Author: Dr Divya Singh

Abstract: Aravind Adiga's Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger (2008) has been widely examined as a narrative of class rebellion and postcolonial critique; however, its feminist and subaltern dimensions remain critically underexplored. This paper interrogates the novel through a feminist-subaltern framework, drawing upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's foundational question "Can the subaltern speak?” to examine the structurally silenced, rendered invisible, and doubly marginalised female figures who haunt Balram Halwai's first-person confession. While Balram's voice dominates the narrative, the women surrounding him, Kishan's unnamed wife, Pinky Madam, and the shadowy figures of the Darkness, are confined to the periphery of language, agency, and self-representation, embodying the condition of the subaltern within contemporary India's fractured socio-economic landscape. The paper is organized into five interlocking sections: an introduction situating the novel within postcolonial feminist discourse; a review of the intellectual genealogy of subaltern studies from Gramsci through the Subaltern Studies Collective to Spivak's feminist revision; a close textual analysis of female characters as embodiments of double subordination; an examination of the limits and possibilities of defiance; and a contextualisation of the novel's gender politics within contemporary India. The study ultimately argues that the novel's true subaltern is not Balram — who ultimately speaks and escapes — but the women whose silence makes his voice possible.

Keywords: Subaltern, Feminism, Aravind Adiga, Postcolonial Fiction, Defiance, Contemporary India

Article Info: Received: 18 Apr 2026; Received in revised form: 12 May 2026; Accepted: 17 May 2026; Available online: 21 May 2026

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.113.27