INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056

Traits of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch in Balram of Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”

A.Gandhimathi1, Dr.P.Santhi2 1 Research Scholar, Department of English Kandaswami Kandar’s College P.Velur (Namakkal) – 638 182 & Lecturer in English Thiagarajar Polytechnic College, Salem - 636005 [email protected]

2Associate Professor of English Kandaswami Kandar’s College P.Velur (Namakkal) – 638 182 [email protected]

Abstract— Postcolonial literatures depict a surfeit of themes from erstwhile British colonies sparkling with composite issues of the society – political, sociological, psychological, economic and racial. Ubermensch, the ’s hypothesis, is a dominant premise. Aravind Adiga’s “Superman” Balram in The White Tiger is this archetype. In Aravind Adiga’s words, every human being wants this: “To take control of your own life, to become an entrepreneur, to get rich quickly, is now a fairly common dream. You don’t want to wait three or four generations.” Through Balram, the novelist Aravind Adiga renders the ruthlessness of power and survival which assume a million moral ambiguities in the post independent India. Balram’s life hops from one place to another due to his belied expectations leading to disillusionment – from the pluralistic nondescript Laxmangarh to Delhi and terminating in Bangalore. He is exposed to the hierarchy, sycophancy, corruption and ruthlessness in the exploitation of the poor and the downtrodden in the shifting environment at every level. His dubious deeds, deserting the family and murdering his master, in his unsavoury march towards self enhancement and donning the mantle of a popular entrepreneur is certainly contentious. Balram is akin to white tiger with its emblematic features. Still he draws our compassion for his ability to extricate himself from Rooster Coop unlike his father and from the mire of poverty, filth and servitude prevalent in society. In short, his character is polyvalent and multi perspective in mould.

Keywords— Ubermencsh, Superman, Balram, The White Tiger, Self enhancement

I. INTRODUCTION Postcolonial literatures flourish with a plethora of themes originating from the erstwhile colonies, now nations, spread across all zones of the globe. These writings accommodate and assimilate far ranging segments of their society with the milieu impacted by the political, sociological, psychological, economic and racial facets. The bearing is apparent in various degrees at an assortment of levels. A singular prototype is the quest for identity through exceptional endeavours of the protagonists of these writings to accomplish the best. In words, they become super human individuals bent upon realizing their “motives” through radical, rather, in the main, unacceptable and unforeseen fashions. To be precise, these archetypes fall under Friedrich Nietzsche’s categorization “Ubermensch.” These atypical personas emerge as a result of “the dissatisfaction that prompted them to take refuge in other-worldliness and embrace other-worldly values” (Nietzsche). But the crux of the issue is that this bias manifests into disproportionate dimensions leading to catastrophic consequences (Priyanka, 157). The following paragraph sketches certain niceties of the concept, Ubermensch.

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II. ATTRIBUTES OF UBERMENSCH The Ubermensch, "Beyond-Man", "Superman", "Over man", "Superhuman", "Hyper man" or "Hyper human", is a theory in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book, , Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra hypothesize the Ubermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. It is a work of philosophical allegory, with a structural similarity to the Gathas of Zoroaster /Zarathustra (Wikipedia). The German prefix Uber can have connotations of superiority, transcendence, excessiveness or intensity, depending on the words to which it is attached. Mensch refers to a member of the human species, rather than to a male specifically. The adjective ubermenschlich means super-human, in the sense of beyond human strength or out of proportion to humanity. The Ubermensch also represents a higher biological type reached through artificial selection and at the same time, it is also an ideal epithet for anyone who is creative and strong enough to master the whole spectrum of human potential, good and "evil", to become an "artist-tyrant". He adds that Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Ubermensch to serve as a Machiavellian bogeyman of the modern Western middle class and its pseudo- Christian egalitarian value system. The Ubermensch shares a place of prominence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with another of Nietzsche's key concept: “the eternal recurrence of the same”. The eternal recurrence replaces the Ubermensch as the object of serious aspiration. The term Ubermensch was utilized frequently by Hitler and the Nazi regime to describe their idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race; a form of Nietzsche's Ubermensch became a philosophical foundation for the National Socialist ideas. Their conception of the Ubermensch, however, was racial in nature. The thought of Nietzsche had an important influence in anarchist authors. There were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behaviour of 'herds'; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an 'over man' — that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave; his praise of the ecstatic and creative self, with the artist as his prototype, who could say, 'Yes' to the self-creation of a new world on the basis of nothing; and his forwarding of the 'transvaluation of values' as source of change, as opposed to a Marxist conception of class struggle and the dialectic of a linear history. To sum up, the concept of ubermensch is on hand in Nietzsche’s words: “I teach you the Over man. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment . . .Behold, I teach you the Over man. The Over man is the meaning of the earth” (Priyanka, 158).

