ARAVID ADIGA

Aravid Adiga: 'This is the reality for a lot of Indian people'

El escritor indio Aravind Adiga el premio Man Booker, el más prestigioso del Reino Unido
La obra ganadora 'The White Tiger' es además el debut del autor como novelista
EL Pais, EFE - Londres - 14/10/2008
El escritor indio Aravind Adiga ha ganado este martes el premio de ficción en lengua inglesa Man Booker, el más prestigioso del Reino Unido, con su primera novela, The White Tiger. Adiga, de 33 años, narra en su novela la vida de un porteador de rickshaw en la India, que se debate entre ser un hijo leal y su deseo de mejorar. El presidente del jurado, el ex ministro conservador Michael Portillo, ha declarado que lo que destaca de la novela ganadora es su originalidad reflejando "el lado oscuro de la India".
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Adiga es el segundo ganador más joven del premio, después de Ben Okri, que se hizo con el Man Booker en 1991, con 32 años. Antes que él, otros escritores como otros debutantes han ganado el Booker, como Arundhati Roi, que lo logró en 1997 por El dios de las pequeñas cosas.
El ganador de este año es el cuarto escritor nacido en India que obtiene el premio, tras la citada Roi, Salman Rushdie y Kiran Desai, mientras que un quinto ganador, VS Naipaul, tenía ancestros indios. Aravind Adiga se ha impuesto en la final al australiano Steve Toltz, por A Fraction of the Whole; el irlandés Sebastian Barry, por The Secret Scripture; el indio Amitav Ghosh, por Sea of Poppies; la inglesa Linda Grant, por The Clothes on Their Backs, y el inglés Philip Hensher, por The Northern Clemency. Cada uno de los finalistas al Man Booker, que el año pasado fue concedido a The Gathering, de Anne Enright, recibe 2.500 libras (3.200 euros ó 4.359 dólares).
En ediciones pasadas, el galardón ha ido a parar a escritores tan conocidos como el surafricano J.M. Coetzee (Premio Nobel de Literatura en el 2003), el anglo-indio Salman Rushdie y la canadiense Margaret Atwood.

El escritor indio Aravind Adiga gana el Man Booker, el premio más prestigioso del Reino Unido
Con su primera novela, ´The White Tiger´, narra la vida de un conductor de "rickshaw" en la India, que se debate entre ser un hijo leal y su deseo de prosperar en la vida
Adn.es EFE
Aravind Adiga, autor de la novela 'The White Tiger'
SHAUN CURRY
El escritor indio Aravind Adiga ganó hoy el premio de ficción en lengua inglesa Man Booker, el más prestigioso del Reino Unido, con su primera novela, "The White Tiger", anunció el jurado del galardón.
Adiga, de 33 años, narra en su libro la vida de un conductor de "rickshaw" en la India, que se debate entre ser un hijo leal y su deseo de prosperar en la vida.
Al anunciar el ganador esta noche, en una ceremonia en Londres, el presidente del jurado, el ex ministro conservador Michael Portillo, dijo que lo que destaca a "The White Tiger" es su originalidad reflejando "el lado oscuro de la India".
En ediciones pasadas, el galardón, dotado con 50.000 libras (64.000 euros ó 87.181 dólares), ha ido a parar a escritores tan conocidos como el surafricano J.M. Coetzee (Premio Nobel de Literatura en el 2003), el anglo-indio Salman Rushdie y la canadiense Margaret Atwood.
Cuarto indio, ganador del premio
Adiga es el segundo ganador más joven del premio, después de Ben Okri, que se hizo con el Man Booker en 1991, con 32 años.
Antes que él, otros escritores como otros debutantes han ganado el Booker, como Arundhati Roi, que lo logró en 1997 por "El dios de las pequeñas cosas".
Adiga es el cuarto escritor nacido en India que obtiene el premio, tras la citada Roi, Salman Rushdie y Kiran Desai, mientras que un quinto ganador, VS Naipaul, tenía ancestros indios.
El joven escritor indio se impuso así a los otros cinco finalistas, el australiano Steve Toltz, por "A Fraction of the Whole"; el irlandés Sebastian Barry, por "The Secret Scripture"; el indio Amitav Ghosh, por "Sea of Poppies"; la inglesa Linda Grant, por "The Clothes on Their Backs", y el inglés Philip Hensher, por "The Northern Clemency".

