MANGALORE, India (UCAN) -- This year's Booker Prize winner, a Hindu, has donated part of his prize money to his Catholic alma mater as a token of gratitude.

Aravind Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, which includes a cash award of 50,000 pounds (US$81,495). The prestigious prize is given each year to the best novel in English by a writer from the Commonwealth of Nations -- an association linking Britain and former British colonies -- or Ireland.

Adiga, 34, donated 1.5 million rupees (US$30,300) to St. Aloysius School in Mangalore, southern India, where he completed high school. The award was announced in London on Oct. 14.

Four other writers of Indian descent have won the award in its 40-year history: V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai.

In an e-mail to St. Aloysius rector Father Francis Serrao, Adiga said he donated the money in gratitude for the "fine education" he received there.

The journalist-writer hailed the school as "one of the gems of Mangalore" and said it laid the foundation for his vision in life. Mangalore, a port town 2,290 kilometers south of New Delhi, is a Catholic stronghold in Karnataka state.

Adiga, who topped the statewide 10th-grade examination in 1989, would like the school to use the money for a special scholarship named after his favorite teacher, Father Victor D'Souza, who taught chemistry and physics. He recalled the late priest reminding students of their responsibility to help and defend the poor and underprivileged.

Father Serrao told UCA News the school is proud of its "great alumnus," a graduate who proved the school's "vision in action."

"Each student is taught to be competent, morally strong, socially sensitive and personally balanced," Father Serrao said. Adiga, he recalled, was already sensitive to the needs of the poor during his school days.

The rector said Adiga's family was close to the local Church, since his father, Madhav Adiga, was a doctor in a hospital under Mangalore diocese's management.

The school plans to honor the writer on Jan. 4, the priest added.

Joseph D'Souza, the school's assistant headmaster, who once taught Adiga, remembers him as a well-behaved youth. The 58-year-old teacher says St. Aloysius School gives a "total formation" that sets peoples' vision of life in the right direction.

Adiga's novel was published early this year. The chairperson of the Booker Prize judges said the novel reveals "the dark side of India." The shiny image of India rising as a modern global economy stands in great contrast against the story of the novel's main character, who has to overcome crushing rural poverty.

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