The ‘ideal Sinhalese’

On reading Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, this writer could not help wondering why Sri Lankan novelists writing in Sinhala have consistently failed to maintain a critical distance from their own culture and the status quo. The White Tiger may not be the greatest work of fiction to come out of India in the last decade, but it did reveal the dark side of India's so-called economic boom, and questioned the ideals of the consumerist middle class that is the most vocal supporter of neo-liberal economic policies. Of course, the 'Indian novel' (at least its English-language incarnations) has long been critically evaluating postcolonial India – Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August being just three well-known examples. An early masterpiece such as Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope (1960) likewise investigated India's possible relationship with the West, with an implicit critique of trying to be Western and Indian simultaneously.

The White Tiger, however, was a sharp slap in the face of neo-liberal India, and the book has illustrated that a novel can indeed 'intervene'. Keeping one's critical distance from the dominant ideologies of the time is a precondition of becoming a great writer, particularly when these very ideologies are smuggled in through the intricate and seductive means of audio-visual media. Arundhati Roy was right on target when she stated, in The Ordinary Person's Guide to the Empire, that new media is not the mere 'vehicle' of neo-liberalism – media is neo-liberalism. Along these lines, the majority of Indians only enjoy the image of being rich, rather than actually being rich.