Justice, subalternism, and literary justice: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Abstract

This article analyses Aravind Adiga’s Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) through the lens of justice: philosophical, legal, and literary. What is justice when its agent is subaltern — disprivileged by both caste and class — and delivers justice to himself? I argue that the fictional representation of class, caste, poverty, and violence can be similar to the structuring and translations of justice. By writing his novel from the perspective of a subaltern character, Adiga joins the call by Dalit critics to reconfigure modernity from the interests of the oppressed and the marginalized. In the process, there can be a rethinking of postcolonial literary criticism from within the postcolonial nation, rather than the established perspective of the postcolonial nation understanding its own colonial oppression. My essay provokes wider insights into the implications for justice and human rights as they are informed and represented by literary fiction, subaltern theory, and deconstructive theory. How can a writer conceive of and represent justice — literary justice — by working within and against philosophical and legal conceptions of justice? The philosophers and theorists I invoke include Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Wai Chee Dimock, Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, and Robert Young.