Rural-to-Urban Migration and Precarity in The Story of My Assassins, Q & A and The White Tiger

Abstract

Novelistic depictions of intra-national migration constantly come up against the debilitating conditions of urban life in India. Far from fulfilling the socio-economic aspirations of migrants, India’s cities exacerbate the precarity that these subjects have already experienced in their abject rural lives. Three significant and representative novels—Tarun Tejpal’s The Story of My Assassins, Vikas Swarup’s Q & A and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger—reveal the oppressive forces of corruption, exploitation, discrimination and police brutality that dominate urban life. Their narrative forms—ranging from pseudo-journalism to romantic comedy to satire—serve in different ways to both elucidate and confirm the inescapable net of precarity for all (including middle-class observers and allies) but the rich and powerful. The depictions in these novels are corroborated by many other well-known novels in the Indian Anglophone canon.