Aravind Adiga wins Man Booker prize for his first novel ``The White Tiger.''

India's Aravind Adiga wins Man Booker prize

Aravind Adiga with his book which won the prestigious Man Booker prize. Photo: AP

LONDON (AP): Aravind Adiga won the prestigious Man Booker prize on Tuesday for

Adiga won the 50,000 pound (US$87,000) prize for a novel about a protagonist who will use any means necessary to fulfill his dream of escaping impoverished village life for success in the big city.

At 34, Adiga was the youngest of the finalists for the literary prize.

The chairman of the judges, Michael Portillo, said the book was an impressive work.

``The novel is in many ways perfect. It is quite difficult to find any structural flaws with it,'' he said.

Some have accused Adiga, who lives in Mumbai, of painting a negative picture of modern India and its huge underclass but Adiga said the novel was meant to be provocative.

``It's not a book that's meant to ingratiate itself with anyone,'' Adiga told the British Broadcasting Corp. before the prize was announced. ``The tone of it was meant to be provocative and even a bit nasty at times. It's meant to get people thinking.''

Profoundly Indian

UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA

Born in Chennai, brought up in Mangalore, writing about Delhi, and living in Mumbai, Adiga loves Tamil, speaks Kannada and writes in English. And in this language of the “erstwhile master”, without exoticism and without sentimentality, he has written a profoundly Indian story. It is not as if other writers have not written about the other, forgotten side of India.

For example, Amitav Ghosh, whose novel Sea of Poppies also appeared on the Man Booker shortlist for this year, has written memorably, with rich detail, compassion and wisdom, about those on the margins of history and geography as has Kiran Desai, in her Man Booker Prize-winning second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. Adiga’s prose is not quite so elegant, but the force of his writing comes from its savage humour and its strength of feeling.

The pages of the 34-year-old Adiga’s novel, however, are different, in their dark humour.

They are also incandescent with anger at the injustice, the futility, the sheer wrongness of a life such as the one from where a bright little boy called Munna, who was later called Balram Halwai in his school records, and then called the White Tiger of the jungle because of his good performance during a school inspection, was pulled out of school and told to smash coal for a tea shop. Where private armies roam about the fields, men and women live sad and stunted lives, and dreams are cut short even before they are fully formed. more