Rising to the top
‘White Tiger’ a fascinating tale of a man trying to escape his misery.
Raskolnikov, the poverty-stricken young protagonist in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” commits the former and suffers the latter, but it is in the nature of his moral retribution around which the novel so deftly revolves. After killing an old woman and her half-sister on the vague pretense of financially bettering himself, the feelings of guilt and self-disgust quickly overtake him, eventually leading to his confession, the act of which leads him to a sort of redemption where his soul can finally be cleansed.
It’s a common recurring narrative arc in world literature (for further literary reference toward crime and guilt, see also Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”), the idea that even if you can get away with a heinous crime, the nature of our humanity is such that our conscience won’t allow us any peace until we’ve met our proper karmic fate. It’s a surprisingly comforting idea, that even when we do knowingly commit sin, our nature won’t rest until moral balance is restored. It is also such a blindingly romantic notion of absolute morality that it can’t possibly be true.
Near the end of Ramin Bahrani’s “The White Tiger,” a film about a young, impoverished Indian man from a lower caste trying
to escape his miserable fate, however, our protagonist Balram (Adarsh Gourav), having viciously dispatched his master earlier, refutes Dostoevsky’s very premise about guilt: “It doesn’t happen like that,” he observes to a crowd of men who now work for him. “The real nightmare is the other kind, when you feel like you didn’t do it … that you lost your nerve, and that you’re still a servant to another man.”
As Balram has it, being born poor in India is a trap from which only a very select few (the “white tigers” of the title) can hope to escape. Worse, like the proverbial rooster crate, the victims can plainly see their impending doom laid out before them, and can still do nothing to prevent it from happening. Such is the indentured nature of their upbringing, the lessons of servitude driven so deep into a poor person’s psyche, that they can’t even contemplate escaping the matrix and becoming free.
As we observe from Balram’s own humble beginnings, a servant’s smile has to contain many things, and conceal a great many more. It has to show your master your trustworthiness, your utter dedication to their service, how much the act of serving them brings you deeper joy and purpose than anything else in your life. While accomplishing all that, it also has to shroud the servant’s truest feelings of fury, bitterness, disgust and rebuke, the violence they feel in their hearts, and how close they are at all times to unleashing it. In forcing themselves to embrace subservience, they submerge their truest selves in a self-sabotaging destruction of their own psyche.
Bahrani’s film, an adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Aravind Adiga, makes a point of the servant’s smile, as it’s so frequently plastered on the face of its protagonist. In Balram’s life, just getting a gig as a driver for a rich family outside of his dusty, bedraggled village is an act of desperate calculation far beyond anything anyone else in his family might contemplate. And once ensconced there, becoming the driver for an oligarch’s son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), and his wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra), as they move to Delhi, where Ashok has plans to move his family’s business from coal to outsourcing, Balram is free to continue his journey from the “darkness” as he describes the life of the many hundreds of impoverished millions in his country, over to the wealthy man’s “light.”
Along the way, he endures the endless indignities of his class and place: living in a filthy, little room in the underground garage of an expensive apartment complex with the other drivers, as his master sleeps in a penthouse apartment above; taking constant verbal and physical abuse from Ashok’s crooked father (Mahesh Manjrekar), and brother (Vijay Maurya); and being forced to sign a document “confessing” to a crime he didn’t commit in order to protect Pinky from possible legal repercussions. Even to the more enlightened Pinky and Ashok, who mostly grew up in America, Balram’s usefulness is mostly as a human shield, protecting his wealthy employers from their own mistakes and indulgences. Through it all, he smiles, and subjugates, and speaks in imploringly circular sentence structures (“Sir, very brilliant, sir”), while keeping his ears open, waiting for any opportunity to make his move.
Framed as an imploring letter to a powerful Chinese dignitary upon his arrival in Delhi, Balram tells his story from the beginning, starting out as a powerless peasant whose caste relegates him to a life of subjugation and strife, eking out a living and sending all available money back home to his relentless grandmother, who controls the family’s meagre finances with an iron fist. Without severe intervention in his own affairs, Balram knows all too well the years of pointless labor and strife that will be his to embrace, much as his own father’s life was a never-ending succession of failure and preordained suffering.
Essentially, it’s a familiar rags-to-riches sort of story — albeit, as Balram points out, not in the form of some feel good “game show” doling out a million rupees to the winner (a not terribly veiled shot at “Slumdog Millionaire,” which turns India’s debilitating poverty into a sort of joyous fantasia) — but rather than show the moral decline of Balram, casting him out after an act of violence, Bahrani’s film makes an entirely different sort of point: In a world in which the rich have everything in their favor, in a system designed specifically to continue their wealthy position at the expense of everyone below them, and a rigid caste system that has so beaten down the country’s citizens they can’t begin to escape its clutches, morality has already been obliterated.
The only thing an enlightened “entrepreneur” can do is act accordingly when he recognizes the manner in which the game is stacked against him (as Balram quotes the Buddha to Ashok on the night of their fateful encounter, “I’m just one who has woken up while the rest of you are still sleeping.”)
It’s a powerful idea, masterfully executed by Bahrani, whose precision and compelling mise en scene help forge Balram’s journey from an individual’s arc into an indictment of an entire social order, like a single drop of rain hurtling into a vast and raging ocean of class suppression and wealth imbalance. The greatest trick the wealthy ever pulled off, it would seem, is to convince the vast majority of their countrymen and women that their lot is so inescapable, they must not even attempt to subvert the system in order to better themselves.
It’s a brilliant piece of filmmaking, which is why Netflix’s at-first curious packaging — the digital movie poster, with Balram sitting and smiling crazily into the camera with a a drawn-on crown on his head, as Ashok and Pinky stand beatifically over him, suggests something far more comedic and disposable — and Bahrani’s control of tone works so effectively. The director has structured it so the film’s true subversive instincts aren’t revealed until near the end. Balram’s story initially seems lightly satiric, shrouding itself like his ever-plastered smile in front of Ashok, inviting trust and asserting loyalty beyond reproach. By the end, though, as Balram stares into the camera a final time, up close, he allows his bright, guileless expression to finally drop as he walks out of frame.