child with no idea of gain.  It is a moment of virtue.  But he has also taken into himself some of Ashok’s soul.  The beggar child agitates Balram’s soul, pulling the best senses about humanistic survival out of him.  Nevertheless, Balram halves his charitable offering, just as Pinky Madam, the Mongoose and others had all his life.  The point is: if this little chap can squeal with pleasure in his utter indigence, then Balram has half a chance to carry his nephew and help him in their striving for a better life.  Balram risked much to rescue Dharam.  Emotion and heart to join the struggle were driving this moment, not selfish egoism.  Mirza Ghalib would have encouraged this motivation in a God-forsaken entropic world.  Balram’s moment of compassion is a telling anecdote as poetically worthy as any recounted by the renowned Persian poets.

As I have said, it is pure conjecture on my part what it was that enchanted Balram in the Muslim Persian poets, other than in Iqbal, whom he says he has read and knows by heart.  Nevertheless, if poetry can save lives or direct one’s life in a meaningful direction, perhaps it was Ghalib who had good advice for struggling, gravely distressed, desperate souls.  Aijaz Ahmad in his introduction to the Ghazals of Ghalib, from which several of the verse illustrations above are taken, has this to say about the poet’s expectations:

“He [Ghalib] expects that you will read these couplets as impressions of a man who sought wholeness at a time when wholeness was difficult—as it always is, but more so.  Also a man who needed love, knew it, knew its failures, yet sought for it always—in himself, and in his loveless times.  Ghalib was a man who wrote poetry because poetry was necessary, the times were inauspicious and poetry alone had the power to save what could be saved in a portrait of a man that was fast disappearing.  Ghalib’s poetry is a work of restoration on that portrait.” (p. xxv)

J) “There was a deep hole, but no bucket and no rope.” [From “A Story Shams Told” by Rumi][15]

If Balram had read about Rumi’s life, he would have learned about his mentor Shams-i-Tabriz, a wandering stranger who taught Rumi the wisdom of his life.  It was not a formal teacher from whom Rumi learned his philosophy but a ragged beggar he happened upon.  Shams was like a phantom Rumi took for God on earth.  In the strange way Balram was awakened by Iqbal’s poetry read by the old Muslim bookseller in the slum of Old Delhi, so Rumi was awakened, his consciousness opened to seeing life with new eyes.   Balram’s education and mind-opening experiences also came from strangers he happened upon:  the old hookah-smoking man who taught him car engines and driving; especially the black-faced Muslim bookseller with the white wisp of beard near the Red Fort market.

Rumi’s powerful poetry of self-consciousness must have had a significant effect on Balram’s self-awareness:

It’s the same with anything.

You don’t understand until you are

what you’re trying to understand.

Listen to what anyone says

As though it were the last words

Of a father to a son.[16]

Jalal ud-Din Rumi (1207-1273) was an original listener, the first poet in Balram’s list, and the earliest in the Classical poetic tradition named by him.  From Rumi’s works I will apply the same treatment of conjecture to consider what might have been significant for the sake of Balram’s survival and edification.  Rumi was a Persian by birth and later settled as a dweller in the South central Turkish town of Konya (Roman Iconium).  Rum was the Arabic term for Roman Byzantium from which he got his nickname.  He was famous as the Sufi mystical poet of a whirling Dervish school.  His poetry is beatific, full of love and longing, of the wonder of stars and the night, of turning wheels, and of beautiful dreams.  The idea of a union with God was for Rumi what we might call the ecstatic losing of oneself, forgetting the ego and libido, the escape from mundane rationality.  Balram wanted escape from the mundane, from the hum-drum, and for a breakthrough into a new perspective.  Rumi would have fit the bill.  For example:

Friends, last night I carefully watched my love

sleeping by a spring encircled with eglantine.

The houris of paradise stood around him,

their hands cupped together

between a tulip field and jasmine.

…

From the beginning of this dream, I told myself

go slowly, wait

for the break into consciousness.  Don’t breathe.[17]

Finally, another piece by Rumi on night and sleep, with imagery from a hilltop view upon the lower land and the transformation of animals into men, perhaps reminiscent of Laxmangarh and the spirits of the Black Fort:

Night and Sleep

At the time of night-prayer, as the sun slides down,

The route the senses walk on closes, the route to the invisible opens.

The angel of sleep then gathers and drives along the spirits;

just as the mountain keeper gathers his sheep on a slope.

