Quest for Identity: A Study of Self-Animalisation in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This paper will look at the technique of animalisation in Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008), where the animal, the white tiger, is not just a tiger in a cage but a trope for the ‘tiger-ness’ of the ‘ever-so-ready to pounce’ attitude of the young Indian. The novel shows the predicament of the Indian youth belonging to the lower strata of society who find themselves trapped just like a tiger in his cage. As will be shown, the white tiger in Adiga’s novel has been variously used to symbolize the ideas of individuality, freedom, aggression, survival and hypermasculinity. Through the discourse of animality, this paper will contend that for the protagonist, Balram, animalising or bestializing himself as a white tiger becomes an important meaning-making exercise to profess his identity and come to terms with his immediate exploitative reality, especially in the context of the rising class conflict and deteriorating socio-economic conditions in the Indian scenario. The novel is replete with instances of animalisation and bestialisation. This paper attempts to find out why does Balram bestialise himself as the white tiger and how does such an exercise help him? It is an undertaking in the field of cultural anthropology and it will border the theoretical concepts of the area of Human-animal studies.