In her review of The White Tiger for Outlook, Manjula Padmanabhan called the book "a tedious, unfunny slog". She found traces of Kiran Nagarkar, I. Allan Sealy and Salman Rushdie in Adiga’s "schoolboyish sneering", but "none of the genius of these authors, neither the complexity of plot, nor the brilliant command of language, nor the depth of vision."
"It reads like the first draft of a Bollywood screenplay . Every character is a cliché. The humour is bitter and unsubtle; the writing forgettable."
Samir Rahim, The Daily Telegraph