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Unit 5: The Vendor of Sweets by R K Narayan

Jagan then asks his cousin to make sure that Mali stays in prison for some time, so that he can Notes
learn his mistakes. Jagan also gives some amount of money to the cousin so that he can buy a
plane ticket to Grace so she can go back to her hometown.

Did u know? The Vendor of Sweets was made as a TV serial in Hindi and subsequently
dubbed into English.

5.2.1 Settings

The love and marriage, their devotion to God and their celebration of the festivals make the
Malgudians come alive. The simplicity of the vendor and the naivety of his customers are
touching when they spend half an hour discussing politics, before asking for sweet meats and
their price.

5.2.2 Point of View

In The Vendor of Sweets, Narayan adopts a Selective Omniscient point of view; it is the father –
son relationship or the conflict of two generations, which plays the dominant role in developing
the action and shaping the narrative. The experiences and events in the life of both the father and
the son, therefore, occupy equal importance in the novel, Narayan, however, focalises the story
from the point of view of the father. All the events and happenings in the novel are described as
seen through the eyes and mind of Jagan. To provide the full view of Jagan’s life and character,
Narayan uses “flash on” and flash back techniques.

5.2.3 Socio-cultural Matrix – The Western Influence

As western modernity enters Malgudi, its own indigenous values are corroded. Presence of an
Insurance company in The Dark Room,, the studio on the bank of river Sarayu in Mr.Sampath,
and story writing machine brought by Mali in The Vendor of Sweets indicate that Malgudi is
already growing as a civilized commercial centre. Change is not only spatial and temporal but
also cultural and social. Mali lives with Grace, an American-Korean even when they are not
married The orthodox Hindu society that Malgudi is, ostracises Jagan for being a Gandhian,
mingling with all kinds of people and courting arrest, then for allowing a girl to stay in his
house, even before her marriage to his son.

Task Read and compare Malgudi Days with The Vendor of Sweets.

5.3 Analysis of ‘The Vendor of Sweets’

R K Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets was first published in London in 1967 by The Bodley Head
Ltd. Its seventeenth reprint appeared in 2006.
R K Narayan’s latest novel, The Vendor of Sweets again to be hailed with great delight and
pleasure. It has the unmistakable stamp of the individuality and genius of R K Narayan as a
writer. There are the same delightfully vivid and picturesque evocations of a South Indian
middle-class life and there is the same inimitable, incomparable and irrepressible humour
tempered with humanity and flavoured with irony. There are again his wonderfully keen
powers of observation, masterly strokes of satire which softy bite, humour which tickles, pinches

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