Starting from interpretations of animal metaphors related to humans, the paper will then put under scrutiny other interpretations of animal references which progressively enlarge their reach, thereby involving not only the city of Sydney, but the whole novel. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of animal imagery in Amnesty and unravel some of its possible meanings. However, animal references become particularly noticeable in Amnesty, his latest. In his previous works, such as the 2008 Booker-prize-winning The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower (published in 2011), animal references frequently feature in the narration, thus conveying multi-layered meanings. The creative and meaningful use of animal imagery plays an important role in Aravind Adiga’s novels. Specifically, while taking the measure of the appraisal The White Tiger has received, this article questions the premises that underpin the most vehement critiques directed at the novel: on the one hand, that Adiga’s work offers a purportedly long-awaited creative departure from Salman Rushdie’s on the other hand, that the characterization strategies followed by the novelist result in what critics have perceived as class ventriloquism and, accordingly, a re-Orientalized title character equipped with an “inauthentic” voice. It begins by considering The White Tiger as an ironic uncovering of the subsumption of a Dark India into the global literary marketplace at a time of a perceived shift in re-Orientalist representational practices and their western reception. A revamped portrayal of a Dark India garnered an unparalleled visibility in 2008 with the award of the coveted Man Booker Prize for Fiction to Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger.This article examines Adiga’s staging of a Dark India as a new-fangled object of exoticist discourses.

The white tiger 2008