The mention of Bangalore as an “un-Indian city” echoes Sujit Banerji’s sociological study where he investigates why the growing urban areas, like Bangalore, are not considered part of the “real” India (Banerji 1969, 431). Balram is eventually able to break out of the rooster coop when he migrates to Bangalore to become that anonymous and atomised urban migrant as predicted by Nandy because he is unlike any other internal migrant witnessed in literature, and that makes him an exception to the old migrant class. P. Suneetha asserts that before Adiga, other Indian English novelists like Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao had depicted the “authentic” village life and its inhabitants differently, portraying them as people whose “lives derived meaning from their identification with temples, rivers, hills, mounds and markets, a peasant sensibility expressed in a style unique to Indian fiction” (Suneetha 2012, 163). Adiga challenges the authenticity of such a portrayal through Balram’s homecoming. The first time Balram drives back from Dhanbad to Laxmangarh for an excursion desired by Ashok, all he sees in his village are the broken roads, undisciplined drivers, the generic marketplace selling generic household items and small children enamoured by big cars (Adiga [2008] 2017, 81). Instead of getting poignant about the time he had spent with his father on the Black Fort, he repeatedly spits at it, casting off any relations he had with that place. Unlike Ashok, who was sent away to study abroad in his childhood, Balram was born and brought up in this village, yet he sees it with an unexpected impassiveness.

The excursion from Dhanbad to Laxmangarh marks the beginning of Balram’s severance from his rooster coop. Born to a rickshaw-puller father and a sickly mother who soon passes away, Balram’s childhood was scarred by the indifference shown by his family members towards him and his parents, and as soon as his father passes away, he cuts the proverbial umbilical cord with his family (ibid., 13-14). He imagines himself to be the Devil, who one day decides not to give in to his servitude to God and rebels against Him by cutting off all ties with his family (ibid., 86-87). He says, “… the Indian family, is the reason we are trapped and tied to the coop.     only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed — hunted, beaten, and burned alive by the masters — can break out of the coop. That would take no normal human being but a freak, a pervert of nature. It would, in fact, take a White Tiger” (ibid., 176-77). Balram understood that his family’s relationship with him was purely monetary, and this is highlighted thrice in the text –– firstly, with no sustainable agrarian income of their own, Balram realises how much his family depends upon the remittances sent by him (ibid., 84). Secondly, his grandmother’s repeated requests to him to get married is also geared towards two ends: dowry and further entrapment in the rooster coop. However, Balram refuses to send money home or get married because he knows that emotional attachments with his family would only tie him down. He reasons that the desire to be a servant was inbred within him so profoundly that he would have passed it on to his children (ibid., 193). Thirdly, instead of trying to save him, his grandmother strikes a deal with the Stork and even agrees to be a witness when they try to pin Pinky’s drunken hit-and-run case onto him (ibid., 168). Balram gets enraged when he realises that his family only cares about money, so he cuts himself off from them and, by extension, the vicious cycle of birth-poverty-death that the rooster coop protects. His inherent mistrust of the family structure allows him to break out of the moral foundation imposed by the rooster coop, which the other migrants cannot.