And what amazing sights he offers to the descending sheep!

Cities with sparkling streets, hyacinth gardens, emerald pastures!

The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men,

Men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal.

I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home; it no longer remembers where it lives, and loses its fatigue.

It carries around in life so many griefs and loads

And trembles under their weight; they’re gone [in sleep]; it is all well.[18]

The problem of losing the self is Balram’s problem, everyone’s problem.  The world of the entrepreneur is a material world of gain.  Being drawn into the selfish desires for gain is the opposite of losing the self, the “I.”  Rumi constantly urges the loss of self, into which vein of philosophical wisdom both Ghalib and Iqbal insinuated themselves, though perhaps less successfully because of the exigencies of civilization’s trends.  Through meditation, through Zen exercises, through yoga, through hypnosis, and many divinational practices, people the world over attempt to escape the certainties of rational, logical awareness.  Through intuitive practices, we begin to learn how music, poetry and painting can improve our awareness and knowledge. Through the arts we can come to grips with an awareness of self.  For Balram, the Persian poets are like diviners, poetic seers, through whom he could intuit ideas clearer than those of his rational mind from the reports of modern media. They are like the Magi of Persian Zoroastrianism who were a priestly class, possessed of powerful visions and insights.[19]  The enchantment of the poets allowed Balram to live outside the closed coops of fruitless existence.  Comfort also comes to Balram in escape from the mundane, as he loses himself in the transcendent vision and sensual dreams of Rumi.  The awareness of grief and sinful baggage allows him to own up to his past.  Who doesn’t wish to sleep and dream in the darkness? The twirling chandelier lights and Balram’s laughter are the echoes of cycling nighttime stars and the ecstatic escape one might also experience through Rumi’s magical verse.

K) The forgotten fourth: Hafiz, Saadi, Sanai—who can it be?

Finally, I think it’s only fair—who, though, really gives a fig for fairness?—that I conjecture who the fourth forgotten Muslim Persian poet was.  Crazy, you say!  Balram doesn’t show he remembers even Iqbal’s words—in translation, that is—he just gives a rough estimate, which is after all what any translation could be of a Persian poet’s original words.   My guess is—and here you might well say, “What a fucking joke!—he has forgotten Hafez or Hafiz (1320-1389), whose very name means “The Rememberer,” “he who has memorized the Qur’an.” (Could this be Adiga’s personal secret joke?)  Like Balram, Hafiz was, in the words of translator Coleman Barks, “a shape-shifter,” one in whom “the conventional divisions of awareness do not apply.” “Hafiz says, ‘How can you walk the true path unless you step out of your own nature?’  This is the paradox he embodied.”[20]   Furthermore, the strait-laced Iqbal, though he once had favored Hafiz’s verse, eventually found him a poor model—drunken, hedonistic, unpredictable–of the morality for turning Muslims toward the true path of Allah.  Since Balram, the White Tiger, never seemed to have a true friend, consider the following short poems of Hafiz:

Each “friend” turned out to be an enemy,

Corruption rotted all their “purity”;

They say the night is pregnant with new times,

But since there are no men here, how can that be?

Desire’s destroyed my life; what gifts have I

Been given by the blindly turning sky?

And, such is my luck, everyone I said

“Dear Friend” to loathed me by and by.[21]

Hafiz, with his merciless squibs and acute criticism of human failings, might have warned Balram about the reality of life just beyond the cockpit of the Rooster Coop. Perhaps Balram didn’t want to remember the Rememberer and his cutting diatribes against human dishonesty and hypocrisy.

Most of you who know some Persian poets might think my choice of Hafiz of Shiraz is really too easy, too important, not to remember.  Taunting perhaps, Adiga is having fun with his character and with his audience. However, the puzzle of the fourth poet may be solved yet.  Balram may have at some point in his youth favored Saadi, or Sa ‘di, the short name he goes by, but whose full name is extremely long and quite forgettable; namely Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī.  Would that have been the name to boggle Balram’s memory?  Consider the following short poem and replace Ashok and Pinky Madam for the names Azra and Laila. Finally, Balram might write in tears before his life is done:

This I write, mix ink with tears,

and have written of grief before, but never so grievously,

to tell Azra Vaquim’s pain,

to tell Laila Majnun’s plight,

to tell you my own

unfinished story.

Take it.  Seek no excuse.

