Gandhi “The
Gita” and Gayatri
in “The Vendor
of Sweets”
R. A. JAYANTHA
The impressive popularity achieved by some of
the novels of R. K. Narayan, notably The Financial Expert, The English Teacher and The Guide, seems to
have somewhat obscured his significant achievement in The Vendor of Sweets (hereafter abbreviated to The Vendor). A creation of his ripe age and maturity as
novelist – Narayan was sixty at the time of writing this work – it has a subtle
charm which becomes apparent to the reader only after a second or third
reading. At least, it was so with me. In terms of outward events,
dramatic and sensational happenings, and variety of people, The Vendor is a complete contrast to Narayan’s other novels. It is outwardly quiet
and gentle. It does not have anything like the menacing presence of a raakshasa to contend with, as in The
Man-eater of Malgudi. Nor is
there a whole community of people which in its blind trust and faith helps in
the transformation of a ragamuffin, a rascal into a saint and martyr, as in The Guide. There is no run on a private bank by hundreds of its
panic-stricken depositors, as in The Financial Expert. Nor
does a magnificent tiger stray into the streets of Malgudi, as in A Tiger for Malgudi, to throw its people into utter confusion to
start with, and later to attain mystical illumination. Instead The Vendor tells us the domestic story of a father and son. An impulsive and
drastic reduction of the price of sweets is the only sensational thing to happen
in it. Unlike The Man-eater
of Malgudi, its predecessor
which presents a richly peopled world almost Chaucerian in its variety, this
novel focuses attention on a limited number of people: Jagan the protagonist,
his son Mali, Mali’s companion Grace, and Jagan’s ubiquitous cousin who is not
given a name. In addition to these chief characters, there are Jagan’s wife
Ambika, his parents, Chinna Dorai the hair-blackener and sculptor, and a few
others. If the number of characters is limited in this novel, it presents
greater psychological subtlety and depth of feeling than many other novels of
Narayan.
It is possible to read The Vendor as a merely amusing story which depends for its comedy on the
improbable and fantastic. But there is much more in it than is apparent on the
surface. While it seems to tell the amusing story of an eccentric and
obscurantist father and his upstart son, and the game of hide and seek they
play with each other, in point of fact it is built on a few inter-related
themes of which the most readily obvious is the father-son motif. The others
are: youth versus age, the generation gap, tradition versus modernity, East versus
West, and search or quest.
The quest motif is the most meaningful in the novel and encompasses all the
others. Jagan the protagonist of the novel, by virtue of the circumstances of
his life, engaged himself in different kinds of search. But he is not a
deliberate and self-conscious quester, nor is he capable of sophisticated
intellectual inquiry. What is more, he is hardly aware of some of the searches
he is involved in.
Ever since his wife Ambika died of a brain
tumor and an invincible barrier began to grow between himself and his orphaned
son
It is better stated at the outset that The
Vendor is not a “Gandhi Novel” and that Narayan has not written one such.
Nor does it aim at expressing any particular attitude towards Gandhi and his
way of life. However, the novelist uses the Gandhian motif, to study a certain
kind of man who claims to be a follower of Gandhi. (P. 15) He gives us a
meticulously detailed account of Jagan’s apparently Gandhian habits. He wears
only simple and plain Khaddar clothes made of yarn he himself has spun on the Charkha. He has been spinning on it since Gandhi visited Malgudi “over twenty
years ago.” (P. 15) He produces enough yarn to meet his sartorial requirements,
which consist of just two sets of clothes. He has made it a point to wear only
“non-violent footwear,” “sandals made of the leather of an animal which had
died of old age.” (P. 15) In the past occasionally he would make “excursions to
remote villages where a cow or a calf was reported to be dying” (P. 15) to
secure the hide. Thereafter he would try his hand at tanning it, even at the
risk of blasting his domestic life because his wife and little son were unable
to tolerate the stench of the leather. Jagan abandoned this practice in
deference to his dying wife’s wish, and thereafter was content to depend upon a
trusted cobbler to supply his rather complicated nonviolent footwear.
