Ramin Bahrani (2021)

It’s not unusual for a screen adaptation of a novel written in the first person to rely on voiceover narrative as a way into the story.  Ramin Bahrani’s screenplay for The White Tiger, adapted from Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, does this to an excessive degree.  The result is, for over an hour, barely a film at all.  The images and events we’re watching are virtually redundant confirmation of what the voice on the soundtrack is telling us.  Although the later stages of The White Tiger aren’t quite so dependent on the off-screen storyteller, this narrative adjustment comes over less as a development than as discordance.  Bahrani, whose previous feature was 99 Homes (2014), never finds a coherent authorial voice of his own.

The film’s opening sequence takes place inside a speeding car.  Bahrani cuts away just as the backseat passenger sees a figure loom up in the vehicle’s path and yells to the driver.  The sequence is repeated about halfway through The White Tiger.  By now, we know the alarmed passenger is the protagonist, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav).  The intervening hour has charted his progress from rural poverty to a job as chauffeur to a rich young couple in Delhi.  They are the suave Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) – son of ‘the Stork’ (Mahesh Manjrekar), the cruelly exploitative landlord of the village of Laxmangarh where Balram grew up – and his even more westernised wife, Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas).  On her birthday, the couple go out to celebrate and get drunk.  Pinky insists on taking the wheel of their car.  The pedestrian who suddenly appears is a child, whom she knocks down and kills.  Balram is always keen to make a good impression with his bosses but even he is taken aback when they instruct him to sign a statement confirming that he was driving.  His obedient signing of the confession is the culmination of the master-servant relationship to which he has been firmly committed but also a turning point. Balram realises he’s regarded by his employers as thoroughly disposable.

So the worm turns but gradually – it takes ages for Balram to become the master that the storyline dictates he shall be.  In the event, no one is charged in relation to the road accident.  Pinky returns to New York, where she and Ashok first met.  Her shocked, abandoned husband has an emotional collapse through which Balram helps him – at the same time starting to cheat Ashok by fiddling expenses, using his car as a public taxi, and so on.  Once Ashok has (suddenly) recovered, he sets to work, on behalf of his father, bribing politicians so that the Stork clan avoids paying taxes.  Balram’s young nephew Dharam (Vedant Sinha) is sent by his family to live with his uncle and learn how to become a driver.  Balram eventually has a light bulb moment, murders Ashok and makes off with his boss’s bagful of money for bribes, fleeing Delhi and evading capture.  In Bangalore he bribes the local police to outlaw other, unlicensed taxi services, and invests the rest of the stolen cash in his own taxi business, whose monopoly brings Balram great financial success.  He treats his drivers as employees rather than servants, sponsors Dharam’s education and is sanguine about their relatives back in Laxmangarh being killed by the Stork’s men in revenge for Ashok’s death.  Balram also changes his name to Ashok Sharma.

Balram’s voice in the film is supposedly reading the text of an email that he’s sending to the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is visiting India and whom Balram would like to meet (but doesn’t).  I don’t know Aravind Adiga’s original but the film left me wondering if the novel presents Balram as a potentially unreliable narrator:  it’s not hard to imagine that readers might be kept guessing whether this teller of his own story really is a successful entrepreneur or a fantasist.  It would obviously be possible for a film-maker to play the audience in a similar way but Ramin Bahrani chooses not to.  He occasionally shows Balram in the act of composing his email, from which it’s clear at least that he looks the entrepreneurial part, with his man bun and laptop.  There’s no reason to think things didn’t actually happen as he describes them and as Bahrani, in the numerous flashbacks, shows them.  There is reason to become impatient with how long it takes for the penny to drop with Balram that he’s being exploited and for him to fight back.

The impatience results partly from knowing, from an early stage of Balram’s life story, that he’s unusually bright.  As a young adolescent (Harshit Mahawar), he’s offered a scholarship to a school in Delhi and told that he’s a ‘white tiger’ – a creature unique in each generation.  He can’t take up the scholarship:  with his ailing father (Satish Kumar) unable to pay the Stork, Balram is sent by his grandmother (Kamlesh Gill) to work at the village tea stall, and he gives up school altogether.  Once that’s happened, his exceptionality, along with his awareness of it, is put on ice until the time finally arrives for him to fulfil his destiny.  It’s a visit with Dharam to the Delhi zoo and the sight there of a white tiger that reminds Balram who he is. The narrative structure, as well as depriving the film of pace and suspense, also works to the disadvantage of Adarsh Gourav, the talented young actor who plays Balram.  From the early scenes in Laxmangarh, Gourav exudes a dynamic, sensitive intelligence.  He always compels attention and interest but it’s frustrating he has to spend much of the film doing unquestioning acceptance of the status quo.

Aravind Adiga uses the caste system and Hindu-Muslim enmities to give a specifically Indian take on his making-of-a-ruthless-capitalist theme.  Ramin Bahrani’s illustrations of the baleful consequences of these cultural traditions and of vast economic inequity are sometimes vivid.  There’s no denying that these and, especially, the lethally calculating climax to The White Tiger offer some kind of corrective to the upbeat falsity of Danny’s Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire.  You wonder, though, how much the impact of Adiga’s book was down to India’s relatively recent recognition as a powerhouse in the globalised economy.   The White Tiger was published in 2008 (the same year, incidentally, that Slumdog Millionaire was released) – just a few years after the term ‘BRIC economies’ was coined.  The events in the film too are taking place in the early years of the century; a decade or so later, India’s economic progress looks more irresistible than ever.  But this also means the phenomenon which Ashok Sharma, né Balram Halwai, represents is no longer any kind of dramatic surprise.  Although white tigers are doubtless more extraordinary than ever, a BRIC money-maker must now be born every minute rather than once in a generation.

25 February 2021