The White Tiger

Balram considers his criminal behavior to be just an act of entrepreneurship because it fits into his world view of the ends justifying the means when it comes to success and making money. Balram has grown up seeing how people who had acted cruelly and take advantage of others acquire wealth, power, and respect from the community. His town of Laxmangarh with its four oppressive landlords/thugs/Animals, corruption in the local government and schools, and terrible poverty and unsanitary living conditions(16-17) is a great example of capitalism at its worst and explains why Balram feels that achieving a “fat belly” validates the you in the eyes of the world and absolves you of past sins. Balram is motivated to succeed because of the dream of his father to have his son become successful: “'My whole life I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine-at least one should live like a man'”(26). He is the quintessential example of an outsider who buys into the fact that capitalism is a rigged game and that those who work the hardest usually do not reap most of the rewards. Balram is willing to do whatever it takes to become rich and realizes that playing by the rules actively prevents him from achieving his goals.

Influencing Balram's morals and behavior is the idea of "crony capitalism", a manifestation of capitalism that sees much of the corruption and government incompetency that we read about in The White Tiger. It is clear from the novel that capitalism is not working for everyone and that Balram and others like him have been exposed to a government and economic system that favors the strong over the weak and punishes them for playing fairly. Much of India's economic growth over the past 50 years has been linked to these problems of corruption and cronyism with the periods of high growth being accompanied by periods of high corruption. The economic situation has led to opportunities for people whose families had been disenfranchised for generations a chance at making it rich yet the newly found social mobility is largely based on gaming the system and exploitation of others, with entrepreneurs like Balram leading the way.
Further reading on crony capitalism in India

The God of Small Things

Chacko means that the family had been indoctrinated to be subservient to the British and lost the connection to the history and legacies of their own ancestors. Describing them as a “family of Anglophiles” (pg. 51), Chacko uses the definitions in the Readers Digest encyclopedia to show the children how Pappachi had turned his back on his culture and embraced the hierarchical system that placed the British above the Indians. It is clear that the legacy of postcolonialism is still strong in India as Chacko describes a “war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves” (pg. 52). This internal war that he speaks of is the practice of cultural indoctrination and all of the assumed prejudices and normalizations that accompany it. Anglophiles struggled with finding their cultural identity and it becomes clear that the internalized self-hatred they have for Indians leaves them without a sense of history. They lock themselves out of their traditional Indian culture and roots yet at the same time are locked out of ever really being part of British culture by the same system that gave them cause to hate themselves in the first place. I interpret the War of Dreams that Chacko speaks of to mean the belittlement of any accomplishments that an Indian might make in the eyes of the British and the Anglophiles. A person could be the most accomplished scholar, greatest inventor, or creator of wealth and yet their success will not mean much because they are still Indian. The dreams of the oppressors end up becoming the dreams of the oppressed through indoctrination yet the oppressed have virtually no shot of attaining these goals. Chacko explains to the children that through the perspective of the Earth Woman that “we, my dears, are everything we are and ever will be are just a twinkle in her eye” (pg. 53) to show them the vastness of history on Earth and how the true history of humanity is as one.

An enduring legacy of colonialism that has become an important issue recently in India has been the cultural preference for fair skin. In a Times of India article linked below Anup Dhir, a plastic surgeon, suggests the phenomenon is influenced by the years of British rule: "Indians are usually obsessed with fair skin as they acquired this legacy from the British era. As our rulers were fair skinned, we also run after fair complexion." Under colonial rule many Indians internalized the idea that British equals better and began to associate whiteness with beauty. Indians with dark skin face discrimination and advertisements like the image above promise to not only whiten skin but to markedly improve lives as a result of having a lighter pigment. The fact that this cultural bias persists is a testament to the effects that colonialism continue to have on the culture of the oppressed generations after colonial rule officially ended.

Article on Indian preference for fair skin

Slumdog Millionaire

The film Slumdog Millionaire offers its audience a voyeuristic and highly-sanitized portrayal of the lives of some of India’s hundreds of millions impoverished citizens. I feel that the lack of first-person narration from the main character Jamal and any of the other characters turns the film into a vessel for the entertainment of a privileged Western audience and denies us crucial context and insight into the lives of those who live in the slums. Without a look inside what is really going on in the characters’ heads the audience is simply along for the ride, a visitor into the environment who is just passing through and following Jamal’s personal journey from afar and many will not understand the legacy of colonialism that led to the oppression and poverty shown in the movie. The director does indeed show many deplorable aspects of the lives endured by the children yet in trying to convey the strength and resolve of the residents of the slums also glorifies their plight. The audience does not get to smell the terrible stench of raw sewage running through the streets, feel the hunger pangs, or double over in pain from the illnesses caused by drinking dirty water. Without the access to the perspectives of Jamal and the others the audience can only sympathize and not empathize with any of their experiences in the film. This film is a great example of the colonialist stereotype aspect of Bhabha’s ideas on colonial discourse and does indeed both install and disavow the differences between the people of the Indian slums and the Western audience (McCleod, 64). The audience is held at arm’s length from the reality on the ground and is left to create its own opinion about the setting and situations shown in the movie, something that our privilege and lack of context does not allow us to accurately do.

Making the comparison between Slumdog Millionaire and the industry of poverty tourism in Mumbai can help us understand the more problematic aspects of the film and its relationship to colonial discourse.

http://travel.cnn.com/mumbai/play/pros-and-cons-slum-tourism-723332