Jagan’s experiments in dietetics, his quackish enthusiasm for nature cure, his
austerity and determination to be self-reliant regarding his personal needs,
his needless conquest of taste, and his proud claim regarding his “simple
living and high thinking, as Gandhi taught us” (P. 45), all these make him an
eccentric and rather comic Gandhi man. But he also accumulates wealth, largely
by evading tax, even though he claims that one who “came under the spell of
Gandhi” “could do not wrong.” (P. 45) With his tongue in the cheek, the author
says that if Gandhi had said anywhere that one should pay his sales tax
uncomplainingly, Jagan would have certainly done so. (P. 117)
Jagan’s evasion of tax and accumulation of unaccounted money is not the only contradiction in his profession and practice of Gandhian principles. He has a tendency to attribute to Gandhi, his “master”, some of his own fads. For example, he asserts that the Mahatma “was opposed to buffalo products.” (P. 97) His experiments with salt-free and sugar-free diet have nothing to do with Gandhi; so too his notions about the properties of margosa and the nylon toothbrush. As the author explains: “It was impossible to disentangle the sources of his theories and say what he owed to Mahatmaji and how much he has imbibed from his father, who had also spent a lifetime perfecting his theories of sound living ...” (P. 26) in a reminiscent mood Jagan can also allow his memory to slur over the fact that by the time he ever came to know about the Mahatma, he had already failed several times in the B. A., and had been taking his examination as a private candidate, and thus make the heroic claim: “I had to leave the college when Gandhi ordered us to non-co-operate. I spent the best of my student years in prison.” (P. 33)
Hence the question: “How sincere is Jagan’s
profession of high-minded Gandhian principles?” Is it entirely hypocritical,
“Pecksniffian”, a mere “smoke-screen” for his dishonesty, as some have chosen
to describe it? While the contradictions in his Gandhism are very true and do
not have to be laboured at all, to be fair to him, we have to note that he
keeps up well past his middle age certain Gandhian practices acquired as a
young man. He consistently wears khadi, spins regularly on the charkha,
and lives a life of ascetic simplicity, even though these do not make his
day-to-day living smooth or comfortable for him. And his loyalty to Gandhi has
made him an outcast from his close relations, although he is quite happy to be
one since he can escape a number of tiresome family festivals and funerals. (P.
148) He has not expected in return any personal gain for being “Gandbian”,
albeit in his own comic way. It is something to be a Gandhian, however
imperfect, in an environment which is anything but Gandhian. The Vendor is
placed in the ’Sixties of post-Independence
Jagan’s devotion to the Bhagavadgita, it may be assumed, is a consequence of his
reverence for Gandhi, although it is not explicitly said so in
the novel. Frequently both Gandhi and the Gita are associated
in his mind. A “red bound” copy of the Gita is a companion
to him and he spends most of his spare time in the sweet shop reading it. He
sports before others his knowledge of its teachings to which he refers
frequently. There is nothing surprising or unnatural in this since the Gita and its teachings are a part of the ethos of Malgudi, and have been so
for centuries. But it is the use Jagan makes of the Gita that renders him eccentric and comic. In fact, his “Gitaism” is much more
comic than his Gandhism. This is brought out quietly in the first ever
reference to it in the novel. We are told that every morning Jagan sat “with a
sense of fulfilment on a throne-like chair in his shop placed at a strategic
point” so that “he could hear, see and smell whatever
was happening in the kitchen” and notice what was going on at the front stall.
As long as the frying and sizzling noise in the kitchen continued and the trays
passed, Jagan noticed nothing, “his gaze unflinchingly fixed on the Sanskrit
lines in a red bound copy of the Bhagavadgita, but if
there were the slightest pause in the sizzling, he cried out to the cooks
without lifting his eyes from the sacred text, “What is happening...?” By a similar shout he would alert the counter-attendant as well as the
watchman at the door, and return to the Lord’s sayings with a quietened mind.
(P. 18)
Until the time for counting the day’s
collection arrived, Jagan would continue to read the Gita with fixed attention. His attachment to money, “free cash” (P. 20) as
well as accounted money, conflicts with the Gita ideals of
non-attachment as well as non-possession (both very dear to Gandhi). But he
likes to believe that he does not accumulate it at all – “it just grows
naturally”. It is one’s “duty to work” and he is doing just this. He cites a
verse from the Gita, as he can always do, in support of it. (P. 46)
Jagan’s attachment to money is not simply that of a miser, although he does
accumulate money meticulously. He is not just another version of Margayya, the
“financial expert”, with whom money becomes such an obsession as to make him at
one stage even grow indifferent to his wife and son. Jagan on the other hand
intends all his wealth for his son and to make him happy. He even feels a
“sneaking admiration” (P 54) for his son when he comes to know to his shock
that
Jagan’s frequent references to Gandhi and the
Gita are little more than a harmless vanity he
indulges in. They become ludicrous and comic not only because they are often
irrelevant but because on these occasions Jagan believes that he understands
both Gandhi and the Gita. One suspects that he invokes them when his
thinking is rather muddled. His understanding of Gandhian principles and of the
teachings of the Gita comes to be put to a most severe test when
Contrary to what some critics have thought,
accepting Grace as his daughter-in-law and into his household is not very
difficult for Jagan. To be sure, he does have some qualms about it at the
beginning, and avoids people lest they should ask him embarrassing questions
about his “daughter-in-law,” and his son. When the “cousin” succeeds in
cornering him once and asks him about their dietary arrangements, Jagan covers
up his confusion and finds his escape in a reference to the Gita: “I can only provide what I am used to. If they don’t like it, they can
go and eat where they please…One can only do one’s duty up to a point. Even in
the Gita you find it mentioned. The limit of one’s
duty is well-defined.” (P. 66) Before long Jagan gets used to the presence of
Grace at home, and even appreciates the feminine orderliness that she brings
his household which he had missed since the death of his wife years ago. (P. 69)
Jagan’s troubles start when both
The turmoil and confusion of Jagan’s mind is
revealed not only when he impulsively reduces drastically the price of all
sweets in his shop, but also imposes on his kitchen staff the Gita, to our amusement and their discomfiture. Thanks to his new policy they
are compelled to have plenty of leisure and he intends to read to them for an
hour every day from the Gita and explain the meaning of the verses. In
fact it is he who is in need of the teachings of the Gita rather than they who flourish in kitchen smoke and prefer frying to
enlightenment. It is interesting to observe how he interprets the words of the
Lord who exhorts the reluctant Arjuna to fight, “Then God himself … explained
to him to fight for a cause even if you had to face your brothers, cousins or even sons. No good has been achieved without
a fight at the proper time..”
