DIALOGIC ADIGA: THE NEOLIBERAL GOSPEL AND ITS CONTEXTS IN THE WHITE TIGER

Abstract

Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The White Tiger, both accommodates and provokes a variety of voices and discourses, evoking and dealing with India’s past, present, and future, thus highlighting its author’s dialogic vision. Although postcolonial and posthumanist approaches are worth exploring at length in this very challenging text, the current starts from the novel’s initial “conversation” with a controversial non-fiction book, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and the theory of the ten flatteners that reshape globalization, with Bangalore as the then (2006) neoliberal hub of the world. Using the patterns of the frame narrative of the Arabian Nights and of the European epistolary novel, the text under investigation dramatizes and transfigures the dark side of neoliberalism by means of the imaginary conversation between a murderer turned successful entrepreneur and the leader of the world’s most prominent rising economic tiger.