Balram feels revolted by the system of servitude and wants to break away from it because it takes away the dignity of human beings. Instead of employment being a contractual exchange of labour with remittances, servitude requires the servant’s compliance at all times, more so if they belong to the lower caste/class. For instance, although Balram was trained for his occupation, he had to appease his masters with affability and suitable lowliness of his caste to gain employment (ibid., 64). He also had to pretend to be an abject subject who could not take any salary from them in return for services rendered because the Stork was a landowner and had a right over the labours of everyone in his village. Bridget Anderson argues that when domestic employment is construed as a form of kinship and family obligation, it “weakens the worker’s negotiating position in terms of wages and conditions — any attempt to improve these are seen as an insult to the ‘family’ and evidence of the worker’s moneygrubbing attitude” (quoted in Tickell 2015, 160). In exchange for food and housing, Balram was expected to cook, clean, bathe their two dogs, do household chores, and massage the Stork’s feet even though he was only hired and paid for a driver’s position. As Balram explains, “in India — or, at least, in the Darkness — the rich don’t have drivers, cooks, barbers, and tailors. They simply have servants” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 68). The same routine was also followed in their Gurgaon home, where Balram was expected to cook, clean and perform other household chores. On Pinky’s birthday, Ashok gets Balram to serve them in Air India Maharaja’s costume, transforming him into a human version of one of India’s oldest commercial brands of deferential service (Tickell 2015, 160). Balram tells the Chinese Premier that he does not envy the rich in America or other European countries because “they have no servants there. They cannot even begin to understand what a good life is” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 176). Physical violence was also an accepted part of the deal, as the Stork would often hit Balram instead of instructing him (ibid., 71). When asked by Ashok if it was required to beat the servants, Stork replied: “They expect it from us, Ashok. Remember that — they respect us for it” (ibid., 72). Unfortunately, the Stork was not far from the truth. Two incidents in the text prove that the master and the servant were made from the same mould. In the first instance, when Ashok hits Pinky for the first time, Balram remarks, “About time you took charge, O Lamb-that-was-born-from-the-loins-of-a-landlord” (ibid., 155). In the second instance, when Ashok realises that Pinky has left him and Balram had driven her to the airport, he tries to strangle Balram and push him off the parapet of his 13th-floor apartment, but Balram simply remarks, “the landlord inside him wasn’t dead, after all” (ibid., 182).

For most of his life, Balram was held back by his socially conditioned servile mentality and believed that if he served his master loyally, his master would take care of him and protect him in return (Khor 2012, 44). He had made himself indispensable to them, not just by following their commands but also by never leaking any gossip about the family, protecting their reputation even at the cost of being ridiculed. The remark made by the other drivers in Gurgaon that he was “loyal to the last. They don’t make servants like you anymore”, in reality, points toward his servile mentality (Adiga [2008] 2017, 183). It takes Ashok visiting his living quarters in Dhanbad to make him realise the miserable condition he used to live in, and only when he starts looking through the eyes of the rich that he recognises how enslaved to poverty his mind and body were (ibid., 78-79). He compares himself to Hanuman, carrying his master and mistress Ram and Sita (ibid., 46), and calls Hanuman the “favourite god in the Darkness” because “he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love and devotion” (ibid., 19) and notes with dismay that with such “kinds of gods … foisted on us, … understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India” (ibid., 19). He exposes how religion protects the caste and class system and solidifies the rooster coop.

However, in return for his servility, Balram soon learns that his masters, including Ashok, only care for themselves. After being called a “part of the family” (ibid., 165), Balram is asked to take the blame for Pinky’s drunken hit-and-run, and he begins to understand how the master class has fattened itself at the expense of the servant class (Khor 2012, 44). He explains that “the jails of Delhi are full of drivers who are there behind bars because they are taking the blame for their good, solid middle-class masters. We have left the villages, but the masters still own us, body, soul and arse” (ibid., 169). Instead of protesting, the driver’s family also enjoys the compensation given by the employers and brags to everyone how loyal and steadfast the driver is, which further helps other members get jobs. Even the police and the judiciary are corrupt and are in on the scam, paid handsomely to ignore the discrepancies in the cases. Again, the driver has no say in this because he fears for his family, just like Balram did (ibid., 177). Nandy articulates that it is in the “political psychology of the city” to offer “anonymity and atomisation” to all its migrant workers (Nandy 2001, 12). Nandy saw urban migration as “a cultivated forgetfulness” (ibid., viii), “a radical and legitimate rejection of the village as that part of one’s self which had outlived its utility” (ibid., 12). Raymond Williams also says that the city “vends a dream of total freedom” (Williams 1973, viii) from the “village as a self” (ibid., 13). However, my contestation is that caste free metropolises are a myth because of the family structure which still resides in the villages and keeps migrants enslaved to the rooster coop. Balram also contests this claim because even while living in the city, the people know his caste, ancestral profession and native village once he tells his family name. This is precisely the reason he adopts the upper-caste name of Ashok Sharma in Bangalore, both as a nod to his previous employer and to his previous caste identity, which he wanted to shed.

