Adiga was just telling the truth. Please do not crib! Aravind Adiga has not been received with the kind of euphoria and exaltation such an instant celebrity would normally attract, because he portrayed India in a "bad light" in White Tiger, for which he won the Booker prize in 2008.
He is not hailed as national pride, but as one who has maligned India's name abroad. Leading the bandwagon has been the NRIs, the largely right wing, flag-waving, ultra-jingoistic crowd who are the unassuming brand ambassadors of 'India shining' campaign and who think they are the only true patriots. Popular web portals like Rediff, known for adding a pinch of jingoism to every possible news item, were replete with anti-Adiga remarks.
I am yet to read the book; but I can’t buy this-man-is-selling-India-abroad theory.
One would wonder how a middle-class, Oxford-educated chap could create the novel’s central character: the downtrodden, uneducated son of a rickshaw puller. We now know it wasn’t an “arm chair novel writing”, for he has had his share of legwork before settling down to write this novel.
In the first place it is amiss to say that Adiga's portrayal of the country is in bad taste, because he was only telling the truth: an India racked by poverty, diseases and corruption. And there’s no better way than fiction to tell the world about and thereby bring social change as rightly pointed out by Adiga himself in an interview by referring to what writers likes Charles Dickens did in the 19th century.
Articles on poverty shouldn't surprise anyone; but that's not the case with fiction, said journalist Jason Overdorf (himself a friend of Adiga) in Outlook. Fictions can have lasting impact unlike a normal report. (Now I remember about a recent Guardian report on the plight of people in Haiti who eat mud cakes because they don't have money to buy foods. This report doesn’t seem to have made any impact; what if the same issue is a subject of a novel? Of course more people will read it and the issue will get wider audience. I didn't mean to say things like this shouldn't be reported. I am just putting across the idea that how powerful fiction can be ).
Writers should strive for social change and it obviously involves telling the truth, which may turn out to be unpalatable to many. If Adiga had written about India's shiny happy people, a minority, glossing over the much larger picture of what is actually taking place in this country, the same 'patriotic' crowd now sneer ing at him would have been going ga ga after him.
Patriotism is not something that should be limited to cricket stadiums or on reading those flashy headlines about that false veneer of economic growth. Your love for the country remains hollow as long as you neglect the dark underbelly of 400 million people, the deprived, the marginalised and the neglected.
