Aravind Adiga’s first novel, The White Tiger, sensationally won the Man Booker Prize last year, against more established writers such as Salman Rushdie, Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh. A groundbreaking work (in my opinion), it was written in the voice of Balram Halwai, an entrepreneurial man who moves up in the world through hard work and honesty, fighting a society that seems to be always working against him, exploiting him, until he decides committing a murder is the only way to break the cycle. The novel explores the plight of India’s poor and an indifferent system that disallows social and material advancement, all narrated in Halwai’s scathing, irreverent and often humorous voice.
Between the Assassinations is the novel Adiga was working on before The White Tiger and is, once again, concerned with the inequalities and inadequacies in Indian society – and particularly the class system that resolutely keeps the lower classes trapped. The setting is the fictional city of Kittur, based loosely on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore, in India’s south. The assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv seven years later are the bookends to the seven days spanned in this collection of interwoven short stories. Adiga takes us through the lives of Kittur’s various inhabitants, examining the social hierarchies and politics in the town through their eyes, exposing the dynamics that are mirrored in the rest of India.
A cycle-cart puller rails against his exploitative employer, his ungrateful customers, and ultimately his fellow cart-pullers, who suffer the abuse and still return day after day to be underpaid and ill-used. A schoolteacher who had dreams of becoming a poet puts his ambitions into his prodigy, only to be betrayed when the boy joins in the mischief of the school’s bad boys. The eighth daughter in a Brahmin family who can’t afford her dowry is sent as a servant from house to house, seeking a place where she will be valued. And my favourite, Xerox, the pavement bookseller who sells illegally photocopied books at discounted prices, mounts a protest against censorship by insisting on selling counterfeit copies of Salman Rushdie’s banned Satanic Verses, even after he is beaten up by the police.
Adiga says that Between the Assassinations is influenced by his reading of Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Just as Balzac offered a portrait of the France of his day, Adiga wanted to ‘capture the inner drives – jealousy, lust, compassion – that shaped the town’. (I also thought I found traces of R.K. Narayan’s classic Malgudi Days, another evocative exploration of a place and time through the town’s inhabitants.) Between the Assassinations feels a little less focused than The White Tiger, mainly because of the structure, but is far more revealing of Adiga’s concerns – both political and social – about India. In these stories Adiga invites us, time and again, into the lives of the people who make up the majority of India’s population, giving us glimpses into their dreams, even as those aspirations recede before us.
Kabita Dhara will be undertaking an Asialink residency in India this year to explore possible relationships between the Indian and Australian publishing industries.
