The White Tiger

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God of Small Things (1997), Salman Rushdie's postmodern novel Midnight's Children (1981), and V.S.Ninpaul's narrative novel In a Free State (1971). Aravind ...
Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, 07-Special Issue, July 2017 Special Issue on Management Studies

An Application of Strain Theory in Aravind Adiga’s Postmodern Indian Fiction: The White Tiger A. Hariharasudan, Assistant Professor in English, Kalasalingam Univeristy. India. Dr.S. Robert Gnanamony, Professor, Kalasalingam University. India.

Abstract--- Strain theory is developed in the field of Sociology and Criminology after 1950s. This theory deals with the individuals who commit crime for his societal pressure on him to achieve high standard of life. The application of Strain theory is quite possible in postmodern literature because only the postmodern literature sanctions the liberal ethics. The author has selected Aravind Adiga’s postmodern Indian fiction The White Tiger for this study. In this fiction, the central character of the novel Balram simply pooh-poohs his professional ethics; he is not loyal to his master and commits crime. The application of Strain theory is clearly visible in this fiction. Keywords--- Strain Theory, Postmodernism, Marginalization, Sociology.

I.

Introduction

Aravind Adiga is a new notable presence on the scontemporary scenario of Postmodern Indian English Fiction. He initiates his profession as a novelist with his debut novel The White Tiger, in 2008. He shot swiftly into worldwide fame when he received the honored “Man Booker Prize” in the year 2008. After winning of this popular award for his first novel, Aravind Adiga has come to position with such renowned Booker prize-winning Indian English novelists as Kiran Desai’s debut novel The Inheritance of Loss (2006), Arundhati Roy’s feminist novel The God of Small Things (1997), Salman Rushdie’s postmodern novel Midnight’s Children (1981), and V.S.Ninpaul’s narrative novel In a Free State (1971). Aravind Adiga’s maiden attempt The White Tiger (2008) is the best example for the application of Strain theory. Strain theory was developed in 1957 by Robert K. Metron, it’s a theory related to Sociology and Criminology. Durkheim defined anomie to explain the concentration of criminal behavior at the end of nineteenth century. Then, Merton (1938) redefined Durkheim‘s anomie to strain by applying it to modern industrial societies. This theory deals with the individuals who commit crime for his societal pressure on him to achieve high standard of life (such as the American dream).

II.

Functions of Strain Theory

In the theory, success is primarily measured by pecuniary achievement and the American dream promotes everyone‘s success, taking the middle class as base. However, there is not an emphasis on legitimate means while cultural goals are emphasized. While everybody raised with the American dream pursues high achievement and monetary success, lower class and disadvantaged minorities are not provided equal means of the middle or higher class. Hence, this inequality promotes attaining the goals by whatever it takes, even in illegitimate ways, which is the major reason promoting criminal activity (Merton 1938). This type of engaging criminal activity is not only reflected in the society but also in twentieth century postmodern literature. Without a doubt Adiga’s postmodern fiction The White Tiger is the right example for the application of Strain Theory.

III.

Application of Strain Theory in the White Tiger

The protagonist of this novel is Balram Halwai. In the novel, he is portrayed as an untouchable, marginalized, dehumanized and oppressed person. He is the victim of the Indian Apartheid. He is the eponymous ‘White Tiger’ of the text. The novel depicts his boundary from darkness to light, from Laxmangarh to Delhi and Bangalore and in the progression, traces his hunt for identity, form a ‘Country Mouse’ to a ‘White Tiger’. There are many such Munnas/ Balrams and Ashokas spread all over the country. This shows that deconstruction has not penetrated or reached the grassroots highlighting many dichotomies like darkness and light, yellow and brown, and big bellies and small bellies.

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Jour of Adv Research in Dynamical & Control Systems, 07-Special Issue, July 2017 Special Issue on Management Studies

