From Darkness to Light: Socioeconomic Division in Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

This study examines the socioeconomic division on The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga which foreshadows the shift in the status of the Darkness to the Light as a key metaphor of inequality in modern India. It primarily underlines major problems such as stratification of classes, institutional corruption, lack of social mobility, and psychological traps of the underclass prevailing in India, which are expressed in the metaphor of Rooster Coop. Based on qualitative textual analysis approach, this study employs a mixed theoretical approach that draws on the theory of Karl Marx (theory of class struggle) and Frantz Fanon (postcolonial theory of internalized oppression and violence). The analysis of the narrative voice, characterization, and symbolism through close reading is based on a transformation of Balram Halwai as a subaltern subject to a self-made entrepreneur. The evidence illustrates that the novel is a criticism of the illusion of meritocracy as it reveals the aspects of structural inequalities and power relations of hegemony dominating the approach to opportunity. Although the upward mobility is made to seem a possibility, it depends on moral transgression and violence, which echoes the idea of liberation by rupture of Fanon. At the same time, the model of Marxism explains the way in which economic systems sustain exploitation and division of classes. The study adds to the subtle perspective of the socioeconomic division, combining both psychological and structural approaches, to provide a new understanding of mobility as a liberation and as complicity.