Apart from the rooster coop, migrants like Balram also face several other infrastructural difficulties in the cities. When he speaks about Delhi, he mentions the pollution and the filthiness of the city space (Adiga [2008] 2017, 133-34), the constant construction work everywhere (ibid., 157) and the sight of thousands of homeless people who have migrated from the Darkness in anticipation of a good life but were now living on the streets or under the flyovers and bridges, in conditions worse than what they had lived in the Darkness (ibid., 119-120). Those constructing the rich’s houses, malls and office spaces lived in slums beside the sewage and sewer lines (ibid., 260). Balram acknowledges two cities living simultaneously within Delhi, “inside and outside the dark egg” of an air-conditioned car (ibid., 138). The two Indias that Balram talks about consist of “one third-two thirds” divide, i.e. one-third of the rich controlling the two-thirds of the poor (Khor 2012, 46). He compares this divide with his dual life –– although he resided in the “modernest suburb of Delhi” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 122) inside one of the poshest apartment buildings, his life was more miserable than the homeless vagabonds of the city. This is because of the inhumanely designed servants’ dormitories in the basement of the buildings where the masters live. With cramped spaces and shared bedrooms and bathrooms, the urban servants, who are mostly migrant workers from the hinterlands, find it challenging to make a home of their own (ibid., 130-132). There are no provisions for them to bring in their families, nor are they allowed to go home frequently. They are expected to be available at all times at the beck and call of their masters, till the end of their lives or until they are dismissed due to old age or disability (ibid., 130). Moreover, the servants and the drivers are invisible figures, and the rich are mostly oblivious to their hardships. Balram voices the dreary occupation of the waiting drivers when he says that sleeplessness, boredom, incessant mosquito bites and discomfort due to extreme heat or cold temperatures are just some of the daily problems faced by them (ibid., 124), and having nothing to do for hours makes “drunks of so many honest drivers” (ibid., 149).

In the absence of personal space, the servants’ quarters and the parking lots of the malls or offices (where the drivers wait) replicate the functionality of a slum for the drivers/servants. Ashis Nandy describes a slum in the city as something caught between “trying to re-invoke a remembered village under different guises” (Nandy 2001, 20) and accepting it “as a new home, from within the boundaries of which one has the privilege of surveying the ruins of one’s other abandoned homes” (ibid., 25). The roadside slums, as well as the servants’ quarters, then become a ghetto for the poor migrants belonging to one particular caste or region or language group, dreaming of an imaginary return to their villages (ibid., 20) whereas also acknowledging the fact that there is nothing left to return to in the village (ibid., 72-73). Nandy calls this dilemma “an urban psycho-geography” (ibid., 74) in which the city and the slum are seen as “the location of homelessness forever trying to reconcile non-communitarian individualism and associated forms of freedom with communitarian responsibilities” (ibid., 25). Nandy further argues that “the city’s promise of freedom also camouflages a certain heartless, inhuman impersonality, casual cynicism, and persistent quiet violence” (ibid., 72- 73), something we notice in the drivers’ interactions with each other. The servants’ quarters and the parking lots of malls or offices are the only places where the drivers are free to be themselves and are not under the constant scrutinising gaze of their masters. They spend

their time reading trashy magazines, gossiping about their masters and mocking/ridiculing any new driver, which makes Balram compare them to a dog who is loyal to its master but vicious towards other dogs, saying, “we attack anyone who’s familiar” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 130). Thus, he concludes that it was the rooster coop mentality that was at work here –– servants pulling down other servants by keeping them “from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs … the coop is guarded from the inside” (ibid., 194). He identifies two kinds of underdevelopment that leads to inequality: the rich under-develop the poor, and the poor under-develop each other (Khor 2012, 46), and at the heart of this understanding is the rooster coop.

