Apu’s World

I haven’t yet read Aravind Adiga’s ‘The White Tiger’, but reading this story, ‘The Elephant’ in this issue of the New Yorker, is making me somewhat sceptical. It does seem to be the kind of writing meant to “present” India to a Western audience and I think fiction that sets out to “explain” or “preach” loses something. 

In the very first page of the story, we have a man whose “face was smeared with sandalwood” and “the fat elephant god, Ganapati.” Now, people don’t ’smear’ their faces with sandalwood, they apply a sandalwood mark or tika, and calling Ganesha ‘the fat elephant god’ sounds quite ridiculous. Later on, we have the rickshaw puller Chenayya telling a journalist, ‘Don’t patronise me’. Is that even an expression used in any Indian language? 

One can’t help thinking (on the basis of this very limited evidence) that Aravind Adiga knows little about the people he writes about. There has been a lot of debate about authenticity, and though I don’t believe that you need to be a slum dweller to write about the poor, somehow there is very little empathy for the character, especially towards the end. I got the sense that he wanted to ‘write about poor people’ rather than ‘a’ person and his/her story. Those who’ve read The White Tiger, what do you think? 

apu The Literary life