Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

A go-getter from the lower class hinges himself to a rich patron, only to discover that he is useful just as long as he can outcompete the countless others striving to replace him. The South Indian town of Kittur, where the stories take place, represents all of India’s linguistic, religious, and cultural diversity, with its Muslim, Christian, and Hindu neighborhoods organized around the timeless principle of segregation. We might view the book almost as a justification for the chaos of post-1991, post-economic liberalization in India. Ambition is raw and abundant, but opportunity severely limited.

Someone from the village has come to the city to make his fortune but finds that the limits of caste and class stop him dead in his tracks. In the new book, Adiga tells the same basic story over and over. The linked-story format-which suggests that the propulsion isn’t there to support a full-fledged novel-serves this transitory context well.

India truly didn’t know, in those years, where it was going. This makes sense because whereas The White Tiger is located in a moment in which the fundamental decision to switch to a capitalist economy was already made, “between the assassinations” refers to that nowhere land of the late 1980s when Indira Gandhi had already been assassinated (ending a phase of national certainty handed down from Nehru) and Rajiv Gandhi, her more Western-oriented son, had yet to be assassinated. While The White Tiger is almost Forsterian in its desire to close the circle of the text, Between the Assassinations stifles closure, leaving everything to chance. Where The White Tiger is highly finished, voice-driven, and ferociously cogent and consistent, Between the Assassinations is determinedly un-centered, resists completion, and lacks the idiosyncratic private voice that often characterizes the postcolonial novel now. Between the Assassinations is less an expansion of novelistic possibility than a willful step back to explain the raw emotions that went into the earlier book. Set in the twenty-first century, it describes an India in the throes of globalization, amid the milieu of international call centers and falling bourgeois values.Īdiga has written not so much a follow-up as a shattering of the clear, one-sided lens through which we read The White Tiger. The White Tiger is about a hyper-ambitious Indian driver who takes revenge on an unjust economic and political system. It is difficult to build on a book as successful as The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Booker Prize, and is a substantial addition to the canon of Indian diasporic writing.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga