ISSN 2348-3156 (Print) International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research ISSN 2348-3164 (online) Vol. 7, Issue 1, pp: (138-141), Month: January - March 2019, Available at: www.researchpublish.com Page | 138 Research Publish Journals FASHIONING OF BALRAM HALWAI IN ARAVIND ADIGA’S THE WHITE TIGER Priya Assistant Professor, Department of Verbal Ability 1(B) Lovely Professional University Phagwara, India Abstract: Main character Balram Halwai from the novel The White Tiger written by a renowned Indian writer Aravind Adiga commits a severe crime. He murders his own master. This becomes a turning point in his life from being a chauffeur to being a business entrepreneur and tycoon. The way his identity is fashioned as result of his own wishes and expectations and the surrounding controlling mechanisms and forces that manipulate and alter his thought and perception is brimful of convoluted incidents that take place before the murder. The concept of Self- fashioning as speculated and described by Stephen Greenblatt deals with fashioning by an individual and the surrounding factors. The cultural and social forces act upon the mentality of an individual and thus bring about a mutual understanding between the old-self and new-self, and old-authority and new-authority. The process of self- fashioning goes through a tremendous procedure in Balram’s life. Keywords: Self-fashioning, the Self, the Other, authority, new-Self, new-authority, transformation, Mirror Stage, cultural artifacts, identity, power-struggle, class conflict. 1. INTRODUCTION Aravind Adiga‟s The White Tiger circumvents the dichotomies between Light and Darkness, rich and poor, and landlords and servants. Adiga explores the psychological upbringing of the protagonist Balram Halwai in an explicit manner by writing in first person narrative. The novel flashes the spot light on Balram who is the White Tiger of the novel, a rare species in the jungle and is determined to jump out of the cage of Rooster Coop. Adiga brings forth the repressed intensions of the poor to be like the rich and he goes to an extreme extend by making his protagonist murder his own master. A play of realizing selfhood different from the other comes into role as the protagonist keeps on comparing and contrasting himself with his master. The objective of this paper is to investigate the novel for evidences that answer the question of how the process of fashioning of Balram‟s character takes place in the novel that further leads to a construction of his identity. 2. FASHIONING OF BALRAM HALWAI IN ARAVIND ADIGA’S THE WHITE TIGER Identity has been one of the major concerns in historicism, psychoanalysis, psycholinguistics, sociology, feminism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and other theories. With the emerging trends and concepts, identity is looked upon from different angles and is defined from different perspectives. One of the concepts is the Self and the Other. Comparison and contrast have been made between the Self and the Other in most of the literary theories. Jacques Lacan has very well defined the Mirror Stage in which an infant looks at its own image in a mirror and is able to demarcate between the Self and the Other. Lacan has proposed this concept in language acquisition when he posits that the Mirror Stage is a transitional phase from the Imaginary Stage to the Linguistic Stage. It also has applicability in the field of identity construction. This happens in the very beginning of the process of understanding selfhood. Thereafter, an individual is exposed to different aspects of life. S/he leads a path where external forces are perpetually influencing the path. So, identity of an individual is constructed by social, economic, political, philosophical, and ideological forces. Culture of a society in which that individual lives cultivates his/her thought and perception, fancies and imagination, and manner and