Balram detaching himself from the other drivers, both physically and socially, while waiting at the offices and malls, points towards his attempts to separate himself from anything that even remotely resembles his village community. Instead of idling away his time, he begins to improve himself by changing his appearance and mannerisms, fashioning himself after Ashok, and expanding his knowledge by reading English magazines. Additionally, instead of sharing quarters with the other drivers of his caste and class, Balram chooses social alienation. The room in which Balram chooses to stay is infested with cockroaches and mosquitoes, with unfinished flooring and cheap plaster peeling off the walls, but he values his privacy over social interactions with his community members (Adiga [2008] 2017, 131). In fact, in comparison to his living arrangements, the car he drives is more spacious and cleaner. These characteristics of Balram differentiate him from the other migrant drivers who would remain caught in the rooster coop their entire lives.

Balram’s attempts to copy Ashok hint at his aspirations for upward social mobility, which ends in him taking Ashok’s name in Bangalore, where he imagines himself metamorphosed into his previous master. While living in Gurgaon, he begins to mimic Ashok in his choice of clothes and shoes (ibid., 148-49) and of women (ibid., 233-235). He stops chewing paan and starts brushing his teeth with whitening toothpaste, and he also ceases to scratch his groin (ibid., 150). The primary impetus for these self-improvements was Pinky’s criticism: “You’re so filthy! Look at you, look at your teeth, look at your clothes! There’s red paan all over your teeth, and there are red spots on your shirt. It’s disgusting!” (ibid., 146). Because a member of the elite class is disgusted by these aspects, Balram identifies them as disgusting too (Khor 2012, 52). He wonders, “Why had my father never told me not to scratch my groin? Why had my father never taught me to brush my teeth in milky foam? Why had he raised me to live like an animal? Why do all the poor live amid such filth, such ugliness?” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 151). Such self-critique and self-questioning bring him farther away from his class, this time not just physically or socially, but mentally and emotionally as well.

However, Pinky’s hit-and-run episode fundamentally changes his equation with his employers, especially after he sees how unconcerned they appear about condemning an innocent to prison, and so he declares a class war on them (ibid., 179-180). Pinky’s remorse over her drunken accident and her desire to compensate the victim’s family (ibid., 180) makes Balram comment, “who would have thought, Mr Jiabao, that of this whole family, this lady with the short skirts would be the one with a conscience?” (ibid., 180). Still, he deems Pinky’s parting gift of 4700 rupees as curiously inadequate because he imagines her withdrawing 10,000 rupees or at least 5000 rupees to give him, and then changing her mind at the last moment (ibid., 206). Similarly, when Ashok promises to take care of his wedding, and then instead of a 1000 rupee note, hands him just a 100 rupee note (ibid., 258), he decides that all the rich people owe him much more and that he needs to rebalance the scales by turning the tables on his masters (Khor 2012, 44). Pinky’s departure, who is ironically dubbed as the ‘moral centre’ of the novel despite her involvement in the accident, fills Balram with a sense of painful betrayal and a primordial rage that allows him to break through his social programming of subservience and catalyses his transformation into the White Tiger. He begins to syphon petrol and inflate the cost of repairs to the car, sells empty whisky bottles to the bootleggers and turns Ashok’s car into a freelance taxi (Adiga [2008] 2017, 230). The more he steals from Ashok, the more he realises that Ashok and his creed have always stolen from the poor like him. In his own words, he was growing a belly at last and becoming his own master (ibid., 231-32). Sankaran Krishna argues that the West is more prosperous than the non- West because it possesses the attributes critical for developmental success, especially the ability to act in “rational, self-interested ways to better one’s own life”, and Balram imbibes these attributes in Delhi (quoted in Khor 2012, 49-52).

Balram’s determination to not let his lower class/caste status limit him fills him with a sense of righteous indignation that the subalterns like himself have lived to serve and enrich others (Khor 2012, 50). Balram’s biggest coup was to slit Ashok’s throat with a broken liquor bottle and steal 7,00,000 rupees meant to bribe the newly elected political party for further tax breaks. Along with Dharam (his nephew), Balram absconds to Bangalore, changes his name to Ashok Sharma and uses the stolen money as capital to start his taxi service for the outsourcing companies. He bribes the local police inspector to revoke the license of competing taxi services so that the companies hire his services and gradually builds his transport and real estate business.

