Three days after seeing the wonderful award season-bait The White Tiger, produced by Priyanka Chopra-Jonas (amongst others), I fail to understand why I don’t remember much — if any — of the apt, biting zingers its protagonist-cum-antagonist Balram throws at the audience. Could it be that, despite witnessing a fascinating — albeit somewhat far-fetched — narrative, I didn’t care for Balram, or the rest of the characters at all? Maybe.

Made with a Slumdog Millionaire-ish template, the film, adapted by Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (Fahrenheit 451, Man Push Cart) from the Booker Prize-winning novel by Aravind Adiga, is a strange confabulation. Like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, it wants us to sympathise with — or at the very least give a nod of understanding to — desperate people who aren’t explicitly good or evil.

In this film’s case, the main focal point is Balram (Adarsh Gourav), an ambitious, at times aggravated, lower-caste young man whose backstory begins sometime in the 2000s, and culminates when he has apparently “made it” in 2010.

Balram tells his story in a long email to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who visited India in 2010. Balram fancies himself an entrepreneur, and often panders to the Chinese viewpoint. At one point he explicitly states in the email that the white people (Americans) are on the way out and that the future belongs to the brown- and the yellow-skinned (ie. Indians and Chinese — not Pakistanis; it’s not our story).

The adaptation of the Aravind Adiga novel The White Tiger by Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani feels true to its source though some creative choices grate

Frankly speaking, I’ve seen a similar type of uthao-giri (subservient behaviour) in my visits to the country. Mostly, it’s not their fault — rather, this comes off as an inbuilt reflex.

The racial bias is inbuilt in Balram who, in his youth, was singled out by his teacher for a scholarship that was taken away by his grandmother’s unyielding mindset, and the eventual death of his father by tuberculosis.

Balram knows his place, yet he often sees himself as a lowly critter with great aspirations. When he hears of the local landlord, dubbed the Stork in the film (Mahesh Majrekar), he convinces granny to let him venture off as the second driver of the house. The Stork is your typical mean monarch — an easily angered god who asks those beneath him to massage his calves and kicks them when they’re down.

His son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife Pinky (Chopra-Jonas) — an American who also hails from a lower-middle-class family — are better people … comparatively.

Ashok and Pinky’s sense of compassion is as lopsided as Balram’s sense of existence. They treat him as a human being, humour his authentic Indian view of life, take his farcical stories of Hindu myths at face-value, on a whim dress him up as a Maharajah for Pinky’s birthday, and then scold him as a master does a servant. Balram goes along with it, happy and angry at the same time.

Tragedy ensues … at the cost of ruining the narrative and the characters. People change, and Balram, who always harboured a warped sense of antagonism and a predilection for violence, takes destiny into his own hands.

As he himself states, he becomes the “White Tiger” — like the animal, he is a rarity in the densely populated, cut-throat world of India. By the end of the film, he shows you that, as a master of his own domain, he is better than his former masters. What he asks you to believe — by breaking the fourth wall — is a truth of his making.

Some of The White Tiger may look tangibly real, especially to those who have visited India and found familiar desperate stereotypes such as Balram. Still a lot of it feels incredulous, as if the grounded reality of the story has taken a backseat to grit, fantasy and creative choices.

One example of creative choice overpowering the story is the primary language of the film; apparently everyone in India speaks fluent English, but they also brusquely slip into Hindi for a few sentences. It is disconcerting, as if the filmmakers — and not the people — couldn’t make up their minds. Having not read the novel, I have no idea if this choice was imported from the source material. However, irrespective of the fact, the choice seems strange and weird at times.

For the most part The White Tiger carries an unapologetic tone for its themes and characters. In fact, it may very well revel in it: the film — and the people it showcases — are gritty, dark, off-putting, and unworthy of empathy. In other words, they’re the perfect award-season bait.

The White Tiger streams on Netflix. It is rated 16+ for mature themes, scenes of violence, sensuality and racial bigotry

Published in Dawn, ICON, January 31st, 2021

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