Abstract

Aravind Adiga's 2008 Man-Booker Prize winning novel, The White Tiger and his second book, Between the Assassinations (2008) are about two different Indias: India, before and after globalization. The stories of Between the Assassinations are set in a specific time frame in pre-liberalised, socialist India, between the assassinations of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi, in a world that disintegrates into the world of The White Tiger which telescopes the reader to the India of the Nineties and beyond. Adiga's latest novel, Last Man in Tower (2011) narrowly focuses on the burgeoning real estate scene in Mumbai, particularly on an epic struggle between the past and the present. The study attempts to place the literary works of Adiga in their proper historical, socio-cultural, political and economic context – in the 'India of Darkness' and in the 'India of Light' – and critically examine how his fictionhas been shaped by a great structural shift in India's post-colonial economic landscape and in turn fashions the evolving dimensions.

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