Another Indian, another Booker Prize. ‘The White Tiger’ by Arvind Adiga has won the elite Booker prize this year.
Keeping aside the suspicion it has created –it is largely seen as an attempt of west to use the ‘The white tiger’ as a mirror to us Indians- I want to again come back to language issue and take it further from where I had left in my post, ‘Status of Hindi in contemporary India’.
It’s quite paradoxical that the Indian writers in English who write about India have their readership mostly in other countries and despite that they get better recognition and appreciation globally including India than their counterparts who write in their mother tongue.
Although these writers write about India but they have hardly any connection with the true India. I have my doubt if Adiga, who grew up in Australia and went to England and US Universities, had any soul connection with India. And they write about the pains and sufferings, the class divide and the widening social gap of this country and get the accolades in the form of ‘Booker Prize’!
What about the Indian writers who did so with true and self experiences and not as a tourist? There are dozen of books published in various Indian languages about the darker side of the Indian society and with much more authenticity. But I doubt if these books or their authors will ever shine like the ones who write about Indian disparity in English and go home with the Booker along with the rave reviews.