28. Telling India Otherwise: Narrative Mediation and Global Legibility in Aravind Adiga's Fiction

Aravind Adiga's fiction relentlessly disrupts the official narratives of "shining India" by bringing to the centre stage the lives of servants, migrants, failed sportspeople, and marginalized urban subjects. This paper, "Telling India Otherwise: Narrative Mediation and Global Legibility in Aravind Adiga," discusses how Adiga builds up counter-narratives of India that defy nationalist triumphalism and neoliberal optimism. At the heart of this project is narrative mediation: the strategies by which Adiga makes subaltern lives knowable, comprehensible, and engaging to a world readership. From epistolary confessions by Balram Halwai in The White Tiger to migrant testimony framed in pieces by Danny in Amnesty, Adiga selects narrative conventions that explain and stage Indian realities for readers habitually positioned elsewhere in India. By placing these texts in the context of postcolonial representation debates, world literature markets, and the "legibility" of the Global South, the paper contends that Adiga holds a contradictory position: he raises occluded or muted voices, but at the same time encases them in modes—satire, confession, melodrama—that appeal to global expectations of postcolonial fiction. This disjuncture between resistance and readability is the core of Adiga's narrative habit. In the end, the essay argues that Adiga "tells India otherwise" by offering counter-narratives of inequality, corruption, and moral struggle, yet remaining deeply implicated within the politics of global circulation and recognition.