'The White Tiger' exposes the harsh realities of India's inequality

India has been a source of inspiration for storytelling and story-loving outsiders and insiders alike. It has centuries of tradition, it's a melting pot of religions and spiritual beliefs and its size and large population are interesting to people.

Of course, its inequality and often violent clashes between different fundamentalisms and its uneasy marrying of history with the necessities of modern economic relations in the face of the pressures from a globalised world fascinate storytellers.

Director Ramin Bahrani's adaptation of Aravind Adiga's acclaimed 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger is a hugely entertaining and thoughtful examination of what it takes to achieve success in a deeply unequal society.

In a society that's as deeply economically skewed and culturally bound by traditional restrictions as India, the only road to success is, as this story shows, through ruthless elimination of anyone and anything that gets in your way.

Our hero, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), tells us early on in his narration that in India the relationship between masters and servants is entrenched and accepted. Servants — like roosters in a roadside chicken coop stall who watch their fellow roosters being slaughtered while they silently wait their turn for certain death — believe that their only function is to serve, and must push aside their personal ambitions or feelings about the inequities of servitude itself.

In his small village, Balram initially has the potential to escape thanks to his better-than-average school achievements, but his hopes are soon dashed by the failure of his rickshaw father to afford his fees. Local feudal gangsters make regular trips to extract money from the peasantry, including Balram's father. His greedy grandmother also has no time for education and puts him to work at a local tea shop with his inept brother, chopping up charcoal for a penance.

When Balram hears that the gangsters are short a driver for their son Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), he charms his grandmother into lending him money for driving lessons and sets off for the city to stake his claim to a place a little higher up the social ladder than tea-shop charcoal-chopper.

Balram's relationship with Ashok and his India-born-US-raised wife, Pinky Madam, played by Priyanka Chopra, starts off in a haze of lovestruck awe at their sophisticated one percent lifestyle, before things take a much darker turn. As Balram slowly and devastatingly begins to realise that to succeed in modern India you must transform yourself from a common, benign rooster into that most rare of wily predators, the white tiger. The only way up is to cut someone else down.

Smartly directed with a good sense of the frenetic discord and jarring juxtapositions of modern Indian life, and a strong feeling for the bitter and dark ironies at its core, the film succeeds in drawing us into Balram's unique perspective while showing us, with energy and empathy, the realities of the world around him.

By the time his rollicking, darkly comic yet soberingly cynical adventure comes to an end, we're still rooting for him, in spite of all the morally dubious things he's done to get where we find him in the end.

In a stellar performance, Gourav displays just the right balance between awestruck naïf and slippery social climber, allowing us to dislike many of his ruthless decisions while being on his side when the climax arrives.

It's not a subtle parable about the realities of class struggle in a rapidly globalising and dismayingly unequal world, but it hits its targets hard and with a satirical precision that makes it gripping and enthralling.

Rather than ignore the harsh realities of the society in which it's set by using the escapism and the myth-enforcing tools of magical realism, Bahrani's film, like Adiga's source material, manages to stare the characters firmly in the eye and to expose the absurdities of India's social sacred cows using a sharp satirical scalpel.

• 'The White Tiger' is streaming on Netflix.