The Netflix film The White Tiger, based on Aravind Adiga’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, will star Rajkummar Rao, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Adarsh Gourav, the screening platform announced in a press release on Wednesday.

The White Tiger has been written and will be directed by American filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, whose credits include Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, 99 Homes and Fahrenheit 451. Filming on the Mukul Deora production will begin over the next few weeks.

Adiga’s acclaimed debut novel about caste, poverty and globalisation was published in 2008. The “self-taught entrepreneur” Balram Halwai pulls himself out of poverty by working as the chauffeur of a political fixer in Delhi. Halwai thieves and murders his way to lucre, which he details in letters to visiting Chinese head of state Wen Jiabao.

In an interview to Scroll.in in 2018, Bahrani had said, “If a project does not have social, political and philosophical aspects to it, I get bored. Pure entertainment is good, but it does not interest me enough to work on. You see this in every novel Aravind has ever written – they have deep meaning, and they are also entertaining.”

In a prepared statement, Priyanka Chopra, who is also the film’s executive producer, said, “When I read the book, I was fascinated with the perspective of the narrative. The story’s portrayal of raw ambition and the extent one will go to achieve one’s goals is riveting.”

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