Name:- Khamal Krishna R
Roll No:- 14
Course:- M.A Sem-4
Paper No:- 13 The New Literature
Assignment Topic:- Portrayal
of youth of modern Indian Middle class
in reference of One Night @call center and White Tiger
Email id:- krishnakhamal01@gmail.com
Submitted
to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar
University
Portrayal of youth of modern
Indian Middle class in reference of One Night @call center and White
Tiger
One Night@ The Call Center
Chetan Bhagat is one of the great
Indian writers. Chetan Bhagat in his books always writes about the young India.
In his books he always writes about the problem in Indian society. Chetan
Bhagat also who is a best seller of his books.
Bhagat is also columnist for newspaper such as
“The Times of India” and “Dainik Bhaskar”, where he writes about the youth
career development and current affairs. “The New York” times called him as “The
biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history”.
Time magazine named him amongst
the 100 most influential people in the world and fast company, U. S. A. listed
him as one of the world’s 100 most creative people in business. In the novels
he uses very simple language so that reader can easily understand and prefers
to read more.
In this both novels portray the
Indian Middle class youth.
These novels dramatize the anxieties that many Indians
are feeling over the redefinition of middle-class social structures and gender
norms in the context of globalization by depicting female characters in
particular as a metaphor for social change. As the said changes are relatively
recent and ongoing, limited scholarly attention has been paid to the issue.
Contemporary middle-class Indian anxieties around globalization revolve around widespread
perceptions of growing Westernization among youth and young adults and the
threat of corruption these pose. Increasingly, major corporations in developed
countries have established BPO divisions in developing countries, enabled by
advancements in information and communication technologies. India is the major
hub of such operations, a phenomenon which has been aided by the liberalization
of the economy since 1991: "To many, the call center has become the symbol
of India's rapidly globalizing economy. While traditional India sleeps, a
dynamic population of highly skilled, articulate professionals works through
the night, functioning on U.S. time under made-up American aliases. They feign
familiarity with a culture and climate they've never experienced, earn salaries
that their elders couldn't have imagined (but still a fraction of what an
American would make), and enjoy a lifestyle that's a cocktail of premature affluence
and ersatz Westernization" (Tharoor 78). (r) Bhagat's One Night is narrated by
Shyam, one of a group of colleagues who work the night shift at Connexions, a
call centre in the Delhi IT suburb Gurgaon. The narrative unfolds over the course
of one night at work using flashbacks to give the background stories of the protagonists
.Shyam is still in love with his ex-girlfriend and co-worker Priyanka , who has
recently become engaged to a rich man based in the United States and is upset
that his failure to gain a promotion at work has affected his chances of
winning Priyanka back. Priyanka herself has a strained relationship with her
mother who simply wants her to find a good husband and settle down. Another
protagonist, Vroom, is frustrated with the mundane nature of his work at the
call centre, but is angrier with himself for becoming reliant upon the good
salary he earns there as he feels he is compromising his ideals. Radhika is a
young married woman with an over-demanding mother- in-law and an unappreciative
husband, whom she discovers is cheating on her. Esha is an model who moved to
Delhi from Chandigarh and has been sexually exploited in her attempts to find
modelling work. As well as these central characters, Bakshi , the
despicable and exploitative boss, and Military Uncle, a fifty-something retiree
who works at Connexions to supplement his pension, also feature. During the
night in question, technical faults prevent the protagonists from taking calls
thus prompting a middle-of-the-night excursion which nearly ends in disaster.
Vroom, driving drunk, almost crashes into a pit at a construction site. As the
group are teetering on the edge of the pit, they receive a phone call from God.
God says he will save them from certain death if they promise to strive for
what they really want in life, not succumb to the exploitative demands of
others. This encounter encourages all of the characters to reassess the
directions their lives are taking, and to implement drastic changes.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga is
a darkly humorous social commentary on modern India. In his novel, Adiga
has portrayed the real picture of common India man who was passing his life as
other human beings in India but creating a different character of Balram Adiga
shows that if a person will do something great he or she will definitely
achieve his/ her goal in their lives. Adiga has focused on the changing trends,
mindsets, value systems in post globalization Indian society. Adiga try to
break the mould of stereotypical portrayal of rural life.
Here,
Adiga wants to show that poor people never go beyond their constructed ideas of
poverty. They are poor because they never go beyond the mind set or the shackle
of poverty. Balram has the different thinking. He has different mindset. His
ideas are new that’s why he became entrepreneur and he has created his own
world and path where he can live as a master and comes out poverty.
