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On the Tarmac of Nationhood: Dismantling Caste and Tribal Loyalty in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Shadrach Ambanasom’s Son of the Native Soil



Author(s)

Gilbert Tarka Fai

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.10.002

University of Bamenda, Cameroon

The White Tiger is Aravind Adiga’s first novel just like Son of the Native Soil which is Shadrach Ambanasom’s first oeuvre. The two novels address two major social concerns (the caste system and tribal loyalty) that impair national cohesion in India and Cameroon respectively. Briefly speaking, the caste refers to the classification of peoples in India (and other South Asian countries) into in-marrying hereditary social classes of the privileged and the underprivileged while tribal loyalty refers to selfish attachment to a tribe or clan to the detriment of community or national feeling. The two concepts are related in the sense that the word “caste” derives from the Spanish or Portuguese “casta” meaning race, lineage, breed or clan. In both cases therefore, the issues of sectionalism, division, discrimination, selfishness, marginalization, and hegemony (amongst others) are at play—issues that impede the notion of nationhood. Read principally from the Marxist perspective of power dynamics and class struggle, the paper argues that Adiga and Ambanasom through skillful manipulation of symbols, time, characters and events, try to imagine the deconstruction of caste and ethnic loyalty in India and Cameroon respectively, which to the two authors, are only historically and socially erected edifices rather than natural order. For the two authors, although global forces may seem to play in favor of a more equitable human society, a necessarily violent revolution might be required to dismantle a blighted body politico-modus operandi that has operated in the people’s psyche for a long time, as characters and events in the two novels reveal.

caste, tribal loyalty, Marxism, globalization