The White Tiger: An impressive roar

The White Tiger (2021) • View trailer

Four stars. Rated R, for violence, sexual candor and considerable profanity

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.19.21 

There’s a trainload of rage in this thoroughly engaging film.

 

During their initial outing, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife, Pinky Madam
(Priyanka Chopra), are surprised to discover that their new driver, Balram (Adarsh Gourav)
hasn't the faintest idea how to get where they're going.

Director/scripter Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s award-winning 2008 novel has been described as a cross between Slumdog Millionaire and Parasite, and that’s reasonably accurate. But this film has the added benefit of a caustic sense of humor — darker than dark — and its protagonist’s sharply observed understanding of the way in which globalization has exacerbated the cruel divide between India’s upper and lower castes.

 

Our “hero,” Balram (Adarsh Gourav), is introduced in a position of prominence. He has become that which he always hoped to attain: an entrepreneur. This isn’t an easy achievement in his country, as he explains; an Indian entrepreneur must be “…straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, all at the same time.”

 

Balram narrates his saga by way of a letter written to Chinese Premier Web Jiabao, on the eve of his visit to India in 2010. “American is so yesterday,” Balram begins. “China and India are tomorrow.” (If American viewers respond to that introduction with unease, I’ve no doubt that was Bahrani’s intention.)

 

Balram (played, as an adolescent, by Harshit Mahawar) grows up in the poor village of Laxmangarh. He’s a bright, curious and perceptive child: that rarest of jungle creatures, a “white tiger,” symbol of freedom and individuality. But his intelligence opens no doors in a feudal hamlet under the thrall of a big city coal baron dubbed “The Stork” (Mahesh Manjrekar) and his thuggish elder son, “The Mongoose” (Vijay Maurya). They extract one-third of the already meager rupees the villagers earn.

 

Balram watches his father literally work himself to death, while the family elder — Granny Kusum (Kamlesh Gill) — berates the man, for not laboring harder.

 

This mind set — the adult Balram explains, in voiceover — is due to the most insidious of India’s “inventions”: the rooster coop, where caged birds silently watch their fellows being slaughtered, while calmly waiting their turn. This characterizes India’s “dark” under class: not merely trapped in a perpetual cycle of poverty and servitude, but trained over centuries to accept that it should be that way.

 

As the adult Balram further observes, “Election promises had taught me how important it is, not to be a poor man in a ‘free’ democracy.”