Streaming: ‘White Tiger,’ a tale of two castes

Charles Dickens never goes out of style. In his 2008 book “White Tiger,” Aravind Adiga promises to tell a tale about “the India of light and the India of darkness,” full of Dickensian melodrama and comedy.

Now a Netflix original film, “White Tiger” weaves a classic bildungsroman of Balram (Adarsh Gourav), a lower caste lad from provincial Laxmangarh, who is told as a boy that he’s smart enough to go to Delhi for school. Even though he’s “as rare as a white tiger,” his Granny Kusum (Kamlesh Gill) can’t afford to pay the rent on her tea shop, so he must remain in the village, condemned to break rocks for the rest of his life.

Granny’s landlord is a thin and greedy man called the Stork (Mahesh Manjrekar) whose thick and greedy son, the Mongoose (Vijay Maurya), makes collections. In spite of his economic limitations, Balram excels at spewing the bunkum, and eventually talks the Stork into hiring him as a driver for the family.

He’s paired with the Mongoose’s younger brother, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and his wife Pinky (Priyanka Chopra Jonas), who met in New York City and take a somewhat softer stance on the treatment of servants (in America, after all, the brutal caste system is at least more subtle than in India).

We see that system in all its misery. If Balram makes a mistake with the car and owes money, his extended family living hand-to-mouth back home will pay the price. But we also learn that Granny relentlessly demands a large cut from his hard-earned wages, and seeks to tie him permanently to Laxmangarh with an arranged marriage.

Eventually Ashok and the Mongoose decamp to Delhi to provide politicians daily bribes, and bring Balram with them. While his masters – and he always calls them “master” – live in a hotel penthouse suite, Balram dwells in an ill-lit, sub-subterranean section of the parking garage on a pallet on the floor crawling with cockroaches and malarial mosquitos. He’s a driver before he’s a person.

An unnamed man with vitiligo (Nalneesh Neel) bosses the basement and advises Balram on the finer points of graft with a loathsome obsequiousness. Though he is always bowing and scraping, Balram does sneak the occasional tumblerful of whiskey and sometimes uses a Q-Tip and places it back in the jar for Ashok to re-use.

In time, Ashok and Balram are almost friends. Then Pinky runs over and kills a small child while driving drunk and the family makes Balram sign a confession for the killing. Their sentimentality turns to icy coldness, and our hero is too shocked to even ask for a bribe.

From “Man Push Cart” to “Chop Shop” to “Goodbye Solo,” director Ramin Bahrani had a strong run of films exploring working class consciousness a decade ago. Here he can’t quite match the furious urgency of his earlier work. While he strays a bit from his neorealist roots, he’s still at his best filming in the streets. Balram often speaks about how lower-caste Indian men die like roosters in a coop. Bahrani matches the narration with a shot of a deft butcher beheading, de-footing and quartering a rooster — it’s powerful and pithy summation of the life of the poor. In a pointed reference to “Slumdog Millionaire,” Balram mutters, “There’s no million-rupee show you can win to get out of poverty.”

It’s quite a long wait — more than 90 minutes — before we learn how Balram becomes the wealthy mogul we glimpse at various points throughout the film. In “White Tiger,” the eventual riches hardly seem a sufficient reward for such a ragged story.