[1] The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India's class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy.
The novel examines issues of the Hindu religion, caste, loyalty, corruption, and poverty in India.
[2] The novel has been well-received, making the New York Times bestseller list in addition to winning the Booker Prize.
"[5] According to Adiga, the exigence for The White Tiger was to capture the unspoken voice of people from "the Darkness" – the impoverished areas of rural India, and he "wanted to do so without sentimentality or portraying them as mirthless humorless weaklings as they are usually.
"[5] Balram Halwai narrates his life in a letter, written in seven consecutive nights and addressed to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao.
In his letter, Balram explains how he, the son of a rickshaw puller, escaped a life of servitude to become a successful businessman, describing himself as an entrepreneur.
Balram was born in a rural village in Gaya district, where he lived with his grandmother, parents, brother and extended family.
He is a smart child but is forced to leave school in order to help pay for his cousin's dowry and begins to work in a teashop with his brother in Dhanbad.
He takes over the job of the main driver, from a small car to a heavy-luxury described Honda City.
One night Pinky Madam takes the wheel from Balram, while drunk, hits something in the road and drives away; the reader is left to assume that she has killed a child through contextual clues.
Balram then decides that killing Ashok will be the only way to escape India's Rooster Coop – Balram's metaphor for describing the oppression of India's poor, just as roosters in a coop at the market watch themselves get slaughtered one by one, but are unable or unwilling to break out of the cage.
[7] Similarly, Balram too is portrayed as being trapped in the metaphorical Rooster Coop: his family controls what he does and society dictates how he acts.
At the end of the novel, Balram rationalizes his actions and considers that his freedom is worth the lives of his family and of Ashok.
And thus ends the letter to Jiabao, letting the reader think of the dark humour of the tale, as well as the idea of life as a trap introduced by the writer.
The White Tiger takes place in a time in which increased technology has led to world globalization, and India is no exception.
This novel highlights the socioeconomic discrimination in India's economic system, which creates divisions in Indian society.
There is a big difference in the amount of money spread around in society today and this book is alluding to that fact.
A few, however, thought that he lectured in parts, caricatured extreme wealth and poverty, and missed an opportunity to say something meaningful about Balram’s desperation instead of mocking upper-class life.