Class Struggle and Economic Disparity in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger

Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) presents a searing critique of post-liberalization India, exposing the deep fault lines of class struggle and economic disparity that define the nation's social fabric. Narrated through the epistolary confessions of Balram Halwai — a servant who murders his master and reinvents himself as an entrepreneur — the novel interrogates the moral and structural dimensions of poverty, caste, and capitalism in contemporary India. This paper examines how Adiga employs the metaphors of the 'Darkness' and the 'Light,' the rooster coop, and entrepreneurial self-fashioning to illuminate the systemic nature of economic inequality. Drawing on Marxist literary theory, postcolonial frameworks, and sociological perspectives on caste and class in India, the study argues that The White Tiger is not merely a tale of individual ambition but a deeply political text that challenges the triumphalist narrative of India's economic rise. The novel reveals how neoliberal capitalism perpetuates feudal hierarchies, trapping the rural poor in cycles of servitude while rewarding transgressive individualism over collective resistance. Ultimately, Adiga's work raises urgent questions about justice, mobility, and the price of freedom in a society stratified by birth, caste, and capital