Caste, Humiliation, and the Architecture of Masculine Response: Precarious Manhood in Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger and Manu Joseph's Serious Men

Abstract

The recent Indian fiction literary scene has generated a considerable body of male protagonists whose social marginalization behaviour is characterized by complex patterns of gendered behaviour. However, the current literature on the subject has mainly used R. W. Connell’s hegemonic masculinity theory in combination with postcolonial theories, thus neglecting the psychological processes through which social precariousness is channeled into specific masculine behaviours. This paper uses the Precarious Manhood Theory (Vandello & Bosson) in combination with affect theory to examine the caste- and class-based humiliation effects on two canonical Indian novels: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) and Manu Joseph’s Serious Men (2010). By close reading and comparative text analysis, it is shown that both protagonists, Balram Halwai and Ayyan Mani, are subject to the same conditions of masculine precariousness, but their humiliation affectively processed in opposite manners: openly aggressive in Balram and secretly passive-aggressive in Ayyan. This opposition cannot be explained by social position alone but by the complex interplay of memory, affective potential, and masculine assertion channels in each protagonist’s specific institutional setting. By heavily relying on textual evidence from both novels, this paper contributes to postcolonial masculinity studies by showing that precarious manhood in caste-stratified societies needs context-specific theoretical approaches that consider the structural determinants of behavioural possibilities. This paper further extends the Precarious Manhood Theory from its original Euro-American experimental psychology settings into postcolonial literary studies, exemplifying how institutional access conditions the architecture of masculine restorative action.