How sweetly you will sing what I so sadly write.[22]

In case you think me totally balrammy from this investigation, this will do for now. However, as Adiga set me on the trail to things forgotten, arts that can enchant a magic-starved existence, I must read more poetry from the Persian poets to find other voices of enlightenment and self-discovery that may pertain to Balram’s plight.  The poets must be legion and it will take a lifetime to cover them.  Many aesthetes believe poetry can save lives.  If Balram remains unrepentant for his crimes, his act of soul restoration may benefit from taking poetry to heart.  Some readers who found The White Tiger too cynical and morbid for appreciation as high art and saw Balram as a despicable hero may still prefer that he punish himself by being hooked on poetry of pain and remorse.  I think sympathy for him is better, more humane, and the hope that he will find a morality that will help his ward and the next generation to flourish without having to peck, claw, or murder their way out of the Rooster Coop.

David Gilmour, October 2012.

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[1] Iqbal and his Poems (A Reappraisal) by K. N. Sud with aforeward by Omar Abou Riche, Poet Laureate of India (Delhi: Sterling Publishers, Ltd, 1969), p. 134.

[2] Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 567. 

[3] From “Four Poems on the Night” translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, in World Poetry: an Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Katherine Washburn, John Major, and Clifton Fadiman (gen. ed.) (New York:  QPBC, 1998), p. 478.

[4] In Indo-European linguistic etymology, a thug is “one who goes undercover”: *steg is the Proto-Indo-European root word, from which Sanskrit sthagati, “he covers,” shows an early formation of the term “thug.”  (See in Appendix of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, in which Pokorny’s Proto-Indo-European roots have become a prized section for amateur and professional etymologists, p. 1543.)

[5] From “Prelude” of The Mysteries of Selflessness: a Philosophical Poem, by the late Sir Muhammad Iqbal, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Arthur J. Arberry (London: John Murray Publ., (1^st ed.) 1953) p.5, vv. 1-17.

[6] Translated by Freeland Abbott, in the Foreward by Rafiq Zakariah of Muhammad Iqbal: Shikwa and Jawab-i-Shikwa: Complaint and Answer: Iqbal’s Dialog with Allah, translated from the Urdu, with an introduction, by Khwant Singh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 12.

[7] Ibid., translated by Allah Allah, p. 12.

[8] Ibid., translated by K. Singh, p. 44

[9] A very thoughtful introduction to the style and content of the ghazal in Mirza Ghalib’s poetry can be found in Ghazals of Ghalib: Versions from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1971), p. vii-xxviii.  He employs several translations from Western poets (Adrienne Rich, M.S. Merwin, William Stafford, et al.) who based their verses on a quite strict literal translation from the Urdu by Aijaz Ahmad.  I have used some of these passages of couplets as examples of Ghalib’s verse and thought.

[10]Poems from Iqbal, translated by V. G. Kiernan (London: John Murray, 1955), p. 30.

[11] The Lightning Should Have Fallen on Ghalib: Selected Poems of Ghalib, Translated from the Urdu by Robert Bly and Sunlil Dutta (Hopewell, New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1999), from “My Spiritual State,” p. 13.

[12] Translated by Mark Strand, in Aijaz Ahmad’s Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 93.

[13] Translated by Adrienne Rich, Ghazals of Ghalib, p. 83.

[14]Translated by William Stafford, Ghazals of Ghalib, from Ghazal 9, p. 47.

[15] The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, translations from the poems of Sanai, Attar, Rumi, Saadi and Hafiz by Coleman Barks ( New Lebanon, NY: Omega Publications, 1993), p. 87.

[16] From “Dying,” by Rumi in The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia, vv. 13-15, p. 89.

[17] From “Caring for My Lover,” tr. by Willis Barnstone and Reza Baraheni. This and the following verses are quoted from World Poetry: an Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, edited by Katherine Washburn, John Major, and Clifton Fadiman (gen. ed.)(New York:  QPBC, 1998) p. 478.

[18] From “Night and Sleep,” tr. Robert Bly in World Poetry, p. 479.

[19] Magus is old Persian from Proto-Indo-European *magh- meaning “having ability or power.”  Iqbal used the term Magian to refer to Persian religious priests and poets.  The magician or mage is one who has special powers.  (See American Heritage Dictionary (3^rd ed.), p. 1527)

[20] Quotes from The Hand of Poetry, p. 145-147

[21] Translated by Dick Davis, World Poetry, p. 482.

[22] Translated by Basil Bunting, World Poetry, p. 480.

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