Quest for Identity: A Study of Self-Animalisation in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

Authors

  • Puru Sharma Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh
  • Dr. Harneet Kaur Sandhu Post-Graduate Department of English, Guru Gobind Singh College for Women Chandigarh

Keywords:

Animality, Animalisation, Animal Imagery, Animal Metaphor, Animal Symbolism, Self and Identity

Abstract

This paper will look at the technique of animalisation in Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008), where the animal, the white tiger, is not just a tiger in a cage but a trope for the ‘tiger-ness’ of the ‘ever-so-ready to pounce’ attitude of the young Indian. The novel shows the predicament of the Indian youth belonging to the lower strata of society who find themselves trapped just like a tiger in his cage. As will be shown, the white tiger in Adiga’s novel has been variously used to symbolize the ideas of individuality, freedom, aggression, survival and hypermasculinity. Through the discourse of animality, this paper will contend that for the protagonist, Balram, animalising or bestializing himself as a white tiger becomes an important meaning-making exercise to profess his identity and come to terms with his immediate exploitative reality, especially in the context of the rising class conflict and deteriorating socio-economic conditions in the Indian scenario. The novel is replete with instances of animalisation and bestialisation. This paper attempts to find out why does Balram bestialise himself as the white tiger and how does such an exercise help him? It is an undertaking in the field of cultural anthropology and it will border the theoretical concepts of the area of Human-animal studies.

Author Biographies

Puru Sharma, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh

Puru Sharma is a PhD student and a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. His research interests lie in the areas of Human-Animal Studies and English Language Teaching. For his doctoral thesis, he is working on the textual representation of the tiger to underscore the discourse of species. He also teaches Cultural Studies paper to post-graduate students in the Department. Along with presenting papers at various national and international seminars and conferences, he recently had his story, “A Painter’s Love for Squirrel,” published in an anthology by Notion Press titled Cursed Love.

Dr. Harneet Kaur Sandhu , Post-Graduate Department of English, Guru Gobind Singh College for Women Chandigarh

Dr. Harneet Kaur Sandhu is an Associate Professor in the Post-Graduate Department of English, Guru Gobind Singh College for Women, Chandigarh with over two decades of teaching experience. She is also a research supervisor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. She has presented several research papers at numerous national and international seminars and conferences along with the publication of research articles in various reputed journals. In addition to her poems being published by Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi, she also has a book titled Tom Stoppard’s Experiments with Drama (2010) to her credit.

References

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Published

01-01-2023

How to Cite

Puru Sharma, & Harneet Kaur Sandhu. (2023). Quest for Identity: A Study of Self-Animalisation in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. Journal of Teaching and Research in English Literature, 14(1), 9–18. Retrieved from https://journals.eltai.in/index.php/jtrel/article/view/JTREL140103

Issue

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2023): January

Section

Research Articles