The last stage of Balram’s migration from Delhi to Bangalore also marks his ideological movement. When Balram becomes a capitalist himself, he replaces the exploitative feudal master-servant relationship with the contractual relationship between an employer and his employees based on mutual respect, trust and honouring of the contract by both the parties (Adiga [2008] 2017, 302). He perceives himself to be ethically and morally superior to his village landlords. As an entrepreneur in Bangalore, Balram finds he has the option, even the duty to be good, something he claims is impossible as a subaltern in Laxmangarh: “It’s just that here if a man wants to be good, he can be good. In Laxmangarh, he doesn’t even have this choice. That is the difference between this India and that India: the choice” (ibid., 306). The most significant instance of Balram’s improved moral standpoint is when one of his taxi drivers accidentally kills a boy on a bicycle. Although he bribes the police into blaming the victim and offers his parents monetary compensation, he never forces his driver to take the blame for him (ibid., 306-313). As his means of atonement and benevolence, Balram’s method of corruption is monetary (Khor 2012, 57). Instead, he accepts the responsibility and offers himself for penance and atonement, and explains his actions in almost emotional terms: “But I had to do something different; don’t you see? I can’t live the way the Wild Boar and the Buffalo and the Raven lived, and probably still live, back in Laxmangarh. I am in the Light now” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 313).

The (Im)Possibility of Breaking the Rooster Coop

 Balram’s memoir completes the trajectory of his migration from the ‘darkness’ of the villages where the necessities of life like education, healthcare and employment were denied to him, to the ‘light’ of the cities where he propelled himself out of his subalternism to gain socioeconomic and political agency. However, two pertinent questions are raised here: why does Balram choose this morally questionable and legally criminal trajectory and is this the only viable option for him to break the rooster coop? Evidently, Adiga thinks that the quicksand of caste and class cannot be traversed only through rural to urban migration but requires a drastic action like Balram’s. He says: “There are lots of self-made millionaires in India now, certainly, lots of successful entrepreneurs. However, remember that over a billion people live here, and for the majority of them, who are denied decent health care, education or employment, getting to the top would take doing something like what Balram has done” (quoted in Jeffries 2008). In another interview, Adiga repeats:

Undoubtedly, Adiga believes that he could not have found a better solution for Balram’s predicament since Balram’s unrepentant declaration at the end of the novel tends to lend moral weight to both the author and his protagonist: “I’ll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 321). Adiga’s rationalisation is sustained by Singhavi, who argues that Balram requires two symbolically dense murders to become an entrepreneur: “the murder of the employer (and therefore murder of the self-as-labourer) and the murder of the family (and thus murder of the caste-bound self)” (Shingavi 2014, 9). Thus, Balram needs to use the implicit threat against his family to steer his rage against his employer, and at the same time, he also needs his family to die so that he can escape the rooster coop of caste and class. Nevertheless, despite Balram’s pretentions to be nonchalant about sacrificing his family in the process of elevating his social position, his obsession with extravagant chandeliers become the physical manifestations of his guilt: “I should talk a little more about this chandelier. Why not? I’ve got no family anymore. All I’ve got is chandeliers” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 117).

Balram finds his literary predecessor in Rodion Raskolnikov of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), who epitomises Nietzchean ubermensch. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), predicts the rise of a man he calls ubermensch (translated as “super-man” or “over-man”) who will break the shackles of the traditional Christian “herd morality” and will construct his moral system, hence acting as a model for those who follow. Dostoevsky criticises this concept through his protagonist Raskolnikov who believes that he could liberate himself from poverty and perform great deeds if only he could acquire money and that certain crimes (even murder) are justifiable if they are committed to remove obstacles in achieving the goals of ‘extraordinary’ men like himself. Similarly, Balram also accepts that corruption has been infused into the fabric of society, that the ever- widening gap between the rich and the poor can never be hedged, and that this great divide is exacerbated through the notion of caste, which further cripples those hailing from impoverished backgrounds. But he decides to utilise these impediments to create a class- based resentment that allows him to construct his system of morals and rationalise his choices because it helps him climb the social ladder. Thus, he claims that his civil war against caste and class disparities makes him the future of India, “I am tomorrow” (Adiga [2008] 2017, 6), the servant who breaks free to become the master who accepts some moral accountability.

