Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger tells the story of Balram Halwai and how he got away with the murder of his master, Mr. Ashok. A common theme throughout the novel is questioning the validity of religious devotion and the idolization of a servant’s master. In The White Tiger, Balram appears religious when spending time with wealthy, powerful individuals, such as Mr. Ashok, or following Indian traditions, but switches to impious when he is focusing on self-gain. Ultimately, Adiga argues through Balram’s inconsistent infidelity that religion in India has lost its meaning and is simply a tool used to create hierarchies in society, such as master versus servant and servant versus servant. When Balram tells retrospective or outlandish stories, he always seems to portray himself as religiously skeptical in order to satirize and criticize the uselessness of religion in modern-day India and the hierarchies it forms. Near the beginning of the novel, when Balram begins telling his story to Wen Jiabao, he notes that “It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power…Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to choose from,” (6). Balram starts by describing the Indian custom of storytelling as “ancient and venerated” in order to make the reader initially believe that there is deep significance of storytelling in Indian culture and that Balram will further explain this topic. However, instead of focusing on