This particular soliloquy follows the initial interchange in the car, when the bourgeois Ashok questions Balram about “current events” using, no doubt,  a traditional conception of what an educated person should know—to the point, an person educated in the Western (English) method left behind as a vestige of the Raj.  Both Ashok and Pinky Madam privilege a more or less Western-Caucasian sense of a proper education, with an emphasis on names, dates, and so on—items that are interesting and potentially useful, but yet are utterly unnecessary for daily survival in a subsistence economy (such as the one from which Balram has emerged).  Balram critiques the point of such an education in the same passage: “Fully formed fellows after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives” (Adiga 2008: 9).  While Adiga, like many of his literary contemporaries, never specifically addresses the question of British imperial rule, the scars of the colonial regime permeate the psyche of the Subcontinent.  Even taking this apparent erasure of the British into account, there is a reference to the centuries of Indian caste culture prior to, and substantially transformed by, the English colonial Raj that informs the narrative and its participants.

Implicit in Balram’s statement that “fully formed fellows…take orders from other men for the rest of their lives” is the idea that “not-quite-not-white” men remain subservient, hence repeating and extending the trope of colonial mimicry within the context of global financial colonization. As Arjun Appadurai (1990) claims:

The idea of deterritorialization may also be applied to money and finance, as money managers seek the best markets for their investments, independent of national boundaries.  In turn, these movements of monies are the basis of new kinds of conflict, as Los Angelenos worry about the Japanese buying up their city, and people in Bombay worry about the rich Arabs from the Gulf states who have not only transformed the prices of mangoes in Bombay, but have also substantially altered the profile of hotels, restaurants, and other services in the eyes of the population, just as they continue to do in London (302).

This internationalized anxiety is in stark comparison to the model of the American entrepreneur that Balram represents in himself (at least in his opinion), while simultaneously deriding American entrepreneurship in a kind of misinformed jingoism.  By making this particular contrast, Balram, and by extension, Adiga, proposes a subversive masculinity: he up-ends the paradigm of “the educated man” by situating him as being feminized (to an extent) by his formal education.  Balram further opens this subversion by creating another, specifically territorialized, binary: “…India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness.  The ocean brings light to my country.  Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off.  But the river brings darkness to India—the black river” (Adiga 2008: 11-12).  By deploying these specific binaries, Balram creates an unconscious association between privileged classes as “light” and feminine, and underprivileged classes as “dark” and inherently masculine.

Encoded in this reading of the subcontinent are the discourses of class and race which will run throughout the course of the novel; Balram not only refers to the poorer areas as that of darkness, but specifically “black.”  Even though he is not of the same African descent as a strictly Fanonian subject, by identifying the Ganges (the river Ganga) as “black,” he claims a stake in Fanon’s broader intellectual project being “…actional, by maintaining in his circularity the respect of the fundamental values that make the world human, that is the task of utmost urgency for he who, after careful reflection, prepares to act” (Fanon 2008: 197).   By murdering his employers and establishing himself as an entrepreneur in Bangalore, Balram believes himself to be a man of action primarily (cf. Adiga 2008: 8-9) and textually situates himself in that light.  Further, Balram emphasizes the “White Mask” side of the Fanonian equation with his constant need to create artificial light, playing off the idea of racialized stereotyping of criminals:  “Sometimes, in my apartment, I turn on both chandeliers, and then I lie down amid all that light, and I just start laughing.  A man in hiding, and yet he’s surrounded by chandeliers!  There—I’m revealing the secret to a successful escape.  The police searched for me in darkness: but I hid myself in light” (Adiga 2008: 97-98).

The muteness of barely-functional literacy comes to bear as Balram is “asked” to sign a statement claiming responsibility for a fatal car accident, even though it was the classed and privileged “Pinky Madam” who was behind the wheel at the time.  Not for nothing is her nickname “Pinky Madam,” representing the politics of class and race taken to their logical conclusion.  A rich, lighter-skinned woman drives drunk and kills a person, but the paid driver, of darker skin and from “the Darkness” (as he calls it) must sign the claim of responsibility.  While Pinky Madam is not “white,” in the traditional sense, she is, as a Christian, closer to both the old “Empire” and the America that Balram both idolizes and disregards.  Furthermore, as a member of the upper middle class (and can thus afford to escape back to America), Pinky Madam represents more directly the flows of capital that Balram can only, at best mimic from his class position.  As such, Pinky Madam is the closest character in the narrative to an empowered “white” person, even in her racial position as East Indian.  The discourses of class and American-ness trump that of skin color and gender in the colonialism of multinational corporate capitalism.

In this way, the novel gives the impression that it is, in a sense, “smarter” than its unreliable narrator; the text knows a cultural context beyond that which Balram represents in his letters.  As Jean-François Lyotard argues in The Postmodern Condition, “In contemporary society and culture—postindustrial society, postmodern culture—the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms.  The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation” (Lyotard 1984: 37).  Balram believes that he is partaking in a narrative of emancipation—by killing his employer and stealing his money, he can live a “free” life in the India of Light, which is to say, postindustrial Bangalore.  Adiga’s text dismantles and problematizes that emancipatory narrative by delegitimizing Balram’s knowledge of his own situation.  It is not until the novel’s conclusion that he truly comes to terms with the idea that he is not free, in that he must concern himself with the potentiality of his arrest for murder and theft.  Adiga deliberately deploys English as the language for both Balram’s narrative and metanarrative, so that he might best highlight what Balram must learn—that even as there is “no outside-the-text” (Derrida 1976: 158), there is also no outside the narrative.  Balram is not, and cannot, be emancipated from the socioeconomic and cultural conditions that surround him in postindustrial (capitalist-colonial) India.  The presence of English serves as a representative of both the history of English colonialism and American capitalist discourse.