(P. 103) The italicised words reveal how Jagan
puts his own construction upon the scriptural passage. He sees himself as
another Arjuna engaged in a fight, though it is against his own son, and this
accounts for the addition with emphasis of “even sons” to the
long list of kinsmen one has to fight with. The parallel between himself and
Arjuna would have been ridiculous, had not his agony been very real and keen.
The conflict with his son over the question
of providing funds for the venture is only the beginning of the crisis in
Jagan’s life. From now on both Gandhi and the Gila not only occupy
his mind increasingly, but in each case he tries to apply to his particular
situation what he understands from their teachings. Formerly, when all seemed
smooth-sailing for Jagan, his profession and practice of the Gandhian ideals
and his public display of devotion to the Gita were touched with vanity
and pride, though harmless, and stressed his difference from the less fortunate
mortals. The crisis he faces now is unprecedented in his life, and he has to
struggle hard to find a solution for it. When he actually finds one, it will be
found though he may not be aware of it, that it is truly in keeping with the
spirit of the teachings of Gandhi and the Gita in so far as it is
possible for a man of his powers of ordinary understanding. In this process of
transformation Chinaa Dorai the hair-blackener and sculptor plays the role of a
catalyst.
Though the meeting of Chinna Dorai with Jagan
appears to be accidental, actually he comes to seek the sweet-vendor’s
patronage so that he could finish the image of goddess Gayatri begun by his
late roaster, and instal it on a pedestal. The bearded sculptor meets
Jagan just at the psychological moment when he has begun the process of
“reckoning”. (P. 99) and introspection. He opens up a new horizon to Jagan
whose “fixed orbit” for years “had been between the statue and the shop” and
whose “mental operations were confined to
As Jagan watches Chinna Dorai and mutely
follows him in the environs of the grove “sweetmeat vending, money and his
son’s problems (seem) remote and unrelated to him. The edge of reality itself
(begins) to blur”. (P. 118) As he listens agape to the other’s account of his
master’s activities, he feels “as if a new world had flashed into view.” He
suddenly realises how narrow his whole existence (has) been. (P. 119) He begins to wonder: “Am I on the verge of a new janma?”
Nothing seems really to matter. He catches himself saying aloud obviously with
implied reference to his problems which had seemed to defy a solution. “Such
things are common in ordinary existence and always passing”. (P. 120) The irony
is that he does not know that far more disturbing shocks than
After the block of stone on
which the master sculptor had knocked the first dents for the image of Goddess
Gayatri, is brought out of the moss-covered pond, Chinna Dorai excitedly
describes the various lines marked on it by his master, and then bursts into a
Sanskrit song which holds forth a magnificent vision of the five-faced “deity
of Radiance.” Here is the full text of the Sanskrit verse, though only a part
of the first line is cited in the text of the novel:
Muktavidruma hemanila dhavala Chhiaah mukhaih
teekshanaih
Yukta bindunibaddha ratnamakutam tatvartha
varnaimikam
Gayatrim varadabhayam kusakasah subhram
kapalam gadam
Samkham thakra madaravindayugalam hastai
rvahantim bhaje
This verse is recited everyday by a section
of Brahmins during the performance of Sandhya vandanam, just before one
sits down to meditative recitation of the sacred Gayatri. As Chinna
Dorai explains the meaning of this verse and elucidates the symbolic
significance of the things the goddess carries in her hands, Jagan is filled
with “awe and reverence at the picture.” (P. 125) The sculptor earnestly pleads
with him to buy the grove and thus help him to create and install the image of
this goddess and thereby fulfil his master’s ambition. The cautious and worldly
wise businessman in Jagan tries to laugh it off, but yields to his suggestion
that it would do good to him to have a “retreat” like the grove. This
suggestion made in utter earnestness helps to bring out what must have been an
unconsciously growing need of Jagan’s to withdraw himself from his son if only
because there does not seem to be any possibility of understanding and
communication between himself and Mali. So he eagerly replies: “Yes, yes, God
knows I need a retreat. You know, my friend, at some stage in one’s life one
must uproot oneself from the accustomed surroundings and disappear so that
others may continue in peace.” (P.