III. PORTRAYAL OF BALRAM IN THE WHITE TIGER The protagonist in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger is an emblematic Fanonian rebel whose evolution from rags to riches befits the tone of the novel – exposition of the binary nature of a nation marching towards its tryst with destiny (Nagpal, 152). Epistolary in style, in the form of a series of letters written over a period of seven nights, the novel is confessional in attitude. Aravind Adiga makes a clean breast of his rationale in an interview (Kidd, 71). “One of the points of The White Tiger is to change the conditions for people like Balram while we still can. Everyone now in India, poor and rich, has the same dreams. This is new. To take control of your own life, to become an entrepreneur, to get rich quickly, is now a fairly common dream. You don’t want to wait three or four generations”. The novel is nothing but this. Balram’s perspective is the author’s perception. From a non-descript village, Laxmangarh, existing on the periphery, to the metamorphosis into a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore, the protagonist’s actions and reactions are responses to each and every situation that he encounters in modern India. Through the occurrences clustered around Balram, Aravind Adiga renders

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the ruthlessness of power and survival which assume a million moral ambiguities in the post independent India.

IV. BALRAM’S EVOLUTION AS UBERMENSCH Balram, the “superman”, subsists in diverse environments. He hops from one level to the next upper level as a consequence of his unfulfilled and disgruntled feelings and aspirations as he is modelled as an ubermensch. The insignificant village Laxmangarh is the hometown of Balram. His father is a rickshaw-puller. The village is a symbol of “at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds.” (Adiga, 14) But the people designate this place as “Darkness.” Adiga defines “that India is two countries in one: an India of Light and an India of Darkness” (14). The government records proclaim the village as a model village with all amenities in place whereas the stark realism is otherwise. The people are malnourished, miserable and mean. The landlord is a tyrant domineering every facility – the river, the agricultural lands, the roads and the hillside. Disgust and demeaning state disillusion Balram and hence he alienates himself and waits for a prospect to escape. The “superman” in him is in quest for something higher than this neglected atmosphere. This comes in the form of his vocation as the driver to Ashok, the landlord’s son and his wife, Pinky. Balram is exposed to the hierarchy, sycophancy, corruption and ruthlessness in the exploitation of the poor and the downtrodden in the changed environment – the connection between the landlords and the politicians, the ignorance and insincerity of the teachers in denying the students of their meals through misappropriation of funds and misuse of free school uniforms for sale in open markets. His master, Ashok, is an epitome of corruption in higher places – greasing the palms of the politicians for shady deals and operating the brazen flesh trade in dubiously distinct hotels to keep the officials in good humour. In Delhi, Balram, thus, comes face to face with two Indias: one India is adorned by multi-storeyed buildings, malls, air-conditioned cars, IT savvy people and call centres: the other India is the squalor and filth abounding in all vices – debauchery, amoral, unethical and unprincipled practices reflected in traffic jams, faux pas in tragic accidents and immoral activities. His pride in donning the driver’s uniform vanishes and is replaced with a fascination, nay, a craving towards an elevated and privileged living as seen in the exclusive lives of his master and mistress. His strong discernment is that he is denied of this elite lifestyle for the following reasons – his circumstances, the system and the flaccid acceptance of his being. (Nagpal, 154) Indignation leads to revulsion and a yearning for a better fortune since Balram is cast as a “hyperman”. Balram designs his elevation to a higher plane through his act of murdering his master Ashok. He has no remorse whatsoever and, in point of fact, deems it a social justice. He rationalizes his crime thus: “All I wanted was a chance to be a man – and for that, one murder was enough.” (Adiga, 318) His runaway episode may paint him as a fugitive but this crisscross journey would interpret him the real nation in kaleidoscopic designs, especially its negativities. At his final destination, he embarks upon entrepreneurship with resounding success utilizing the seven lakh rupees snaffled from his master Ashok. His transmutation as Ashok Sharma with sixteen SUVs as taxis and his kindly demeanour towards his “boys” treating them as “family,” thus upholding a dignified employer-employee relationship, is an elevation of his disposition to a higher plane of existence. This near total lift puts his life in a magnificence as well as opulence he has been aspiring for since his childhood and thus the fruition is achieved. He is now Nietzsche’s ubermensch, the Superman Substantiate – a free and confident entrepreneur writing to the Chinese Premier detailing his rags to riches story during the course of which he unfolds the best and worst India. His delineation is crystalline – a subaltern’s transformation to an elite citizen.