The White Tiger: Cultural
& Social Points of Views
In White Tiger Adiga’s criticize the
cultural point of view like the Village vs. City , The Landlords
Corruption, Political dogma, The concept true Indianness, Rooster coop of
Indian society, American Dream, the Indian caste system.“In the old days
there were 1,000 castes...in India. These days, there are just two castes: Men
with Big Bellies and men with small Bellies.”
The White Tiger is the discussion of the India caste
system. The caste system in India is a social system that divides the
Indian population into higher and lower
social classes. Although said to be disappearing in urban India, the caste
system still remains in rural India. A person is born into a caste, and the
caste one belongs in determines his or her occupation. Balram gives his own
breakdown of the caste system in India, describing that it was “……clean,
well-kept orderly zoo”. But no longer because that caste system broke down, and
powerful with the big bellies took over anything they could and how there are
only two castes in India the haves and the have nots. Balram was born into the
Halwai caste, meaning “sweet-maker”, and was the son of a rickshaw puller- not
a sweet maker, because someone with power stole his destiny of being a
sweet-maker from him.
Adiga brings awareness to the
corrupt India caste system by having Balram work the country’s system to get
what he wants and to become an entrepreneur by any means necessary, including
murdering his boss. Balram educates the Chinese Premier throughout his letters
about the corruption and immoral ways of India’s caste system and its economic
gap. Although it may seem that Balram’s position in society will forever remain
the same, he manages to go from a sweet shop worker, to a personal driver for a
rich man, and finally to an owner of a small business.
Balram’s quest to becoming an
entrepreneur shows the oppression of the lower caste system and the superiority
of the upper caste. He tells the story of how India still has a caste system
and political and economic corruption is still present. Balram shows the country
of India in which a person high on the caste system can bribe people such as
police officers with money to cover up murders, sabotage political opponents by
rigging votes and money, and have privileges such as shopping in a mall
specifically for those of high social and economic importance. He also shoes
the side of India in which those who are born into poverty and low castes
may forever remain there and so will their children. Balram is a rare
exception, as he experiences both sides of the caste system and manages to move
up the social ladder.
Aravind Adiga is one of the very few
modern Indian novelists who took the present day challenges against the
economic exploitation and the political deprivation, the social marginalization
and the spiritual subjugation of the poor that is taking place in India behind
the screen of economic, infrastructural, political and technological development.In
an interview with Nick DiMartino (2014),Adiga expressed his motivation behind
writing his novel, The White Tiger“I wanted to depict someone from India's
underclass which is perhaps 400 million strong
—and which has largely missed out on
the economic boom, and which remains invisible in most films and books coming
out of India” (p.1). Addressing the socio economic problems to develop India from
inside is both a strength and a tradition of India as a nation and Adiga, with such
an attitude, has taken a twenty first century step to bring to light the tragic
deprivation of both the rural and urban poor societies against the propagandist
images of a happy and successful modern India. To achieve that, first thing he
did is to convince the readers that there are two India’s: “two countries in
one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness” and this is also true even in
the urban settings which should have been away from the spell of the
traditional socio
-cultural hegemony of the dominating
middle class over the downtrodden
(Adiga, 2008, p. 10). In his email to the Chinese
Premier, Balram Halwai, the
protagonist of the novel , explained, “Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries
two India’s. The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi”(p. 150)
The Darkness : Balram talks about
the Darkness of India by saying that India is two countries in one An
India of Light An India of Darkness “I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the
country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the
middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water
buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those
who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your
Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India
of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map
of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the
black river.”
And right from this it comes recurrently in the novel. But
mainly Balram tells about the ‘India of Darkness”. He is one of those who
emerged from the India of Darkness and then enters into India of Light. At the
time of writing the letter to Chinese Premier, Balram is in India of Light; but
he recalls all his experiences of India of Darkness. In fact in the whole
novel, Balram’s deep anger for the ‘India of Darkness’ is in center. There are
two ‘Indias’ living in one India. The concern of author is to show and to
clarify the difference between these both images if India. Because the world
and even most of the people of India can only see the shining India, the ‘India
of Light’, but then what about the other India ? The other, dark India, which
is still backward with stale ideas and traditions, which is like dung-hill,
full of (invisible) garbage of superstition, poverty, unemployment, crimes,
corruptions and many other such dirt.
