Serendipitously, a day or so after finishing Aravind Adiga's wonderful, Man Booker Prize-winning novel about a down-trodden young man's path to becoming a successful entrepreneur through dubious means in contemporary India , The White Tiger, I heard a fascinating story on NPR about a group of vigilante Indian women called "The Pink Saris".
The Pink (Gulabi) Gang or Pink Saris, are led by Sampat Pal Devi and wear, what else, bright pink saris, and carry a leki stick, the weapon of choice for Indian police. The Gulabi Gang goes around and attacks dishonest and bad folks who avoid punishment by the Indian criminal justice system through the payment of bribes and influence. The average target of Pink Sari attention is a male who has victimized someone poorer and less powerful, often a woman.
I find this interesting because the term "thug" originally comes from India, derived from the term "thugee", which is a kind of organized crime, Kali-worshipping cult, who were feared bandits and thieves. The idea of this women-only group, who wear such distinctivly feminine clothing, banding together, getting thuggish for justice like a band of Wild West vigilantes, and openly taking on an unresponsive, male-dominated justice system is pretty interesting stuff.
The White Tiger has a similar theme of the weak against the strong, but Balram, the protagonist, takes on the system in a covert, murderous way rather than through direct action like the Gulabi Gang. Balram, a Dickensian anti-hero, is a young man working in the Indian capital of New Delhi as the personal driver of Ashok, the soft, Westernized son of the family that has Balram's rural village and entire family locked in a merciless, feudal grip. Balram, the white tiger, seeks to survive the corrupt, injust world he has been locked into from birth by striking out at his employer.
Balram is a true, old school Indian Thug, which comes from the Sanscrit word for "conceal", "sthag". Balram hides his true feelings beneath a submissive exterior, bowing and scraping and obediently performing all the menial tasks set for him by Mr. Ashok and his family, who Balram calls animals, no matter how horrible or degrading. Balram's spiritual link to the Thuggees is underscored by the presence of a Kali magnet on the dashboard of the car that Balram drives for Mr. Ashok.
Picture from http://www.shivani.com.au/Media/picture-galleries/Trip-to-India.aspx?imagepath=%2FMedia%2Fpicture-galleries%2FTrip-to-India%2FIndia-and-Diwali-07-080 . Accessed 12/8/08
Arviga's novel combines an amoral protagonist a' la Camus with elements of Poe ("The Casque of Amontillado" first comes to mind) and a touch of Shakespearean tragedy (I seem to recall a reference to bloody hand-washing). The upstairs/downstairs contrasts of Indian life in the rural "Darkness" versus the "bright lights, big city" of Delhi are sharp and startling. T
his novel smoothly transitions from the first world, high-rise apartment where Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam, Ashok's overly-sexy, spoiled American wife, reside in air-conditioned comfort to the third world, bug-infested, squalor where Balram and his fellow drivers spend their nights without missing a beat. This clear and shocking dichotomy is as strong a call for social justice as anything Charles Dickens ever wrote or any picture Jacob Riis ever took. The novel's gruesomeness and the author's use the first-person frame tale of a series of letters to a Chinese bureaucrat, among other things, also echo the building, Gothic horror of Poe's, "The Tell-Tale Heart".
Ms. Sampat Pal Devi's autobiography has been published in France.
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