The Faces of Urban Camouflage: A Tale of Survival in The White Tiger

Introduction

In twenty-first century Delhi, much like other modern cities, an uncanny force with time erases the distinctions between localities, buildings, and people. Old structures don glass facades, assimilating their appearance; individuals from diverse communities strive to blend into the masses, while urban planners and developers skillfully imitate a “world-class aesthetic” (Ghertner 146) for a global city. The forces of globalisation and neoliberalism overlay the cityscape with concrete-steel-glass monoliths and networks of roads. Intriguingly, these developments that breed inequality, class segregation, and gentrification, become one of the defining features of the city (Butcher). Consequently, a struggle for survival ensues, perpetuating a cycle of conformity. This, in essence, creates a vicious cycle, fuelled by practices of assimilation and imitation that culminate in the larger act of camouflage: blending seamlessly with the environment to ensure survival. 

This paper explores the concept of urban camouflage as an ouroboros, drawing insights from Aravind Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger (2008). Through an analysis of the novel, it delves into how forms of camouflage operate within the city, figuring as a self-devouring serpent and ultimately contributing to the production of a  dystopian reality.  Camouflage is read here as a phenomenon that creates spaces of sameness in the city which systematically exclude and marginalise outliers like the novel’s protagonist Balram, a poor migrant worker, pushing him to survive by assimilating and conforming to the codes and conventions set by those who have placed him on the fringes of society. 

Taking recourse to black humour, the novel tests the readers’ susceptibility as it stretches the boundaries of conventional morality with a certain relativist ethics of its own. The title works on the analogy between the white tiger surviving in an unforgiving jungle and Balram making his way through a ruthless cityscape. Both these ‘creatures’ cannot wholly assimilate and belong in their environment. The white tiger’s distinct identity forces it to come out of hiding and strike both prey and predator for survival. Similarly, Balram’s identity of being a working-class migrant from a village necessitates scheming and hoodwinking so he may rise above his fellow servants in the eyes of the elites whom he serves: in such conditions, he owes his loyalty to no one but himself.  

The unassuming title of the novel gestures towards the warped bildungsroman of a man rising in stature from a bonded labourer to a servant-cum-driver to an entrepreneur. The injustice that he suffers on his way provokes the reader to justify Balram’s ultimate use of fraud, deception, and murder to free himself from the bonds of a master-servant relationship. The humour creates a sense of unease as the story of his life unfolds, replete with the drudgery and humiliation that shape the reality of blue-collar workers and migrant labourers who storm the city in search of a better life. Aman Sethi’s A Free Man (2011) and Rana Dasgupta’s Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014) paint a similar picture of Delhi and its people through narrative reportage, and the voices of the real individuals in their accounts seem to find echoes in Adiga’s novel. 

Visual Markers of Conformity and Otherness

D. Asher Ghertner in Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (2015) highlights how in Delhi certain visual markers and codes determine who and what can rightfully belong in the city. The normativity that operates in the development and planning of the city forces outsiders (including the poor and other marginalised identities) to reorient themselves, their thoughts, and their activities in accordance with diktats of  urban acceptability. In his case study of Shiv Camp, a slum settlement affected by demolitions towards Delhi’s transformation into a ‘world-class city’, Ghertner uncovers intriguing perspectives among the residents. While they fight for their right to belong in the city, they are simultaneously conditioned to believe that their slums lack legitimacy in the new urban landscape. This paradox arises due to the normalisation of a hegemonic “world-class aesthetic” (156), leading residents to seek social legitimacy within the system ordained for civic planning. 

Inside the slum dwellings, Ghertner observes posters depicting opulent bungalows with gardens, representing the idea of ‘proper’ homes in line with the authorities’ vision of a world-class living standard. These images offer hope and a sense of possibility to the residents amid demolitions and housing loss. As they aspire to a better future, the desire to attain wealth and own a house becomes a means of securing their place in society, driving their subjecthood in the city. However, the harsh reality of displacement often turns these aspirations into unattainable fantasies rather than achievable goals (141-156).

At first glance, conformity and otherness seem to be determined predominantly by visual aspects. City structures, people’s attires, behavioural patterns, and actions, all contribute to producing distinctions. In the novel, Balram describes how rickshaws which dominate the streets of Old Delhi “are not allowed inside the posh parts of Delhi” (Adiga 27). Visuals of rickshaws and rickshaw pullers fall outside the range of acceptable and modern public transport in a ‘developed’ city. The imagery of “thin, sticklike men, leaning forward from the seat of a bicycle, as they pedal along a carriage bearing a pyramid of a middle-class flesh-some fat man with his fat wife and all their shopping bags and groceries” (Adiga 27) appears too coarse and distasteful for the refined sensibilities of the city’s elite.  

Shopping malls and five-star hotels, on the other hand, are emblematic of modern cities. The construction of such structures creates a “hegemony of form” in city spaces, overlaying the landscape with power and order (Ghertner 125). Malls are classic spaces in globalised and neoliberal cities that heighten the gentrification dividing classes (Goss 18–47). The imposing architecture of malls, coupled with an awareness of the goods and services they offer and the presence of security personnel at the entrance, automatically communicates to lower-class workers that this is not a place where they might be welcome. Balram observes that when employers visit malls, their drivers patiently wait outside in the parking spaces, aware that they are not allowed inside without anyone explicitly inviting them. When those who are presumed not to belong dare to enter such spaces, they are categorically stopped in their quest to defy the distinctions between the rich and the poor, as their appearance and apparel readily reveal their identity. When a group of drivers in the novel sees a poor man’s failed attempt to infiltrate a mall, one of the drivers says: “If all of us were like that, we’d rule India, and they [the rich] would be polishing our boots” (Adiga 149). To understand why these drivers instinctively refrain from attempting to enter the mall, one must see the phenomenon in the context of  Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality or the “conduct of conduct” (Dean 18). Forces of governance in modern societies of surveillance operate at various levels and forms, encompassing rationality, morality, and ethics (Dean 18-20). This influence extends to individuals as they internalise power structures and norms, leading them to understand the boundaries they will be penalised for transgressing.

Balram’s Transgression and Survival in the City

Balram finds himself in a habitus^* where exploitation, inhumanity, corruption, and disregard for human lives are the norm. The village’s socioeconomic framework has moulded circumstances in which his family persists in a position of subservience to the landlords, simultaneously imposing the expectation upon Balram to dutifully embrace his assigned role and status. In the village, he has seen the abject exploitation of his family and the people of his caste, and in the city the enslavement of servants and their resultant and routine debasement. For him, taking recourse to dishonesty and corruption, which has ultimately boosted the growth of his employers, therefore becomes a way of understanding and manipulating the system. In one instance, a fellow driver tells Balram about the stratagem adopted by drivers and servants to leverage their positions in the master-servant relationship. This includes reselling expensive liquor bottles, siphoning off the petrol, and managing a side business of taxi driving while the employer is at work. In the city, people like Balram then have a community where they can belong. While cleverly securing their position, they do not trespass the boundaries of conformity outlined in the city. 

Unlike his fellow drivers, Balram, partly owing to consistent exposure to the ugly economic divide of the city and partly because he is enticed  by the opulence of the wealthy, skillfully disguises himself to infiltrate the predator’s den. This chameleon-like quality is evident in his almost obsessive fascination with chandeliers when he becomes a successful entrepreneur after killing his employer and moving to Bangalore. For him, chandeliers, which he first saw in his employer’s house back in the village, are symbols of prosperity and power. In Bangalore when he dons his new identity of an affluent and successful man, these chandeliers help him conceal his erstwhile identity. 

Balram becomes aware of the abject condition of the quarters allotted to him when one day his employer Ashok visits his room and finds it appalling and uncomfortable. Ashok who lives in the ignorance of comfort finds Balram’s room uninhabitable. For him, Balram has thus far been an insentient figure appearing whenever he needs any help. Looking at Balram in his room within the servants’ quarters of his sprawling apartment complex oddly provokes Ashok to finally perceive him as a real human being. The narrator describes this moment: , “[Ashok’s] eyes [seem] full of wonder: how could two such contrasting specimens of humanity be produced by the same soil, sunlight, and water?” (79). The uneasiness that Ashok experiences upon discovering Balram’s living conditions, stems from the fact that his servant does not adhere to the conventional standards and aesthetics of living to which Ashok himself is accustomed. This in turn makes Balram conscious of his difference and deviance from the way rich people live and conduct themselves. And this encounter therefore creates a pivotal fissure between his mind and body. Physically he is still a servant, but mentally he starts to think like his masters: “and so I [see] the room with his eyes; [smell] it with his nose; [poke] it with his fingers – I [have] already began to digest my master” (74-79).

