Mark Reviews Movies: THE WHITE TIGER

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 12, 2021

On paper, the caste system in India—dividing people into various socioeconomic stations based on their work and their religion, their ethnicity, the place and family of their birth, and other assorted and flexible distinctions—should no longer exist. After gaining independence, India wrote anti-discrimination policy into law and its constitution, but eradicating an ancient system of perceived social order cannot end with some writing. The system does still exist—and strongly.

The caste system has affected Balram (Adarsh Gourav), the protagonist of The White Tiger, in ways that he once could barely comprehend. He grew up in a small village, where people worked menial jobs for those above them and paid regular "rent" to a local landlord, who walked around taking money and making threats with only his manner. In flashbacks, the landlord looks and probably is more akin to the leader of criminal enterprise than a legitimate businessman, but legitimate business for people like him is this work.

He's in charge, simply because he was born into it. He was born into it because the rest of his family, for unknown generations before him, was granted that position, simply on account of some now-unknowable rationale. That's where the landlord is. That's where his sons and their sons will be. Decades from now, no one will have any idea how the landlord's great-grandsons ended up in this position, and none of the people paying rent will even think to ask why they have to. It's just the way things are.

At some point in his life, Balram asked. We first meet him in the city of Bangalore in 2010. He is dressed suavely and sports a perfectly trimmed, well-maintained goatee. His story, as we'll quickly learn when we discover his origins in that small village, is one of "rags-to-riches," but it also becomes terribly clear that such a tale, as ordinarily fantastic as it may seem to an audience in the United States, should be close to unachievable in India.

For Balram, it wasn't just about working hard and doing that physically impossible metaphorical act of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps. There is no amount of work or level of dedication that could have accomplished his rise, and in a pointed jibe at a specific feel-good film, there is no "million-rupee game show" that could save Balram from his social status.

From the start, then, writer/director Ramin Bahrani's film, based on Aravind Adiga's 2008 novel, is not just a piercing takedown of the modern-day caste system in India. It is also and more skeptically a critique of the very notion that there's anything to feel good about in such a story of one person's rise within a system that treats people as commodities, social hierarchy as unquestionable, and wealth as the primary reason to assign worth to anything or any person. Balram's story is specific to the changing but, in some vital ways, still static values of India, but there undoubtedly will be many heads nodding when he asks the audience, "Is it that way in your country, too?"

The story is narrated by a wiser Balram, who has earned no small success when we first encounter him. He takes us through his life—as an intelligent kid in his local class who is promised a scholarship to a relatively faraway school under a government program, as a child laborer at a local café who has to earn money for the family after his father's death (The father's toes curl on the funeral pyre, rebelling, Balram notes, for nothing—just as the man did for the whole of his life), as a young man who only dreams of becoming a servant for the former landlord's seemingly kind son.

That landlord, known as "the Stork" (Mahesh Manjrekar), has moved up in society when Balram arrives at the man's mansion, looking to become a driver. Balram wants to work for Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), the landlord's American-educated younger son. Ashok appears progressive in his thinking, telling his father and older brother "the Mongoose" (Vijay Maurya) not to hit their servants, speaking to Balram in a friendly tone, and having married an Indian-American woman named Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), despite his family's objections.

The truth, of course, is less rosy—not only about Ashok, but also, as we discover when he reveals that he's wanted by the police, about Balram. The tale here is wide in scope, going back-and-forth in time and giving us a broader view of the caste system by way of Balram's interactions with his bosses (whom he constantly and almost reflexively refers to as his "family"), his actual family (who demand most of his earnings and want him to marry, so that his income stays close to home), and other people who serve assorted other bosses.

The view is of a corrupt system from the top (a politician, known as "the Great Socialist" and played by Swaropp Sampat, presents herself as a champion for the poor but demands a bribe from the landlord so he can continue evading taxes), through the middle (The landlord's family, led by Ashok, begins a donation campaign against the popular politician), and all the way to the bottom (Balram extorts a fellow driver to become the number-one guy). Balram witnesses all of this corruption from above but, at the time, thinks little to nothing of it, because he has no foundation to conceptualize his "masters" doing wrong.

All of that changes, though, when the landlord's family asks Balram to take the blame for a crime. The shift actually arrives when Balram realizes how quick he was to accept the notion and ask nothing in return for it.

Despite Balram's success, there is no happy ending here. Bahrani, who finds some sympathy for the major players here (Ashok and Pinky, who treat Balram with condescending kindness or kneejerk cruelty, are caught up in this system, too, to an extent), knows such a conclusion is impossible. The White Tiger could be seen as a cynical film, in which our hero is as corrupt, amoral, and ruthless as the people against whom he finally rebels. That's the point, though. In this system, there are only certain ways to the top, and Balram has learned from the "best."

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