While his books deal with the life of India's less fortunate, Booker winner Aravind Adiga casts aside suggestions he's a social crusader, writes FIONA McCANN
'I'VE FAILED at just about everything I've tried," says Aravind Adiga with convincing diffidence. "Which is why I've got to be a novelist." He is sitting in a hotel bar at Dublin Airport, fresh off a flight from London where he's been promoting his new book, Between the Assassinations, less than a year after taking home the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Yet despite the latter's international success, Adiga seems determined not to rest on his laurels. The Indian author's face is boyish, its expression earnest, and he speaks quickly in a musical accent, his sentences spilling forth as he insists that writing is his last resort. "I'm good at nothing else. What else can I do? I flopped as an academic and I don't like being a journalist, so there's not much else to do really. This is it. This is what lazy people end up doing."
For a man with the literary world at his feet, Adiga is astoundingly self-deprecating. Despite placing pieces in prestigious publications, such as Timemagazine and the Financial Timesduring his short-lived journalistic career, he still describes it as "something to do before I did my novel". It was a career, he says, he began mainly to guard against his insecurity about returning unemployed to India after studies at Columbia University in New York and Oxford.
“I wanted to come back to India because I was living abroad then, but I was too middle class and frightened to come back without a job,” he recalls. “I’m surprised now how timid I was. I waited for years for the right job to take me back. But that was all journalism was meant to do, it was supposed to pay for me while I wrote my book.”
That book, The White Tiger, went on to win him the 2008 Man Booker Prize, with Michael Portillo, chair of the judging panel, saying it was chosen above the other shortlisted books because of "its originality". This is not a word Adiga would use about his own work. "There's very little or no original thinking in The White Tiger," he tells me categorically.
“If you had stayed in India as a novelist and just been alive for the past five or six years, and had any brains about you, you would have written a novel like this. I don’t know why someone else hadn’t done it.”
The White Tigeris the story of the son of a rickshaw-puller who is forced through poverty to leave school and become a servant for one of the country's rich minority. For Adiga, it was about "finding a literary way to capture the voice of a large part of the country, perhaps the majority of the country, which is no longer much represented in cinema or literature".
It was, he explains, an attempt to make visible the invisible. “It may seem obvious to outsiders that we have poor people in India, but as a middle class Indian this is not an obvious thing,” he explains. “The poor just seem like people on the margins. They are invisible. Often, you don’t even see them. They’re your servants.” Yet Adiga is at pains to distance himself from any suggestion of social crusading. “The impetus for this wasn’t really anger or any kind of moral righteousness. Just a writer’s desire to write, [and] my curiosity about these people about whom I’d known nothing.”
To address this dearth of knowledge, he did what he says few of his Indian peers ever do: he talked to working class people, poor people, people outside of his social milieu. “I went travelling through India, talking to people in a way that I wouldn’t [have] talked to them before.”
So didn’t this middle class, Oxford-educated 34-year-old have any compunction about writing about those so far from his own experience? He bristles at the suggestion. “That’s the whole point of writing literature, trying to imagine you’re someone you’re not.” He may not have been motivated by anger to write about his country’s poor, but the suggestion that he wasn’t qualified to do so clearly gets his back up. “People in India do ask me this, and that’s a question that can only come out of a hierarchical society. For me it’s a very disturbing question,” he says, his voice fierce with a calm kind of fury. “It’s almost a function of India’s long legacy of caste that someone would even think of this, that you can’t imagine yourself in the skin of someone else. To me, it’s a great silliness. If that were true there’d be no point in writing anything. It’s the whole purpose of being an author.” He pauses, and the passion recedes. “Whether you succeed or not is another thing.”
For many, Adiga's success is easy to measure, with a Man Booker Prize and its concomitant £50,000 (€57,800) cheque in the bag, and book number two, Between the Assassinations, already garnering him comparisons with John Steinbeck and Anton Chekhov. Yet Adiga himself seems wearied by such acclaim. "I gather writers are important [in Ireland]," he acknowledges. "But [in India] we get put in our proper place, which is pretty low down the scale."
His prize winning, he assures me, has had little effect on his own day-to-day life in India. “I don’t think anyone in my building knows or cares,” he says dismissively. “My life hasn’t really changed in any way in Bombay, and I prefer it this way. It’s not a complaint! It’s a statement of deep gratitude to a city that continues to treat me like crap, as it did before, which hopefully means I’ll still write about these people.” While he seems impatient with the hoopla that surrounds the big prize itself, he acknowledges that the lengthy consideration process that preceded his win had its advantages. “The longlisting is what’s really important as a first-time writer,” he explains. “That was the happiest moment of the entire process for me . . . because once you’re on the longlist, you’ll get a second book.”
That second book, Between the Assassinations, was already in the pipeline when he took home the prize for his first. A book of 14 short stories set in a fictitious village on India's south-western coast, its title refers to the period between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the murder of her son Rajiv in 1991.
" The White Tigeris set in the new India, and I had planned another book in the last years of the old India," he explains. "They were meant to go together, one before globalisation and one after. The year 1991 is the dividing year of Indian history."
The two books were intended to work in parallel, and they have their crossing points: like its predecessor, Between the Assassinationsis once again peopled by characters at the wrong end of social injustices. Among the upper-caste businessmen and privileged schoolboys whose voices are included here are the servants, the beggars and the underclass who live alongside them. "Just open your eyes, it's all around you in India," says Adiga. "It's not an exposé of anything. It's just opening your eyes to what's happening."
Downplaying any reading of his work as social revelation, Adiga continuously returns to the themes of social injustice that permeate his work almost despite himself, all the time conscious of the fact that he is writing about people who will probably never get to read his work. “If I were poor, I wouldn’t be wasting my time reading a book, I’d be figuring out how to survive,” he admits. “The book was always written for a middle class Indian audience. These are the people who are the intended audience. These are the people who can change things in India.”
And there is much to change. In clipped, short sentences, Adiga details problems of illiteracy, bad sanitation and the extreme poverty of his home country. It’s a far cry from black tie Booker balls and overpriced coffees in airport hotels. “My main concern when I get back to Bombay is whether I’ll have water tomorrow.”
It's clearly another world, the one from which Adiga writes. Yet some things still manage to bridge the distance. "Do you cover literature on a regular basis?" he asks, and when I answer in the affirmative, he smiles. "Are you the person from The Irish Timeswho was abusing me after the Booker?" I am reminded that this newspaper's literary correspondent used words like "trite" and "opportunistic" about Adiga's debut, comparing it to "a polemical cartoon for grown-ups". I hurriedly assure him that I am not said literary correspondent. "We heard about it in India," Adiga tells me with a smile. Maybe it's not so far away after all.
Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga, is published by Atlantic Books
