Sunday book pick: In ‘The Vendor of Sweets’, a Gandhian is put to the test in postcolonial Malgudi

“Once a Satyagrahi, always a Satyagrahi. If one was not acting for truth against the British, one was acting for truth in some other matter, in personal affairs, in all sorts of things. His training was always there, but somehow had dimmed inexpicably.”

If there’s an author that immediately comes to my mind for “comfort reading”, it is the iconic RK Narayan. There are few destinations as familiar to the Indian literary traveller as Malgudi, the eccentric, warm-hearted South Indian town where there’s a story in every gully.

Narayan’s 1967 novel, The Vendor of Sweets, takes the reader back to Malgudi. This time, we meet Jagan, a Bhagavad Gita-reading, Gandhi-abiding, fastidious vendor of sweetmeats who is suggested to have the most successful confectionery business in the town. Jagan is 55 and his wife has been dead for some time. His only son Mali lives in his own world. Jagan’s time is occupied at the shop, ensuring he sells only the best, purest sweets to his customers.

A Satyagrahi out of water

Independent India has little use for a Satyagrahi but for Jagan it is a way of life. He has given up salt and sugar, wears only khadi, and spins the charkha for an hour every day. His free time is spent reading the Bhagavad Gita. Jagan is objectively a simple man – his needs and wants are few – yet he is particular about money (of which he has plenty), safeguarding it from roving eyes, including his son’s.

With a fine balancing hand, Narayan at once sympathises with and ribs the retired Gandhian. With the freedom movement concluded and the young nation slowly getting back on its feet, Gandhians like Jagan sought to employ their Satyagraha elsewhere. Jagan’s austere lifestyle is at odds with his riches, but Narayan admires his dedication to the ideology he has adopted. Jagan’s worst vices are his orthodox view of marriage and an affinity for wealth, but other than that he’s portrayed as a good man.

Mali’s sudden departure to America discomposes Jagan. But for Narayan, this is an opportunity to flex his humorist’s muscles once more. Jagan is infatuated with America like an unrequited lover. Mali’s sparsely worded letters allow Jagan to fill the gaps in his knowledge with romantic imagination. For a Gandhian, this is a strange preoccupation; however, one must keep up with the times and circumstances. Jagan does his part in disseminating knowledge by telling the townsfolk of the great luxuries of America.

Jagan’s pride is punctured when Mali returns to India with a foreign bride on his arms. Jagan’s initial horror is replaced by reluctant acceptance. Furthermore, Mali announces his ambition of manufacturing “storywriting machines”. (This sounds especially sinister in the age of AI). Narayan is superbly discerning in these segments; instead of planting deeper seeds of suspicion in his protagonist, he facilitates a friendly acquaintance between Jagan and Mali’s wife, Grace. In his relationship with Mali, Jagan relies on Grace to intervene.

Jagan feels harassed by his son’s demands for money and his secretiveness. He is as ignorant about Mali’s life in Malgudi as he was about his life in America. But a Gandhian is also an optimist. Jagan tries to have an encouraging outlook on his son’s business ventures but cannot help but feel disheartened as he constantly belittles India and Indians. Here too, Narayan handles Jagan’s embarrassment with great delicacy.

A different RK Narayan

Unlike Narayan’s more linear novels, The Vendor of Sweets travels to the past and a dreamlike alternate timeline where Jagan simultaneously revisits his days as a new husband and an ageing man at the verge of renouncing his worldly ambitions.

Jagan’s accounts as a prospective groom – looking for a bride, the successful matchmaking, the grand wedding – and then a devoted husband are especially charming. Jagan’s own struggles with education and then the more serious struggle with childlessness bring out the serious writer in Narayan. He argues in favour of a couple’s privacy and Jagan’s steadfast devotion to his wife is also feminist in attitude. The trials that the couple faces through more than a decade of childlessness end happily with Mali’s birth.

Though a detour from the main story, any path that Narayan takes the reader on is a pleasant one. This segment has all the flourishes of a novella and before long, the reader is whisked away to a Malgudi from a few decades ago, where life, at least for Jagan, was not as lonely as it is in the present.

In the dreamlike alternate timeline, Jagan encounters a mysterious hair dyer who cares nothing about Jagan’s confectionery business or his strict Gandhian lifestyle. Instead, he introduces Jagan to a similarly principled way of life through the anecdotes of his fabled guru, a highly learned sculptor. Jagan is mesmerised. Consolidating the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi’s wisdom, the guidance of this enigmatic stranger, and his own weariness, Jagan vows to give up domestic life and pursue enterprises more suitable to his age.

The Vendor of Sweets has all the trademarks of a Narayan novel, while being one of his most sobering. The generation gap between a father and son is its most obvious discord, but it is also rather sorrowful to see how quickly Gandhian principles were discarded after independence was won.

Mali’s enchantment with an industrialised America points to the younger generation’s need for speed while Jagan’s obsession with safeguarding his money is an insult to Gandhi’s idealism. Does this mean that Narayan thought of the Gandhian way of life as ultimately unsustainable? It does seem so. Even so, he seems to suggest that while minor disturbances and digressions are inevitable, it is still possible to be a truth-worshipping and conscientious Indian, regardless of whether one spins the charkha.

The Vendor of Sweets, RK Narayan, Penguin Modern Classics.

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• RK Narayan
• malgudi
• gandhi