La India sucia y oculta, en la voz del ganador del Booker
Hoy sale a la venta 'Tigre blanco', la novela de Aravind Ariga que ha ganado el galardón más prestigioso de las letras inglesas y que en España publica Miscelánea

Carmen Álvarez
Adn.es Madrid 27/10/2008
El escritor Aravind Adiga posa orgulloso con su libro después de saberse ganador del Premio Booker.
EFE Londres
En un buen número de casos la India que nos llega hasta Occidente es la de Bollywood, el Taj Mahal y una economía en ascenso. Si le preguntamos a Aravind Adiga (India, 1974) cómo es su país, la respuesta será muy diferente. Su visión, como la de millones de indios, se aleja de la historia de bailes, colores brillantes y felicidad. Es en cambio la historia de una tierra pobre, regada por un río considerado sagrado e impregnado de lodo y excrementos, donde la cultura sólo es para unos privilegiados y la pillería es casi la única manera de abrirse camino.
Tigre blanco, la novela ganadora del último premio Booker, cuenta esta cara desconocida del país a través de la voz de Balram Halwai, "un empresario autodidacta" y "el futuro" de la India, como él mismo se define. A través de siete noches, nos desvela su ascenso económico desde una infancia pobre y en la que no pudo completar su formación, hasta el día de hoy, convertido en un empresario con buena fortuna. Sería algo así como el ejemplo del sueño indio si no conociésemos su verdadera historia. Porque en Balram Halwi, como en otros muchos, no es oro todo lo que reluce.
Enlaces recomendados
NOTICIA Lee el primer capítulo de 'Tigre blanco'
NOTICIA El escritor indio Aravind Adiga gana el Man Booker, el premio más prestigioso del Reino Unido
NOTICIA Con ilusión y magia arranca Miscelánea
Galardonada con el premio más prestigioso de las novelas publicadas en inglés, Tigre blanco llega hoy a las librerías de la mano de la recién creada editorial Miscelánea, que ha lanzado una buena tirada 8.000 ejemplares.
Según cuenta su editora, Patricia Escalona, ya confiaban mucho en este título antes de conocer el veredicto del Booker y este reconocimiento -así como el que le otorgaron los libreros españoles llamado Libros con huella- no han hecho más que confirmar su intuición. "Me lo leí, me encantó y me pareció divertidísimo", resume sobre su flechazo con la novela de Adiga. Y cree que no será la única.
Denuncia
Pero, aunque con buenas dosis de humor -en algunos momentos escatológico-, la intención de Adiga es, fundamentalmente, denunciar la corrupción de un país y el malestar de una mayoría de la población que no tiene voz. Como explica en su novela, la India podría dividirse en dos: la Oscuridad -el campo pobre- y la Luz, la ciudad tecnológica y rica. Dos universos que, aunque cerca, están siempre separados.
Este fue uno de los aspectos que decantó al jurado del Booker por esta novela. Así lo resaltaron al concederle el premio, cuando valoraron su capacidad para "analizar las relaciones entre ricos y pobres a escala global". Su "prosa accesible y rica" acabó de inclinar la balanza hacia Adiga, que se ha convertido en el cuarto indio en ganar este galardón.
Aún así, no todo han sido elogios. Algunas voces críticas han denunciado la elección del jurado, que, desde el principio, manifestó su predilección por las obras aptas para todos los públicos, en lugar de novelas más sesudas. El libro ya está en la calle y ahora le toca al público español poder juzgarlo.