In the India of darkness live to poor bonded labourers. The four landlords, who possess animal traits and own almost everything, make their life depressed due to their heavy debts. Thus, the village system is that of slavery and village people have slavish tendencies. The outcastes and Harijans are ill-treated. Balram’s father realizes the value of education. He is a rickshaw puller but a “man with a plan” (Adiga 27). He wants his son to read and write. Yet due to the heavy debts, Munna/Balram is enforced to quit school and work at a tea stall. That is why, he remarks ironically that his story narrates how “the half backed” (Adiga 207) are shaped in India. His work in the tea shop signifies the continuation of slavery in India. His father was a slave and his elder brother Kishan and he are slaves. He says, [...] Why did I feel that I had to go close to his feet, touch them and press them and make them feel good-Why? Because the desire to be a servant had been bred into me: Hammered into my skull, nail and poured into my blood, the way sewage and industrial poisons are poured into Mother Ganga (Adiga 193). The nature of slavery has finely changed. Thus, as Balram grows up, he becomes aware of class relations, authority, feudal system and the power equation rampant in the society, this wide break, being poor, unemployed and discriminated against leads to his exclusion from economic, social and political life. The varied experiences in his personal and social life of domination, segregation, vulnerability or discrimination result in a feeling of marginalization. According to Peter Leonard societal oddness is being outside the mainstream of creative motion and/or societal recreate motion (Leonard 180). He portrays the marginalized people as standing outside the chief arena of capitalist productive and reproductive activity (Leonard 181) and as such as facing uncontrolled marginality in the society. (Leonard 181). Kagan describes marginalization that, the core of keeping out from satisfying and recognizing full social lives at person, interpersonal and public levels. The marginalized groups have quite small control over their lives and the wealth offered to them; they may turn into disgraced and are frequently at the getting last of pessimistic public approaches. Their chances to construct social contribution may be restricted and they may build up low self confidence and self admiration (Kagan). Marginalization leads to the feeling of alienation. Now, in all social science, the different synonyms of alienation have a prime position in studies of human relationships. Investigation of the “‘normless’, the ‘obsessive’, the ‘unattached’, the ‘isolated’, and the ‘marginal’ individual all give evidence to the central place occupied by the hypothesis of alienation in the present-day social science”(Coser & Bernard 374). Alienation further constructs powerlessness which is at the heart of most of the current literature. It also directs to meaninglessness resulting in ‘low confidence limits’. The alienated person is powerless to guess future outcomes of behaviour. Thus, the marginalized psyche is distinguished by distortion, marginalization, otherness and difference. This falls out in a dualism between the Oppressors and Oppressed. Theories related to inequality are highly developed by almost all disciplines of the behavioural and social sciences. These clarifications of violence and aggression are correlated to the different ways in which hierarchies, privileges, inequalities, oppressions and discriminations, on the one side, outwardly stimulate a number of people to exploit, abuse, and in general take advantage of those labeled as socially substandard and, on the other side, internally stimulate those persons subject to the labels of poor standard to oppose and fight aggressively against their positions. These clarifications of violent behavior are stranded in the political economies of personal property and industrialist development. Balram’s father is enforced to spend his life in misery due to poverty. Farmer’s life in the village is a prolongation of the same age old misery and poverty. Farmer is cooped up because of his family. Adiga sheds more light: […] That’s because we have the coop. Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many Mr.jiabao. A handful of men in this country have tainted the remaining 99.9%- as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way-to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse (Adiga 175-176). Balram plans to come out from the coop. His first move is to go away from the family behind in the village. In the city, he spends all time in the company of other drivers, like the Vitiligo-lips and other when he is not working. He becomes conscious of the differences that exist amongst the haves and have not’s in India. He understands that the poor in the city take on and carry out a number of ways and means to bamboozle and cheat their employers. They lie, cheat and steal to be like their masters. Balram too digs up corrupted in their company and becomes “from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow full of debauchery, depravity, and wickedness” (Adiga 197). He starts drinking in the same style as his master and dressed up like him, visits the city mall and longs for a prostitute with golden hair. Balram’s behaviour is in harmony with the Reference Group Theory. He believes the behaviour of

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Mr.Ashok as ideal behaviour and mimics it. He compares himself with his employer. He wishes to get luxury life in the societal status and as such becomes keenly aware of his weaknesses. This feeling of relative weakness brings to the sense of virtual dispossession in the ‘Country Mouse’ Balram. Thus on account of virtual dispossession, Balram adopts the values or standards of Mr.Ashok (deviance sub- cultures) which results him the behavioral changes. As states in Sheriff statement, Man is the only animal capable of Reference Group Behaviour. He can change his behaviour by assimilating the values and standards of other individuals and group. This condition, in the words of Sheriff, ‘stems from man’s psychological capacity to relate himself to groups, values and goods beyond the limits of immediate surroundings within his perceptual range, and beyond the limits of the living present into the future’ (Shah). As alienation is come from Durkheim’s portrayal of “anomie” and it reveals a state of normlessness. Strain Theory is an extension of Postmodernism; it was developed by Robert Merton. In the conventional way, anomie stands for a state in which the societal customs regulating person conduct are no longer successful as rules for behavior (Coser & Bernard 37). Strain Theory deals about crime and poverty going along with each other and can be functional to Balram. Balram a poor man perceives a rich man with a car, wife, house, suit, etc. He is alert that due to his life choices, he will not have the opportunity to achieve these items or chances in the future. However he can achieve them through crime. This is how the strain theory functions. Social strain and poverty keep a person down long enough to devastate his hopes and dreams for him to notice alternative means to dig up it. By following Merton’s direction, the anomic condition, from the person perspective, may be described as one in which there is big expectation that conventionally unrecognized behaviours are needed to attain the set goals (Coser & Bernard 407). Durkheim thinks that various social conditions lead to “overweening ambition” which constructs a breakdown of regulatory norms. Man’s social wishes cannot be synchronized and in turn, lead him to abnormal behaviour. Balram too longs for the life of his master. All do’s and don’ts forces upon him turn him angry and the way in which he is enforced to accept for the car accident committed by Pinky, makes him furious. Later his position as a human being is quashed by Mr.Ashok by his comment, “I had nothing but this drive in front of me for five nights. Now at least I have someone real by my side: you” (Adiga 189). The aggravation reaches its climax and at that moment, he reads in a book, you were searching for the key for a long time/But the door was not locked, it is always open (Coser & Bernard 255). He is annoyed by the discrimination in sharing of power. Dahrendorf highlights that those without authority and power have an interest in changing the “Imperatively Coordinated Associations” so that they can obtain more power, whereas those with authority have an interest in maintaining their privileged positions. This latent clash of interests can become overt under certain conditions. The more the subordinate understands his position in the disadvantaged group, the more is the possibility of violent behavior. The degree of transform is a function of the level of violence. Dahrendorf’s concept of Imperatively Coordinated Associations (ICA) is becoming a reality in the text. Balram observes that men sit together and read. They group together and discuss. One night they will join together to deconstruct the Rooster Coop. Yet Balram does not believe in an organized ICA. He says, An Indian revolution? No, sir. It won’t happen. People in this country are still waiting for the war of their freedom to come from somewhere else-from the jungles, from the mountains, from China, from Pakistan. That will never happen. Every man must make his owe Benares. The book of your revolution sits in the pit of your belly, young Indian. Crap it out and read” (Adiga 304). What Balram expects is very trouble-free and simple. He wishes for a descent place “where humans can live like humans and animals can live like animals” (Adiga 318). It is, at this stage, that he takes the matter in his hands. He explains his situation and says, “All I wanted was the chance to be a man and for that-one murder was enough” (Adiga 318). He is not a tough hearted criminal but a sufferer of circumstances, of marginalization and labeling theory. He clarifies his role in the new India: Why not? Am I not a part of all that is changing this country? Haven’t I succeeded in the struggle that every poor man here should be making –the struggle not to take the lashes your father took, not to end up in a mound of indistinguishable bodies that will not rot in the black mud of Mother Ganga? True, there was the matter of murderwhich is a wrong thing to do, no question about it. It has darkened my soul. All the skin-whitening creams sold in the markets of India won’t clean my hands again (Adiga 318). Renowned Criminologists Laub and Sampson have proposed a theory of ‘informal social control and cumulative disadvantage’. Their rationalization of rebellious behavior deals that there are significant conditions and events that change and alter unexpected pathways. Their theory is constructed upon three interrelated argument or themes. First, that structural conditions or factors such as radical discrimination or poverty impact the growth of social bonds. Second, which an amalgamation of societal condition and labeling practices can direct to increase the strength and

