Much of The White Tiger’s comic energy comes from Balram’s treatment of his criminal drive to become a businessman—he eventually goes on to run a car service—as an admirable story of success. The novel itself is told in a series of letters addressed to Wen Jiabao, the premier of China, who visited India in 2005 and expressed curiosity about its entrepreneurial spirit. What Balram doesn’t seem to understand in these near-sociopathic missives is that upward mobility doesn’t justify slaughtering your master—although in the context of India, that might be what it takes.

Adiga himself was born in southern India and lived there until the age of 15, when he left for England, Australia and New York before returning to his home country in 2003 as a correspondent for Time magazine, an eye-opening experience that provided much of the fodder for The White Tiger. He was amazed to rediscover the reality of the lower classes, which had only swollen more grotesquely after the country’s economic boom in the ’90s. “Even the middle class in Delhi have three or four servants: a chauffeur, a cook, someone to have around the house to look after your kids,” Adiga explains. “After I returned, I went to the liquor store and it was a huge revelation. It hit me that I was the only guy buying my whiskey for myself—everyone else there was a servant, buying it for someone else.”

The novel burrows deep into this milieu, in which the poor are grateful to have jobs, no matter how menial. Balram labels his world “the Coop,” likening fellow servants to obedient chickens. Adiga explains that Balram’s frequently hilarious animal metaphors reflect a particular Indian mind-set. “When you come here, you’re struck by the animals—cats, dogs, stray cows, monkeys roaming wild within the cities, stray animals, diseased animals, animals looking for garbage,” the author says. “This tends to reflect in the way Indians talk—I’m much more likely to use a metaphor involving an animal now. It also reflects how the narrator, like a lot of Indians of his class, sees life as being a brutal and harsh Darwinian struggle.”

Balram’s menial duties grow increasingly humiliating. When Mr. Ashok’s drunken wife is involved in a fatal hit-and-run, Balram is forced by his master to accept legal responsibility for the death. But when the intrepid narrator figures out how to get his hands on the corrupt Ashok’s vast sums of money, he finds his way out of the so-called Coop and into the capitalist rat race.

Balram’s chaotic social climbing forms the basis for a funny and imaginative tour of modern India. The White Tiger certainly has sympathy for its protagonist, but it’s much more than a simple social critique. India comes off as a deeply flawed nation (“It is developing autistically—it’s the kid who can do amazing math but can’t tie his shoelace properly,” says the author). And Balram is a complicated antihero: vain, entitled, and willing to sacrifice anything, even his family, to start his own business. “I was trying to capture a voice and a way of talking about India and thinking about life here which I don’t find represented in books—a kind of morally ambiguous, venal, violent kind of voice,” Adiga says. In refusing to wallow in superficial exoticism or South Asian family tensions, The White Tiger finds its own path to multifaceted success: It’s both a riveting existential crime story and an exposé of social injustice.

The White Tiger (Free Press, $24) is out now.