Page 63 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Elective English—III

Notes irresistibly, and yet leaves the mark. Instances may be taken from almost any page of the novel.
To take a sample: ‘A street dog lay Snoring on a heap of stones on the road side, kept there since
the first municipal body was elected for Free India in 1947 and meant for paving the road.’ In the
same way, the description of the vagrant waiting to eat the remains on the dining leaves to be
cast out of houses after dinner and Jagan throbbing for a moment with several national and
international problems and their ramifications is both humorous and deeply touching.
The character of Jagan, the 55-year-old vendor of sweets, is broad and firm in outline, convincing
and natural in full personality and essentially true to nature. Jagan’s character is a curious
mixture of innocence and shrewdness, humble simplicity and delightful eccentricity and he has
a heart full of tenderness for his late wife and his ‘poor boy.’ He is a strict follower of Gandhi in
all matters, in Truth, Satyagraha, Charkha-spinning, in dress, not the least, in non-violent
footwear. His never-to-be-published magnum opus is on Nature Cure and Natural Diet with his
immense faith in the properties of margosa, for brushing the teeth or for relief from headache,
incorporating his ideas on ‘the whole secret or human energy’ and dietetic prevention or cure
for premature white hair.

And yet we ask, as the ‘cousin’ (to the whole town) in the story asks and never bothers to know,
why this man who has apparently perfected the art of living on nothing should go on working
and earning, taking all the trouble? The author himself with an uncanny stroke of irony strips
him bare by saying that as long as he bears the frying and sizzling noise in the kitchen his gaze
is fixed on the lines of the Bhagavad Gita and once it stops he cries out ‘What is happening?’
Another stroke of the author is that Jagan keeps two categories of cash – one that can be inspected
by anyone, the other to be viewed as ‘free cash’ perhaps self-generated and entitled to survive
without reference to any tax. In addition, why, again we ask, is all this for this devout Gandhian
follower, a simple man with harmless eccentricities? Well, perhaps, there is always a fascinating
touch of mystery and inexplicability in the humble heroes of R K Narayan.
If Narayan’s The Guide was a novel of intricate story, zigzag narration, complicated technical
flourishes, a picture of hectic activity and straining tempo, with a young, romantic, irresponsible
type of man as a hero, The Vendor of Sweets is a somewhat straight-forward, conventional but not
unexciting novel with a humble, responsible, tender-hearted middle-class parent as a hero.
From one point view it is a perfect picture of the ever-growing tension in – son relationships
nowadays; a picture of a humble, tender-father, Jagan, facing an irresponsible, ultra-modern,
rebellious son, Mali, and at its level of universality, it presents a sharp and disturbing clash of
generations. As an old widower fondly in love with his son Jagan suffers the utmost when his
son shocks him as a foreign-returned, ostentatiously business-minded would-be celebrity with
nothing but mocks and insults and sneers for him, his ideas, his humble profession of the
vending of sweets. It is after all with his money and love that Mali is enabled to fly foreign and
return ‘foriegn’, as it were, with a charmer from Outer Mongolia to be a wife. It is as though the
branch tries to cut itself off the roots from which it derived sustenance and breath. As for the
story of Jagan, only an R K Narayan could depict the pathos and poetry of such a parent and save
the tale from degenerating into the lachrymose sentimentality of a fumbling, fatuous, old fool
of bygone days.
Jagan at a symbolic level suffers the gall and sorrow, confusion and bewilderment of the
traditional, uncontaminated old Indian generation when sneered at and jettisoned by the
artificial civilisation with its machine-produced literature and strange values. The Vendor of
Sweets is thus from one point of view a vivid picture of traditional India set against modern
India that is being rapidly westernised and uprooted to be planted in unhealthy alien soil.
Perhaps a synthesis is to be awaited but at present there is only the widening, deepening gulf
of generations, the old rapidly receding into the background, the new not yet attaining even
material prosperity. A stage has to come, of course, of achieved material prosperity and
retained spirituality in India.

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