126) And Chinna Dorai
enthusiastically endorses it. Thus Jagan unexpectedly happens upon the
traditional ideal of Vanaprasthasrama.
The rest of the novel shows how under the
pressure of experience, Jagan’s earlier interest in Gandhi and the Gita and
his newly-acquired interest in the sculpting of the Goddess Gayatri coalesce.
His contact with the bearded sculptor touches him profoundly. For the first
time in his life, he is invited to entertain an idea utterly free from any
self-regarding thought from thoughts of profit and loss, and cultivate a
disinterested interest – a sort of intransitive interest – which is pursued for
its own sake without any thought of the consequences Not that Jagan understands
fully at this moment the implications
and significance of the sculptor’s advice or the thrilling vision of the
goddess although he is deeply impressed by both. He has to go through some more
of agonising experiences – in fact the worst is yet to be – before his need for
a retreat reaches its full consciousness and urgency, and before he can begin
to act in the direction of Chinna Dorai’s advice and take the plunge to become
a Vanaprastha. But the process of transformation and the travails of entering
a new janma have
begun.
When Jagan returns home
from Nallappa’a grove, his mind is in an excitement and a “turmoil” To still his
nerves and thoughts he spins on the charkha for a while. He recalls significantly
that “Gandhi had prescribed spinning not only for the economic ills of the
country, but also for any deep agitation of the mind.” He has a feeling that
his “identity is undergoing a change,” and that he has become “a different man
at the moment,” although he still cares for his family, shop and house. (P. 127)
As he spins at the wheel his mind analyses “everything with the utmost clarity.”
(P. 128) He reflects: “One enters a new life at the appointed time and it’s
foolish to resist. He was no longer the father of
However, this sense of
elation is short-lived, as Jagan’s reverie is broken by
Thus Jagan, who has
allowed things to drift, is now driven to intense introspection leading to a
final decision. Brooding rather nostalgically over the different phases of his
life, particularly the circumstances surrounding the birth of Mall after years
of frustration, he comes to the realisation that he had “outlived” his purpose in
the house and that he should retire without grumbling and fretting from the
familiar surrounding. to enter “a new janma” and live the remaining
years of his life “on a different plane” (P. 182), so that his
son may live his life as it pleases him. Now he becomes fully conscious of the
particular relevance of the sculptor’s advice to him to cultivate an interest in
the making of the goddess’s image. Having made up his mind, Jagan collects In a
“little bundle” his requirements. It is to be particularly noted that the
bundle includes his charkha: “It is a duty I owe Mahatma Gandhi. I made a vow
before him that I could spin everyday of my life. I’ve to do it, whether I’m at
home or in a forest.” (P. 183) It is characteristic of Narayan’s comic
vision and art that he draws attention to the fact that Jagan’s “ardour of
renunciation” is somewhat mitigated as he emerges into the morning sunlight
after a refreshing cold bath and gruel. The novelist constantly reminds us that
his protagonist is of the ordinary and average humanity, in his strength as
well as weaknesses.
One more shock, a sort
of parting shot, awaits Jagan as if to test the strength of his resolve The “cousin”,
who meets him on his way, brings him the news of Mali’s latest escapade – his
being taken into police custody for violating Prohibition laws. Jagan is just
non-Plussed. However, with some effort he is able to recover his composure. His
resolve to withdraw into the grove remains unchanged. His mind attains an “extraordinary
clarity.” His attachment for
Jagan, who cardes with
him into retirement his Gandhian charkha, also takes
with him the “bank book”, which as the cousin shrewdly remarks, is “a compact
way of carrying things.” (P. 191)
Does this not cancel out all his
talk of renunciation? Does he not devalue the very ideal of Vaanaprasthasrama which he is embarking on? Is not
he trying to have the cake and eat it too? A closer look at what happens at the
close of the novel would present Jagan’s action in the right perspective. He asks the “Cousin” to run his shop and look after the cooks well until
* Quotations from the
text are from The Vendor of
Sweets, Indian Thought
Publications, Mysore. 1981. All parenthetical page references are to this
edition.