Re-Writing Violence and Victimhood: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess

The chapter examines how the narrative of The White Tiger by an upper caste Aravind Adiga uses violence as a narrative structure to carve the lower caste personality and delineate the struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed. It argues that violence as the narrative structure is more geared towards the devaluation of the lower caste Balram Halwai’s personality than empowerment, thus making a mockery of Dalit emancipation. Thereafter, such inadequacies in the representations of the Dalit are brought to scrutiny through a comparison with a Dalit writer Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess. The Gypsy Goddess demonstrates how Dalits wield more control over their representations even in incidents of violence and victimization, and how Dalit characters become agentive subjects rather than merely remaining objects of suffering, sympathy, and victimhood. The novel also recapitulates the analysis of the previous Anglophone novels. Kandasamy uses counter-violence and collectivism as central tropes in her narrative to characterize Dalit dignity and resistance. The conceptual tools related to violence and counter-violence are drawn on the notions of B.R. Ambedkar, Malcolm X, and Franz Fanon as well as the rhetoric of revolutionary counter-violence of the Dalit Panthers.