‘The White Tiger’ Ending Explained: Why did Balram kill Ashok and how did he rise to become a new kind of master?
Spoiler Alert for ‘The White Tiger’
In a quest to present “tomorrow” of the voice of the colossal underclass, Aravind Adiga shattered records after he penned down his novel ‘The White Tiger’ in 2008. A darkly humorous take on India's class struggle, the story revolved around a village boy named Balram Halwai. Religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty played a key role in the book and it even went on to clinch the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
Now, a Netflix movie — directed by Ramin Bahrani and starring Priyanka Chopra, Rajkummar Rao, Mahesh Manjrekar and Adarsh Gourav in the lead — repaints the tale with fresh hues. In 125 minutes, Balram (Adarsh Gourav) narrates his epic rise from poor villager to successful entrepreneur in modern India.
Cunning and ambitious, the young hero jockeys his way into becoming a driver for Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and Pinky (Priyanka Chopra-Jonas), who have just returned from America. Society has trained Balram to be one thing — a servant — so he makes himself indispensable to his rich masters. But, one night changes his entire life. One night, after a party, Pinky takes the steering wheel in a drunk state and tells Balram to sit in the backseat. Making their way through the desolated streets, Pinky and Ashok sing and crack jokes until she crashes into a poor man. To cover up her crime, she puts the blame on Balram's head. After that night of betrayal, he realizes the corrupt lengths they will go to trap him and save themselves.
On the verge of losing everything, Balram rebels against a rigged and unequal system to rise up and become a new kind of master. Months later, he eyes a red bag Ashok holds close to him. He plots Ashok's murder thinking he has found a “replacement” and hides his uniform and a broken whiskey bottle inside the car. Taking advantage of one night when Ashok is alone, Balram tricks him into checking the tire of the car and hits him with a broken bottle of whiskey. Repeatedly, he thrashes his head until Ashok dies on the spot.
Balram then runs with the wad of notes in the red bag and starts a new life. The story takes the White Tiger as a metaphor — introducing it as a creature born only once every generation — as Balram compares himself to a White Tiger. After killing Ashok, Balram screams loudly and then laughs.
Reminiscing how he couldn't even move for four days after the horrendous crime, he says, “They are extraordinary men who can kill and move on.” Balram then narrates his journey of going from a social entrepreneur to a business entrepreneur. One of the dialogues that will stick with you is: “It's the century of the brown man and the yellow man, god save everyone else.”
The guilty of committing a murder haunts him and he says, “I think about him a lot. He didn't deserve his fate.” But he proudly boasts, “I do things differently than my masters. For the poor, there are only two ways to get to the top... Crime or politics. Is it like that in your country too?" In the final scenes, he says he finally learned “just for a moment, what it means not to be a servant...”
‘The White Tiger’ is available for streaming on Netflix from Friday, January 22, 2021.