In Netflix’s The White Tiger, there are no heroes or villains

The film adaptation of the 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel about class inequalities in India doesn’t make such binary distinctions about its characters. That’s why it’s just as relevant today, its stars tell Tufayel Ahmed

Adarsh Gourav’s protagonist Balram is not your typical hero (Tejinder Singh Khamkha/Netflix)

It’s the century of the brown man and the yellow man, and god save everybody else,” protagonist Balram Halwai audaciously declares in Netflix’s film adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger, after making the rare leap from India’s poverty-stricken working class to the wealthy elite. But The White Tiger is no conventional rags-to-riches story, and Balram is not your typical hero.

Central to this blistering depiction of India, directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (Fahrenheit 451, 99 Homes) and the 2008 novel on which it is based, is the theme of stark class inequalities. The haves and have-nots. As Balram – played so strikingly by Indian actor Adarsh Gourav – points out: “In India, there are two kinds of people: those with big bellies and those with small bellies.”

Balram, born into a lower caste of sweetmakers, has an appetite bigger than his belly but remains indentured in a life of servitude like most of the population – what he calls the “rooster coop”, or people conditioned to accept their battery-hen lives with little in the way of upward social mobility. But Balram is not content with his lot in life. He orchestrates a scheme to join the 1 per cent by getting a job as a driver to the American-educated son of a wealthy landlord, and this is where the story diverges from nobly intentioned steal-from-the-rich, feed-the-poor Robin Hood fare. Balram isn’t above going to extreme lengths to escape the rooster coop, resorting to blackmail, theft and murder to become an entrepreneur in his own right. He is, he says, a “white tiger”, a species so rare that it is only born once a century.