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disadvantage of disruptive behavior across the life. Third, that the progress of societal capital later in life, particularly for the period of adulthood, can change rebellious routes toward traditional values. All these are visible in The White Tiger. Strain theory stresses that, while facing the virtual achievement or success of others around them, ineffective or poor persons think dissatisfaction at their condition. The higher this strain, the greater the inequality, and the bigger the stimulus for economical poor condition of individuals lead to do misdeed or crime. In this aspect, inequality is allied with misdeed or crime for the reason that it is associated to poverty: places with high inequality lean to have high poverty rates. Facts also validate that as the poverty space widens in India, caste-based violence is flashing throughout the country. This nasty circle needs to be broken. Strategies of admittance from marginalization have to be worked out. As Balram turned Ashok comments, “I think the Rooster Coop needs people like me to break out of it. It needs masters like Mr.Ashok-who, for all his numerous virtues, was not much of a master-to-be weeded out, and exceptional servants like me to replace him” (Adiga 320). Yet in spite of having made it and having broken out of the coop, he is not able to forget his real self–that of being Balram. He delightedly declares. “I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not be a servant” (Adiga 321).

IV.

Conclusion

Balram kills his boss. He is at the present a self–reliant, intrepid man and triumphant, who can visualize of lettering to a Chinese Premier in that kind of voice. The brutality he has done has strengthened him. According to Franz Fanon, at the personal stage, aggression or the violent behavior is a cleaning force. It clears the colonized of their poor standard, of their submissive and depressed mood. It strengthens them and restores their confident level (Fanon 51). Balram has to get this tremendously extreme step for the reason that an animal turns into a human being, a human being from a donkey, a human being deconstructing himself. By doing this act, he is going to attain what all his generations were devoid of–Sovereignty–Sovereignty from the irons of the handcuffs he is locked up. Murdering is essential in the first stage of upheaval, says Sartre, eradicating in one go off tormenter and subjugated: getting a man dead and others set free (Sartre IV). In addition by doing so he is rinsed out –is rinsed out at the cost of his family in dusk, is rinsed out of his inferior of being a subaltern, and rinsed out of the disgrace of being called a family when he is shown as nothing more than a maidservant. Thus, the application of Strain Theory is clearly visual to the readers of Adiga’s The White Tiger.

References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Merton, R.K. Social structure and anomie. American sociological review 3 (5) (1938) 672-682. Leonard, P. Personality and ideology: Towards a materialist understanding of the individual. Macmillan, 1984. Coser, Lewis & Bernard Rosemberg. Sociological Theory A Book of Readings. Macmillan Pub.Company: New York, 1982. Seeman, M. On the Meaning of Alienation. Sociological Theory A Book of Readings New York: MacMillan, 1976. Fanon, F. The wretched of the earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove, 2004. Sartre, J.P. Colonialism and neocolonialism. Psychology Press, 2001.

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