Poor and rich divide in
Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger
India has always been land where
extreme of wealth and poverty have existed side by side .Ancient inequalities
still exists in our Indian, and throughout the novel we see that difference
between Poor and rich through the perspective of Balram Halwai.
Adige has presented the two opposite
side of India: India: of Darkness & Light, in which Poor people represented
Dark side of India while Rich people represents light side of Indian. But this
metaphor “goes in changing its meaning with different situation. Light &
darkness go “.
In India two things are increasing
together and it is increasing speedily and that is poverty of poor and richness
of rich people. In this novel we find that how Balram Halwai suffers as poor
and how Mr.Ashok who represents rich class made him to suffer with the power of
money. Through various symbols like water buffalo, Dog, Pan, Rooster coop Adige
has tried to show the poor and rich class conflict of India.
. Homi K. Bhabha: ‘Introduction: Narrating the Nation’ (Nation
and Narration)
•
Nation – the modern Janus: the uneven development of capitalism
inscribes both progression and regression, political rationality and
irrationality in the very genetic code of the nation – it is by nature, ambivalent.
•
Nation is narrated in ‘terror of the space or race of the Other; the
comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class, the customs of
taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the
sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of
institutions; the quality of justice, the commonsense of injustice; the langue
of the law and the parole of the people’.
•
It is to explore the Janus-faced ambivalence of language itself in the
construction of the Janus-faced discourse of the nation.
•
Nation is an agency of ambivalent narration that holds ‘culture’ at its most
productive position, as a force for ‘subordination, fracturing, diffusing,
reproducing as much as producing, creating, forcing and guiding’.
•
The ambivalent, antagonistic perspective of nation as narration will establish
the cultural boundaries of the nation so that they may be acknowledged as
‘containing’ thresholds of meaning that must be crossed, erased and translated
in the process of cultural production.
•
What kind of cultural space is the nation with its transgressive boundaries and
its interruptive’ interiority?
The
post colonial critic Homi K. Bhabha argues, "memory is the necessary and
sometimes hazardous bridge between colonialism and the question of cultural
identity... remembering is never a quiet act of introspection and
retrospection. It is a painful remembering...". It shows Bhabha's hybrid
personality. For him postcolonial identity is a painful remembering. The past
of the colonized people was painful. Past cannot be totally forgotten and
totally new identity cannot be created due to painful memory of the past. In
this sense the protagonist Balram's present status is just hybrid and his
identity is nothing new but just the mimicry of the west. Balram's identity is
new in the sense that he is not a servant now. He murdered Ashok. How did
Balram learn to murder? He learnt it from the acts of Pinky Madam who killed a
child hitting by her car. Isn't it mimicry? At last Balram's name is changed
into Ashok Sharma. Isn't it mimicry as well? Balram is the man of right action.
He has been a successful entrepreneur now but his memory of the past is painful.
Here,
he remembers Lord Buddha and he is proud of being his disciple. Balram
glorifies the richness of Indian culture. He argues, "We live in a
glorious land. The Lord Buddha received his enlightenment in this land. The
river Ganga gives life to our plants and our animals and our people. We are
grateful to God that we were born in this land" . Balram believes that
change is possible only being enlightened like Buddha and even Ganga river is
the source of inspiration for Indian to be enlightened. So the Indian should
not forget the path of justice. Balram became quite radical and killed Ashok
due to unbearable justice upon him. He was given new name Balram by a school
teacher as he argues, "I came home that day and told my father that the
school teacher had given me a new name...". The issue is quite interesting
here because the writer shows some sort of consciousness that was emerging at
least in school teacher. At least, the school teachers are aware about their
identity. So 'Balram' was the name which was given by his own teacher and this
name was chosen according to Indian culture. Balram was the sidekick of the God
Krishna. Balram's source of enlightenment was his school though he studied
there just for three years.
Works Cited
Choudhury, Monir A. Aravind Adiga’s The White
Tiger as a Reinscription of Modern India. 4 Aprill 2018
<http://ijll-net.com/journals/ijll/Vol_2_No_3_September_2014/10.pdf>.
, Eelen Trurner. Gender
Axnxiety and Contemprorary Indian Popular Fiction. 2012. 4 Aprill 2018
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb>.
Dhawan, Tapan K. Ghose & R.K. Chetan Bhagat The Icon of
Popular Fiction. New Delhi: Prestige Books International, 2014.Print.
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