Aravind Adiga began his journalistic career as a financial journalist, interning at the Financial Times. With pieces published in the Financial Times and Money, he covered the stock market and investment, interviewing, among others, Donald Trump. Adiga's review of previous Booker Prize winner Peter Carey's 1988 book, Oscar and Lucinda, appeared in The Second Circle, an online literary review. Adiga was subsequently hired by TIME, where he remained a South Asia correspondent for three years before going freelance. During this freelance period, he wrote The White Tiger. He now lives in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.
Booker Prize
Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Booker Prize. He is the fourth Indian-born author to win the prize, after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai. The five other authors on the shortlist included one other Indian writer and another first-time writer. The novel studies the contrast between India's rise as a modern global economy and the lead character, Balram, who comes from crushing rural poverty. Adiga explained that "criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of the 19th century helped England and France become better societies". Shortly after he won the prize, it was alleged that Adiga had, the previous year, sacked the agent who had secured his contract with Atlantic Books at the 2007 London Book Fair. In April 2009, it was announced that the novel would be adapted into a feature film. Propelled mainly by the Booker Prize win, The White Tigers Indian hardcover edition sold more than 200,000 copies.
Academic criticism
According to Ana Cristina Mendes, The White Tiger falls prey to "inauthenticity": Adiga a well-read Indian author who writes in English, having been educated at Oxford and Columbia – errs on the side of an unconvincing colloquialism by making his characters speak a language of the Indian underground, which he himself masters only to a certain extent. The novel is described as a first-person bildungsroman and placed within the wider context of contemporary Indian writing in English, as a novel about "the Darkness" and a fascinating success story about the overnight rise of one character from rags to riches, but also about India’s development as a global market economy. Mendes notices in this a certain artificiality, cleverly masked by irony, and remarks the “'cardboard cut-out' title character equipped with an inauthentic voice that ultimately undermines issues of class politics". Pakistani blogger Sarmad Iqbal reviewed Adiga's The White Tiger for International Policy Digest, saying: "This novel in multiple ways was an eye opener for me about the rising India as being a Pakistani I grew up listening to and learning nothing good about India. As I got acquainted with all the dark secrets of a rising India divulged by Adiga in this novel, I came across several astonishing similarities between what goes in the 'enemy state' I knew from my childhood and my own country Pakistan." Other academics find the book to be a fascinating assessment of the ongoing development of India as a nation, written with a manner of direct honesty, humour and frankness few authors can harness when attempting to evaluate their own nations. Adiga provides readers with a broad perspective on the ancient ideas of historic India as they contrast with the last 120 years of rapid societal change and advancement. Readers who have spent significant periods of time in India can glean essential insights from the book while appreciating the author's firsthand knowledge of the subtleties of the diverse and intoxicating cast of people that make India such an interesting place, be it tragic or breathtaking.
Other works
Adiga's second book, Between the Assassinations, was released in India in November 2008 and in the US and UK in mid-2009; twelve interlinked short stories comprise this book. His second novel and third published book, Last Man in Tower, was published in the UK in 2011. His third novel, Selection Day, was published on 8 September 2016.