This text builds up the argument that rural to urban migration indeed presents a possibility of liberation from the rooster coop. Balram could not have been able to break the rooster coop even after murdering and thieving if he had stayed in his village because, as we have seen earlier, his whole being was restricted to his racial affiliation. Therefore, Balram needed to migrate to a metropolitan city like Bangalore to shed his previous caste and class identity and begin anew. Cities afford anonymity and atomisation to migrants like him, something not possible in any village or small town, however distant from his own. On the other hand, the trajectory adopted by Balram to break free from the rooster coop is so morally problematic that it makes one question its pragmatism or replicability by others.

Moreover, after shattering the rooster coop, Balram finds himself in a moral and social vacuum, boycotted by his society. He becomes atomised to the point of absolute isolation. Desperation arising from such isolation makes him boast about his possessions because he lacks respectability in the community. Throughout the narrative, he seems to be hiding behind the shadows of physical darkness in his office since he has essentially bought his freedom through bribery and corruption. Even Raskolnikov is shown racked with disorientation, paranoia and disgust as he struggles with the guilt and horror of his actions. Eventually, he finds his redemption in Sonya’s love and repents of his actions through his life sentence in the Siberian jail. However, Balram neither feels any shame nor finds any relationship to redeem him. He does not even repent upon the death of the young cyclist killed in a road accident by one of his drivers. Although he offers monetary compensation to the boy’s family, in actuality, they receive no justice or retribution for the death of their son. Thus through his actions, Balram dehumanises familial relationships, treating them as collateral damages in his quest for personal freedom and affluence. Hence, although he claims to have attained enlightenment like Buddha when he begins to accept moral accountability and does not oppress others, in reality, he becomes what he hated the most — an alternate version of the feudal landlords in his village. Consequently, one needs to question if the text indeed points towards the possibility of breaking the rooster coop or if it undercuts that possibility by providing such an unrealistic solution.

Conclusion

 To conclude, I think this novel ends in aporia because Balram is not able to break the existing social and economic hierarchies even after he migrates from the village to the city, but is reduced to imagining a substitute society where he opens a school to train ‘white tigers’ like him who would operate outside of moral, social and legal obligations (ibid., 319). He promises to teach his students ways to escape their socioeconomic impoverishment, but it comes at the cost of their moral deprivation and humanity. Since he shows no remorse himself and does not get punished for his crimes, he wishes to teach the next generation that something as heinous as murder (directly or indirectly) is also justified if it serves its purpose. Fundamentally, these fantasies are of a desperate and isolated man who envisions creating a different social order where he would not be judged for his actions or made to feel guilty about them. Balram’s yearning for the existence of such a community emerges from his lack of caste and class membership and a desire to reintegrate himself within some social structure. Such delusions of Balram reaffirm the impossibility of undermining the rooster coop.

Moreover, his need to confess his crime to a foreign dignitary like the Chinese Premier also hints at his need to form a community. Confessions are typically made to religious or moral exemplars, but a politician like the Chinese Premier hardly fits the bill. On the contrary, because Balram does not consider the Chinese Premier a moral standard, he feels comfortable confessing to him. Since he cannot find anybody from his community to connect to, he thinks that someone like the Chinese Premier will understand him, and he will not be judged by the same standards of morality or law as his peers. He compares himself with the Chinese Premier and says that every politician in this world, including Mr Jiabao, must have killed “someone or another on their way to the top” (ibid., 318). Again, he chooses the most exotic figure he could find and about whom he knows nothing but assumes the worst so that he could share his burden of guilt with him. Furthermore, typically confessions are geared towards the absolution of one’s sins so that the sinner could be reabsorbed into the community. But since Balram does not send those letters, it becomes a futile exercise, and the aporia continues in his case.

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