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Traits of Nietzsche's Ubermensch in Balram of Aravind Adiga's

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Traits of Nietzsche's Ubermensch in Balram of Aravind Adiga's 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 Friedrich Nietzsche’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 other 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. Volume 8 Issue 10 2019 758 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 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, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 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 Volume 8 Issue 10 2019 759 http://infokara.com/ INFOKARA RESEARCH ISSN NO: 1021-9056 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.
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