Page 97 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 11: Rupa Bajwa: Sari Shop—Theme

him and at work Ram Karan is appointed moneyman and fall guy by his boss, Mr. Gupta. As Notes
wheeler and dealer and extractor of bribes from school principals however Ram Karan has only
limited flair. As he admits: 'My general incompetence and laziness at work had been apparent
for...long...this is common for a certain type of civil servant who knows that he is viewed with
disdain by his superiors and that he cannot lose his job.' In Ram Karan's world, the rules of public
life are meant to be circumvented - his cowardice and his talent for finding moral loopholes are
assets that aid his success. He becomes Mr. Gupta's right-hand man when the latter commences an
ill-fated run for Parliament.
Over the course of the novel it also becomes apparent that the rationalizations and excuses Ram
Karan is so adept at seep into his personal life as well - the moral miasma he operates in includes
rape and incest. As Ram Karan admits at a moment of typical self-abnegation, 'My mind was
attracted to what is loathsome and humiliating.' His molestation of his own daughter Anita has
remained a bitter family secret, but once he reaches for his granddaughter Asha, Anita becomes
the avenging goddess, determined to expose and punish him. The shape of that retribution gives
the novel its title.
If Ram Karan is the consummate insider working at the heart of India's political machine, Rupa
Bajwa's protagonist in The Sari Shop Ramchand is the eternal man on the margin. Orphaned at a
young age and rendered asunder from the fabric of family that supports Indian society, his work
restricts him to the feminized, seemingly innocuous arena of the small town sari shop where he is
a salesman. The Sevak Sari House is the narrow oblique lens through which he, with the reader,
views contemporary North India. There are the customers, ladies of leisure from Amritsar's elite
families and then there is the lower middle class existence of Ramchand and his colleagues.
Like AOF, the precise and inescapable gradations of class (and implicitly caste) and power configure
the arena of possibilities in The Sari Shop; like the former novel, the struggle for upward mobility
provides the motive force. Unlike Akhil Sharma's Ram Karan, however Bajwa's Ramchand is
naïve and perhaps more pertinently, young. His path of self-improvement takes him through
English essay books. But for all of Ramchand's comic efforts, there is horror also at the end of the
The Sari Shop - in the rape of Kamla, the wretched wife of one of his colleagues, Ramchand sees
the consequences of challenging the social order. The surfaces of this world may seem smooth but
the edges are jagged.
The Kamla episode has been described by many reviewers as 'melodramatic' and implausible but
in fact it is no more than the stuff of numerous newspaper headlines brought home. Read together
with Sharma's more polished novel, The Sari Shop thus yields an interesting counterpoint. In AOF
the political becomes personal; in The Sari Shop the personal becomes political. In both the iniquities
of the public sphere cannot be escaped.
Neither Sharma nor Bajwa can offer the possibility of salvation for their characters - if Ram Karan
succumbs to his daughter's brutal revenge, Ramchand survives by an equally terrible
anaesthetization of sensibility. Yet despite the similarly bleak outlook the two novels have a
remarkably dissimilar flavor. In Sharma's Delhi, the quality of the light is almost never untainted;
in Ramchand's (and Bajwa's) Amritsar occasionally the sun shines down 'gently on him, with
pleasant warmth'. As The Sari Shop progresses, these moments prove to be deceptive; yet while
there is no more hope here than in AOF, the possibility of recognition serves almost as a proxy for
redemption.
As an illustration consider the contrasting moments of revelation of injustice in either novel. In
AOF, Anita's attempts to expose Ram Karan's incestuous tendencies to her relatives are met with
no more than a mild curiosity; in The Sari Shop Ramchand's attempt to draw a seemingly
sympathetic and enlightened college professor into condemning the incarceration and rape of
Kamla are met with frank hostility. Yet Ramchand's own breakdown and horror at Kamla's fate

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