The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga unveils the real "New India": corrupt, impenetrable and darkly comic

Media coverage of recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai brought the divide between elite and ordinary Indians into sharp relief. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga makes the most of this inequity. Written by an Indian-born journalist, the novel reveals a hard and oppressive nation that's far removed from the patchouli-scented image sold to the West in Bollywood epics and mushy self-help books.

Adiga describes the rise to power of Balram Halwai, a self-described "entrepreneur" whose past holds a dark secret. Born into a servant class, Balram's success owes nothing to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any established business protocols. Instead, his mantra is an American phrase picked up from his ex-master's ex-wife: What a fucking joke. It's the 21st century Indian equivalent of Catch-22—a battle cry in a world so convoluted that right action alone is pointless. Armed with this phrase, and the wisdom of his favorite poets ("Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib and a fourth fellow whose name I forget"), Balram wages capitalist war on India's technocracy.

Balram tells his story in the form of a rambling letter to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Written in advance of a fact-finding mission to the city of Bangalore (a technological center similar to California's Silicon Valley), Balram's letter advises the Premier to ignore the sanitized vision of Indian enterprise that will be served up by his official escorts. As a cautionary tale (or is it an optimistic guide?), Balram offers his own version of the modern entrepreneur: an ambivalent "thinking man" who "has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time."

The description also describes Adiga's prose. Refreshingly nonjudgmental, the author allows Balram wide berth as he plots his rise from servitude. Of the master whom he will eventually murder, Balram muses: "He was so powerless, so lost, my heart just had to melt...I forgave him entirely." Compassionate yet ruthless, Balram remains likable, human and downright hilarious. "When you get here," he tells the premier, "you'll be told we Indians invented everything from the Internet to hard-boiled eggs to spaceships before the British stole it all from us."

Adiga doesn't offer his protagonist any real redemption, and that's refreshing, too. Balram's only salvation is that he's no longer a servant, the latter being a fate literally bred into India's working classes. Like roosters in a coop, "They see the organs of their brothers lying around them. They know they are next. Yet they do not rebel." Rightly or wrongly, Balram succeeds because he can break these bonds, if only temporarily, and commit the unspeakable.

In a sense, Adiga's character is the opposite of Salman Rushdie's Moraes Zogoiby, an equally humorous character who, in the The Moor's Last Sigh, represents the rapidly aging decline of his family—and India's—merchant line. Balram is the prototype for a new kind of Asian businessman who takes his orders not from the West, but from an internal compass that may or may not hinge on a recognizable moral locus.

Ultimately, it's poetry that provides Balram the freedom to act, albeit amorally. He cites Iqbel, but the poet's exact words elude him—"God says: I am powerful. I am huge. Become my servant again. Devil says: Ha!" More than cold-blooded murder, Balram's final act is political—one system must die in order for another to live. Both systems are equally corrupt, but the new one contains at least a glimmer of opportunity.

Rather than an exoticized version of America, The White Tiger shows us contemporary India with all its unique paradoxes and biases. Its characters defiantly refuse to fit Western notions of "hero" or "villain." Though this may prove frustrating to some readers, it's a point that Adiga is determined to make. After all, says Balram, "That is the difference between this India and that India: the choice."