Page 94 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Indian Writings in Literature

Notes a criticism per se. Her imagination, vulnerability, and even her weaknesses are cause to want to
read on to the end. It is because she is not yet refined that the reader extends her grace and
continues on to learn what she has to say and see where her characters go.

Self-Assessment
1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Ramchand also learns that Chander’s wife is the victim of ............... outside the law for
demanding her husband’s wages.
(ii) Chander’s wife ............... threw a sharp object at another of the rich family heads, Ravinder
Kapoor.
(iii) Kamla threw a sharp object on the head of ............... .
(iv) Each garmet can have a head piece called by various names such as pallu or chunni. This
systematic destruction of Kamla’s life creates a moral crisis for ............... .

10.3 Summary

• A gem of a novel about the stuff life’s made of. It is another working day in Amritsar, and
Ramchand is late again. He runs through the narrow streets to Sevak Sari House, buried in
the heart of one of the city’s main bazaars. There, amongst the Bangladesh cottons and
Benaras silks, Ramchand and his fellow shop assistants sit all day, patiently rolling and
unrolling yards of coloured fabric.
• Then, one afternoon, Ramchand is sent to a new part of the city with a bundle of saris
carefully selected for a trousseau. His trip to Kapoor House jolts him out of the rhythm of his
daily routine and his glimpse into this different world charges him with an urgent sense of
possibility. And so, armed with a second-hand English grammar book and a battered Oxford
Dictionary, a fresh pair of socks and a bar of Lifebuoy soap, Ramchand attempts to realize
the dream that his childhood had promised. But soon these efforts turn his life upside down,
bringing him face to face with the cruel reality of his very existence.
• The Sari Shop heralds the arrival of a writer who combines a profound sensitivity with
humour and unflinching honesty. Rupa Bajwa’s story is both heartbreaking and very real,
and depicts a modern world in which hope and violence are permanently entwined
• Rupa Bajwa’s “The Sari Shop” set in the little city of Amritsar captures evocatively, the social
atmosphere of small-town India. Her narrative encapsulates the spirit of the sari-shop
environment with its spirited, intimate, interaction between shop personnel and regular
patrons. In the background, the rustling silk, soft cotton and shiny synthetic saris reach out
to us so realistically that we long to hold and caress them in our hands. Apart from that, the
unplumbed pathos of Ramchand, an assistant in Sevak Sari Shop, whose world revolves
around selling saris to the women customers, deadens our heart with sorrow. Ramchand’s
life and his isolation in the indifferent world are effortlessly carved out in fine detail. Is it
surprising then, we are drawn to empathize with his empty, monotonous existence?
• The characterization in the novel I feel is pertinent to the trivial rivalries that seethe beneath
the surface of life lived by petty traders and class-conscious, middle-class wives. The wives
of rich industrialists with their empty lives and the educated class with their snobbish
intellectualism, is skillfully caricatured. The lives of the lower middle class, their resigned
acceptance of poverty, their escape into filmi world and their aspirations to higher things
through English speaking jobs, brought a lump into my throat due to the streak of desperation
that intertwined hope.
• Bajwa dramatically illustrates the class gap in contemporary India in her debut novel, focusing
on the fortunes of Ramchand, a lowly, disaffected clerk in a popular sari shop. The novel

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