Roars of anger
Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker prize this week. But its unflattering portrait of India as a society racked by corruption and servitude has caused a storm in his homeland. He tells Stuart Jeffries why he wants to expose the country's dark side

Stuart Jeffries
The Guardian, Thursday 16 October 2008
Article history

Aravid Adiga: 'This is the reality for a lot of Indian people'
This year's Booker prize winner, Aravind Adiga, talks to Stuart Jeffries Link to this audio
How do you get the nerve, I ask Aravind Adiga, to write a novel about the experiences of the Indian poor? After all, you're an enviably bright young thing, a middle-class, Madras-born, Oxford-educated ex-Time magazine correspondent? How would you understand what your central character, the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller turned amoral entrepreneur and killer, is going through?
It's the morning after Adiga, 33, won the £50,000 Man Booker award with his debut novel The White Tiger, which reportedly blew the socks off Michael Portillo, the chair of judges, and, more importantly, is already causing offence in Adiga's homeland for its defiantly unglamorous portrait of India's economic miracle. For a western reader, too, Adiga's novel is bracing: there is an unremitting realism usually airbrushed from Indian films and novels. It makes Salman Rushdie's Booker-winning chronicle of post-Raj India, Midnight's Children (a book that Adiga recognises as a powerful influence on his work), seem positively twee. The Indian tourist board must be livid.
Adiga, sipping tea in a central London boardroom, is upset by my question. Or as affronted as a man who has been exhausted by the demands of the unexpected win and the subsequent media hoopla can be. Guarded about his private life, he looks at me with tired eyes and says: "I don't think a novelist should just write about his own experiences. Yes, I am the son of a doctor, yes, I had a rigorous formal education, but for me the challenge of a novelist is to write about people who aren't anything like me." On a shortlist that included several books written by people very much like their central characters (Philip Hensher, for example, writing about South Yorkshire suburbanites during the miners' strike, or Linda Grant writing about a London writer exploring her Jewish heritage), the desire not to navel-gaze is surprising, even refreshing.
But isn't there a problem: Adiga might come across as a literary tourist ventriloquising others' suffering and stealing their miserable stories to fulfil his literary ambitions? "Well, this is the reality for a lot of Indian people and it's important that it gets written about, rather than just hearing about the 5% of people in my country who are doing well. In somewhere like Bihar there will be no doctors in the hospital. In northern India politics is so corrupt that it makes a mockery of democracy. This is a country where the poor fear tuberculosis, which kills 1,000 Indians a day, but people like me - middle-class people with access to health services that are probably better than England's - don't fear it at all. It's an unglamorous disease, like so much of the things that the poor of India endure.
"At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the west, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of society. That's what writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens did in the 19th century and, as a result, England and France are better societies. That's what I'm trying to do - it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination."
That, though, makes Adiga's novel sound like funless didacticism. Thankfully - for all its failings (comparisons with the accomplished sentences of Sebastian Barry's shortlisted The Secret Scripture could only be unfavourable) - The White Tiger is nothing like that. Instead, it has an engaging, gobby, megalomaniac, boss-killer of a narrator who reflects on his extraordinary rise from village teashop waiter to success as an entrepreneur in the alienated, post-industrial, call-centre hub of Bangalore.
Balram Halwai narrates his story through letters he writes, but doesn't send, to the Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Wen is poised to visit India to learn why it is so good at producing entrepreneurs, so Balram presumes to tell him how to win power and influence people in the modern India. Balram's story, though, is a tale of bribery, corruption, skulduggery, toxic traffic jams, theft and murder. Whether communist China can import this business model is questionable. In any event, Balram tells his reader that the yellow and the brown men will take over the world from the white man, who has become (and this is where Balram's analysis gets shaky) effete through toleration of homosexuality, too slim and physically weakened by overexposure to mobile phones.