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V. THE DETERMINING VALUES Balram is the white tiger of Aravind Adiga. A genetically adapted version, the white tiger’s eyes are very conspicuous: the blue of iris and the yellow of comex merge and when illuminated, display just a black pupil on a light yellow background. This analogy is brought to Balram’s character – “the moral pigment is absolutely absent in Balram and he would stop at nothing to succeed”(Nagpal, 159). The manifestation starts with his school days. In the course of a surprise inspection, the school inspector identifies him as “an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots” (35) when Balram demonstrates his dominance in reading and writing skills. The inspector christens him - the white tiger. His approbation of a white tiger on the eve of his visit to a zoo is revealing: “Not any kind of tiger. The creature that gets born only once every generation in the jungle” (276). His eye contact with the tiger is so disquieting that he falls unconscious. He insists his nephew, Dharam, to write to his grandmother about his confused apologies for no longer being able to live in a cage. For Adiga, Balram, the white tiger, has broken free from the cage with India symbolized as jungle. Perhaps this may be the ironic signification of the moral dilemma of the novelist himself. The symptom of the white tiger has a denotation and culmination in Balram’s grandiose proposition in the ultimate part. “...take the money, and start a school – an English language school – for poor children in Bangalore. A school where you won’t be allowed to corrupt anyone’s head with prayers and stories about God or Gandhi – nothing but the facts of life for these kids. A school full of White Tigers, unleashed on Bangalore! We’d have this city at our knees, I tell you. I could become the boss of Bangalore.” (319-320) Balram’s penchant for poetry has several instances but this inclination doesn’t dissuade him from his exploitation of unfair means to accomplish his desires. “I know by heart the works of the four greatest poets of all time – Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Galib and a fourth fellow whose name I forget” (6). He could share a verse with a bookseller desultorily: “You were looking for the key for years/but the door was always open” (253). The pose of Buddha which he adopts while sitting in a car is also not in consonance with his act of murdering his master. Balram’s occasional burst of rage and flashes of introspection evolve out of his resentment and vengefulness rather than self augmentation or affirmative assessment. The Rooster Coop imagery sums up the India of Aravind Adiga and Balram’s chief drive stems from his persistent ventures to extricate himself from this mire to comply with his basic instinct, ubermensch. The nation is teeming with servile men discharging their multifarious duties unflinchingly with not even an iota of thought or act of disloyalty or dissent or deceit or dissatisfaction because they are attuned to the Rooster Coop situation. “Go to Delhi, behind Jama Masjid and look at the way they keep chicken there in the market. Hundreds of pale hens and brightly coloured roosters stuffed tightly into wire mesh cages, packed as tightly as worms in a belly, pecking each other and shitting on each other, jostling just for breathing space: the whole cage giving off a horrible stench – the stench of terrified, feathered flesh. On the wooden desk above this coop sits a grinning young butcher....the roosters in the coop smell the blood from above...they know they are the next...they do not rebel...they do not try to run out of the coop.” (173-174) This is analogous to human servitude with the disrobing of their dignity and, in the real world, they “exist in perpetual servitude, servitude so strong that you put the key of his emancipation in a man’s hand and he will throw it back at you with a curse.” (176)

VI. TECHNO CAPITALISM – A PATH TOWARDS PROGRESSION David Huebert (25) is unambiguous and asserts in no uncertain terms that the novel is derisive with the confluence of capitalist views. With an overwhelming concern for the role of technology in the formation of contemporary Indian culture, Balram voices the connotation of the new entrepreneurial spirit

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in India: “These entrepreneurs – we entrepreneurs – have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now”. Three intermingling themes make the morally ambiguous protagonist, Balram, at once devious and compassionate.  Techno-capitalism is the only path for Balram towards self-empowerment.  This choice of techno-capitalism to achieve wealth and status compels Balram to reject Gandhian traditionalism and drags him to the all-but-inevitable adherence to nefarious deeds – criminal as well as immoral.  Aravind Adiga is suspect in his stance in the sketch of Balram’s traits i.e. the novelist is not candid in his condemnation of Balram’s means of realizing personal advancement at the expense of others.

VII. CONCLUSIONS Thus Balram is “hyperhuman” veiled in Nietzsche’s code of ubermensch. Balram’s audacity is marked:”I have woken up and the rest of you are sleeping and that is the only between us” (319). A man’s climbing of the ladder of fame passing through the hurdles and hardships of economic inequality or misfortunes and the established structures of nepotism and plutocratic social hierarchies could in a way justify his wrongdoing. His adversity might be unfortunate but more unfortunate is the means he adopts to overcome it. Balram might have climbed the ladder of success and achieved material prosperity at the end but the moral debasement he has fallen into makes one question if it is worth it after all. But to censure Balram altogether is to ignore the atypical traits of the novel – ambiguity and nuance. Balram’s actions are neither utterly irreproachable nor indisputably denounced (Heubert, 46). His acts of robbing, exploits and killing others for his own gains deserve reprimand whereas his disentanglement from Rooster Coop unlike his father and from the mire of poverty, filth and servitude demand our approbation. In short, his character is polyvalent and multi perspective in mould.

REFERENCES [1] Adiga, Aravind. The White Tiger. Harper Collins Publishers, 2008. [2] Heubert, David. “A Tiger in the Rooster Coop: Techno-capitalism, Narrative Ambiguity and Gandian Traditionalism in The White Tiger.” South Asian Review, vol. 36, no.2, Nov.2015, pp. 25-50. [3] Kidd, James. “Interview: Aravind Adiga.” Asia Literary Review, vol.10, 2008, pp.67-74. [4] Nagpal, Pratibha. “Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger: A Critical Response.” The Commonwealth Review, vol.18, no.2, pp.151-161. [5] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. edited by R. J. Hollingdale and E.V. Rieu, Penguin Classics: Penguin Publishing. [6] Priyanka, Parmar. “Nietzsche’s Ubermensch in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Research Journal of English Language and Literature, vol.3, no.4, 2015, pp.157-162. [7] “Ubermensch.” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubermensch. Accessed 04 July 2018.

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