Ashok’s wife Pinky also makes Balram perceive his aberrations from the norms that dictate how men of stature appear and behave. She finds him scratching his groin, an activity that Balram admits drivers subconsciously do from boredom, and scolds him: “ 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!” (146). This provocation makes Balram buy a T-shirt similar to the ones that Ashok wears, a white shirt with a small design in the centre, something that Balram would have never bought himself. His choice would have been “something very colourful, with lots of words and designs on it. [That would have been a better] value for the money” (149). Along with the T-shirt, he buys a pair of black shoes and toothpaste to clean his teeth. He also consciously stops himself from his unmannerly habit of groin-scratching, questioning the circumstances that make the “poor live amid such filth, and ugliness” (151). 

When Balram feels that he has camouflaged himself well enough as rich, mannered, and polite, he gathers courage and visits a mall. Though the terror of being identified and exposed by the guards does not leave him, he finds roaming inside the mall an exhilarating and intoxicating experience. He is equally aware that he has cracked open codes that till now have successfully kept people like him outside of such silos. He labels this transgressive act his “first taste of the fugitive’s life” (152).

Balram’s imitation of his employer Ashok’s manners seems to be a mimicry of dress, behaviour, and gestures in the sense Homi Bhabha conceptualises it within his postcolonial criticism, bearing the shadow of a colonial hangover. This mimicking is never complete because of the ambivalence in it; it remains “at once resemblance and menace” (Bhabha 127). It is governed by the logic of being “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 127). The resemblance remains a partial representation and the menace of mimicry also disrupts its authority as is seen by the hasty and inappropriate behaviour of Balram. Moving from an individual to a societal level, a similar condition of mimicry is visible in the modality of transforming Delhi into a “world-class city” (Ghertner 8). Ghertner has noted how the transformation project of Delhi is undertaken through a skewed survey of city space, primarily focusing on its visual aspects, where “slums are deemed illegal because they looked illegal” (184). The visual standards and norms of a post-industrial global city have created a “diffused normative consensus” (184) through which the authorities shape the city, calling upon the common populace to align themselves.

Summing Up

The manner in which urban camouflage operates in Delhi reveals a fascinating interplay between power dynamics, social norms, and individual survival strategies. The city’s visual markers and codes of appearance act as gatekeepers, determining who can belong and who is excluded, continually generating spaces that are unwelcoming and threatening to those who don’t naturally fit into their aesthetics. 

Adiga’s novel, The White Tiger, serves as a compelling entrypoint for exploring the complex interaction between such camouflage and vulnerable urban subjectivities. It is a satirical tale that shows the pervasive effects of globalisation, neoliberalism, and societal norms on the urban landscape, which collectively shape both the physical spaces and the psychological behaviour of individuals in the metropolis. Power structures in the city, reflected in its urban planning, perpetuate inequality and marginalisation such that people who find themselves at the margins are forced to mimic the behaviours of the elite and conform to societal standards in order to survive.

Balram’s reaction to the city’s gentrifying impulses, in some ways, mirrors that of the residents of Shiv Camp in Ghertner’s analysis. Both demonstrate their resilience and resolve to establish their legitimacy in an unequal society by adopting the aesthetics and cultural norms which produce that social order. 

To realise his aspirations and in pursuit of survival, Balram bends the contours of conventional morality throughout the novel. For instance, upon joining his master’s household as a servant, Balram finds himself in competition with an older servant who holds a higher status in the servant hierarchy. But he deviously identifies a key vulnerability in the older servant’s identity and outs the latter as a Muslim when he had been pretending to be a Hindu all this while. In what he considers to be a society governed by the rule of the jungle, where only the fittest survive, Balram sees an opportunity to secure his position as the top servant and strategically betrays the old servant’s secret. His actions come to demonstrate the extreme lengths to which individuals may go to secure their place in a society that marginalises and exploits the vulnerable.

Balram’s story serves as a poignant reflection of the moral ambiguities that arise for the sake of survival in an unjust society, where one must often compromise their values to thrive. Balram’s crimes can therefore be read as a product of the  unjust society that shaped his mind. His unyielding and malevolent personality is produced by the systemic oppression he has faced right from his childhood. The city makes him what he thinks is a rebel, fashioning himself after the rich till he becomes one of  them, both in terms of economic stature and social behaviour. The validity of his actions and motivations is ultimately left to the reader to decide. Instead of proffering judgments, the novel presents the realities faced by those living on the fringes of society and the lengths to which they may go to alleviate their circumstances. Balram’s narrative portrays the complexities bred by urban landscapes in modern India, where the pursuit of success and upward mobility can lead individuals down morally ambiguous paths, inviting readers to confront the stark realities of social inequality and the harsh consequences of a society driven by greed and exploitation. The White Tiger ultimately provokes us to question the ethical implications of such a system and the impact that it has on individuals like Balram, who are both products and victims of their environment.