Halwai has come from what Adiga calls the Darkness - the heart of rural India - and manages to escape his family and poverty by becoming chauffeur to a landlord from his village, who goes to Delhi to bribe government officials. Why did he make Halwai a chauffeur? "Because of the whole active-passive thing. The chauffeur is the servant but he is, at least while he's driving, in charge, so the whole relationship is subverted." Disappointingly, Adiga only knows of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic from reading Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. But that dialectic is the spine of his novel: the servant kills his master to achieve his freedom.
The White Tiger teems with indignities masquerading as employee duties. Such, Adiga maintains, is India - even as Delhi rises like a more eastern Dubai, call-centres suck young people from villages and India experiences the pangs of urbanisation that racked the west two centuries ago. "Friends who came to India would always say to me it was a surprise that there was so little crime and that made me wonder why." Balram supplies an answer: servitude. "A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9% - as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way - to exist in perpetual servitude." What Balram calls the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy; unlike China, he reflects, India doesn't need a dictatorship or secret police to keep its people grimly achieving economic goals.
"If we were in India now, there would be servants standing in the corners of this room and I wouldn't notice them," says Adiga. "That is what my society is like, that is what the divide is like." Adiga conceived the novel when he was travelling in India and writing for Time magazine. "I spent a lot of time hanging around stations and talking to rickshaw pullers." What struck him was the physical difference between the poor and the rich: "In India, it's the rich who have problems with obesity. And the poor are darker-skinned because they work outside and often work without their tops on so you can see their ribs. But also their intelligence impressed me. What rickshaw pullers, especially, reminded me of was black Americans, in the sense that they are witty, acerbic, verbally skilled and utterly without illusions about their rulers."
It is not surprising then that the greatest literary influences on the book were three great African-American 20th-century novelists - Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. "They all wrote about race and class, while later black writers focus on just class. Ellison's Invisible Man was extremely important to me. That book was disliked by white and blacks. My book too will cause widespread offence. Balram is my invisible man, made visible. This white tiger will break out of his cage."
For Indian readers, one of the most upsetting parts of that break-out is that Halwai casts off his family. "This is a shameful and dislocating thing for an Indian to do," says Adiga. "In India, there has never been strong central political control, which is probably why the family is still so important. If you're rude to your mother in India, it's a crime as bad as stealing would be here. But the family ties get broken or at least stretched when anonymous, un-Indian cities like Bangalore draw people from the villages. These really are the new tensions of India, but Indians don't think about them. The middle- classes, especially, think of themselves still as victims of colonial rule. But there is no point any more in someone like me thinking of myself as a victim of you [Adiga has cast me, not for the first time, as a colonial oppressor]. India and China are too powerful to be controlled by the west any more.
"We've got to get beyond that as Indians and take responsibility for what is holding us back." What is holding India back? "The corruption, lack of health services for the poor and the presumption that the family is always the repository of good."
Our time is nearly over. Adiga doesn't know how he will spend his prize money, isn't even sure if there's a safe bank in which to deposit it. Doesn't he fear attacks at home for his portrayal of India? After all, the greatest living Indian painter, MF Husain, lives in exile. "I'm in a different position from Husain. Fortunately, the political class doesn't read. He lives in exile because his messages got through, but mine probably won't."
Adiga, who says he has written his second novel but won't talk about it ("It might be complete crap, so there's no point"), flies home to Mumbai today to resume his bachelor life. His most pressing problem is that Mumbai landlords don't let flats to single men. Why? "They think we're more likely to be terrorists. I'd just like to say, through your pages, that I am not. In fact, if you check the biographies of Indian terrorists you'll find they are mostly family men who are well-off. It's a trend that needs to be investigated."

Link to this audio
Possibly in a new novel by Adiga, yet again analysing the unbearably poignant torments of the emerging new India. Ideally, though, with jokes.
· This article was amended on Saturday October 18 2008. We were wrong to originally describe author Philip Hensher as Sheffield-born; he was born and lives in London. This has been corrected.