The Vendor of Sweets by R. K. Narayan

First published: 1967, in Great Britain as The Sweet-Vendor (U.S. edition, 1967)

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: The mythical town of Malgudi, South India

Principal Characters:

• Jagan, the protagonist, a sweet-vendor and a prosperous widower
• The Cousin, a man-about-town and a confidant to Jagan
• Mali, Jagan’s Westernized son
• Grace, Mali’s half-Korean, half-American wife
• A Dye-maker, an old man who changes the course of Jagan’s life

The Novel

Close to sixty, an age when orthodox Hindus are supposed to enter a new spiritual phase of detachment from worldly affairs, Jagan is a prosperous widower who combines handsome profits from his sweets business with high-minded Gandhian principles. The contradictions between Jagan’s greedy materialism and his ascetic sense, however, are all too evident. A former activist in Gandhi’s satyagraha movement in the turbulent 1940’s, who received a jail sentence as a result, he is now experimenting with nature diets and cures. His book on the subject still awaits publication, for Nataraj, the printer, is a master of delays.

Jagan’s pride and joy is his son Mali, who abandons his studies in order to try his hand at writing. Jagan’s consternation is exacerbated when Mali coolly announces that he is going to America to become a writer. Jagan believes that the West will corrupt his son, who is already hostile to many Indian ways—especially his father’s occupation. Mali steals money from his father and sets off.

A year or two later, Mali returns to Malgudi with a half-Korean, half-American wife, Grace, and a grandiose scheme for marketing an electronic novel-writing machine. Jagan, who is still a stranger to his son, is extremely flustered. He is upset by Grace’s presence in his orthodox home, and he is even more agitated when Mali publishes a prospectus containing the unauthorized use of Jagan’s name. A silent tension grows in the home as Jagan acts increasingly guilty and embarrassed, slinking around rooms and avoiding his son. Grace tries to understand and adapt to Indian ways but finds this difficult.

The tragicomic clash of generations deepens with every chapter and is beautifully counterpointed by a long flashback to Jagan’s own youthful marriage to Ambika, a temperamental woman who had to survive years of Jagan’s idleness and lust before the gods blessed her with a son.

The crucial turning point of the story, however, is Jagan’s fateful encounter with an old dye-maker, who reminds him of his real being, which is not mere flesh and blood. The dye-maker has a sacred mission—to retrieve and complete a half-finished carving of five-faced Gayatri, the deity of Radiance—and he elicits Jagan’s help in this matter. Suddenly, Jagan is struck by the significance of this experience. All too aware that his home is beginning to resemble a hell on earth, he decides that he must prepare for a new janma, or phase of life.

Jagan barricades himself completely from Mali and Grace, insulating himself from the evil radiations of a couple not married according to Hindu custom. When news arrives of Mali’s arrest for a violation of the liquor prohibition law, Jagan is curiously detached. He figures that truth will out. He then prepares to turn over his finances and shop to his son, takes his leave of his worried cousin, and offers to buy Grace an airplane ticket should she wish to return to America. His benevolence and withdrawal mark his emergence as a free man who is taking leave of a world whose affairs must now be left to younger people.

The Characters

R. K. Narayan focuses on a single protagonist in the process of spiritual change, and he builds a cast of foils around this central figure. Jagan is the hero caught at a time when most people his age think about retirement. A prosperous widower, he has made only superficial preparations for old age and a different mode of life. He has renounced salt, sugar, and rice—staples in an Indian diet—but he has not yet conquered the self. His austerity is contradicted by his monetary greed. After he piously reads Hindu scripture, he carefully counts out his daily profits (won by some dishonest practices) and then secures the money in a drawer with a strong-lock. A former political activist, he is now given to eccentric ideas about diets and nature cures.

The conflicts between his materialism and spirituality are displaced, however, by the conflicts with his spoiled son, whose laziness and wastefulness eventually yield to a Westernization radically at odds with Indian customs and values. Mali’s cold contempt for his father’s occupation and way of life deepens the gulf of generations. The chasm is widened by Mali’s wife, Grace, a woman who first baffles, embarrasses, and annoys Jagan, before eventually winning his respect and love.

Jagan is never, however, the innocent hero. The long flashback to his youth and marriage demonstrates his own quirks and failures in the past. Like Mali, he also failed as a student, and like Mali, he also failed to be a kind, thoughtful husband. Jagan’s wife turned increasingly temperamental because of his insensitivity, lust, and periodic silences, and this produced great anxiety for Jagan in the early years of his married life.

Nevertheless, the past is past, and it is Jagan in the present who is the true focus. To this effect, the cousin (a man-about-town who claims “cousinhood” with many others) and dye-maker play significant roles in sharpening the focus, for they serve as foils to his temperament and vision. The cousin listens to Jagan’s complaints, advises him in important domestic matters, brings him news of the town, and helps Jagan to crystallize his attitudes in a crisis. He reminds Jagan of the equanimity that should be the individual’s prime goal in life, and his reminder is an apt extension of the message already implanted in Jagan’s mind and soul by the dye-maker of Kabir Street.

Although he appears in only one chapter, this dye-maker is of crucial importance in the novel. He is a link between past and present, a catalyst for the future, and a prod to conscience. In this way, he is a didactic figure, whose role is explicit and direct but no less dramatic for being so obvious. His tales of the past, when he was reared by a man who had dedicated his life to making a new statue for one stolen from a temple, carry Jagan into a world very removed from his present. Yet, paradoxically, the edge of reality blurs, and sweetmeat-vending, money, and Mali’s problems all recede in this episode. The dye-maker prompts Jagan into realizing how narrow his whole existence has been. The change in the dye-maker’s manner (he becomes increasingly authoritarian as he speaks to Jagan) precedes the change in Jagan’s spirit. The dye-maker reveals that at sixty-nine, he is prepared to die peacefully if he can but still hopes to complete the sacred statue and install it on its pedestal. His revelation inspires Jagan, who becomes convinced of a need to retreat from the mundane world and vanish into the forest or, at least, from his trouble-torn home. It is at this point that he enters his most contemplative phase, which precedes his eventual withdrawal from Mali’s problems and his own business affairs.

Critical Context

Considered a born storyteller with a fine sense of the tragicomic, Narayan has sometimes been compared to Anton Chekhov by virtue of his underlying sense of beauty and sadness. His writing is wholly Indian, however, in its assumptions, attitudes, and form, in that its protagonists are always circumscribed by an Indian society permeated by a sense of dharma, or duty. The gods and goddesses, too, play instructive (and entertaining) roles in the lives of his protagonists, and the world of politics (sometimes relegated to a shadowy background reality) gives his novels a connection to a larger sphere.

From the beginning of his career, Narayan has been an optimist—at least as far as India is concerned—for he has always been confident that no matter what happens in a sociological or political context, the country will survive and continue. All of his novels concern themselves with questions of identity and a quest for equilibrium, but because behind these questions and themes lies an implicit faith in the transcendental nature of God and human fate, the endings of a Narayan novel sometimes seem much too calm in their detachment from worldly cares and issues. The Vendor of Sweets is not exempt from this “fairy-tale” feeling. To a Western reader, Jagan’s belief that he is a “free man” simply by his walking away from his shop, son, and associates may smack too much of an illusion of tranquillity, and the choice of noninvolvement seems a questionable virtue. Narayan is not, however, writing according to Western values.

Bibliography

Argyle, Barry. “Narayan’s The Sweet-Vendor,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. VII (June, 1972), pp. 35-44.

Rao, V. Panduranga. “The Art of R. K. Narayan,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature. No. 5 (July, 1968), pp. 29-40.

Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan, 1971. Edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert.