The Vendor of Sweets Study Guide

R.K. Narayan was born in 1906 in Madras (now Chennai), a large city in southern India, during the British colonial period. His family was ethnically Tamil and Brahmin by caste (Brahmins, associated with the Hindu priesthood, have a high status in the Indian caste system). He began attending Maharaja’s College at the University of Mystore in 1926. After graduating, he briefly worked as a teacher before deciding he wanted to become a writer. He made money writing articles for newspapers and magazines and, in 1930, completed his first novel, Swami and Friends. However, the novel was repeatedly rejected for publication and was not released until 1935, after a mutual acquaintance showed the manuscript to British author Graham Greene (1904–1991), who championed it to his own publisher. After Narayan published his third novel, The Dark Room (1938), his beloved wife Rajam—whom he had married in 1933—died of typhoid, leaving him and their young daughter Hema bereft. He wrote an autobiographical novel based on these experiences called The English Teacher (1945). After this, Narayan’s novels because less autobiographical and more experimental. In 1960, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award, an award including a large cash prize given by India’s National Academy of Letters, for his novel The Guide. In addition to his literary career, Narayan had a political career: 12 of the 250 members of the upper house of India’s Parliament are nominated by the president for their cultural contributions, and Narayan was nominated to Parliament and served from 1986–1992. He died in 2001, at age 94, in his hometown of Chennai, India (formerly Madras).

The Vendor of Sweets mentions that its protagonist Jagan’s son Mali is in the U.S. during the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occurred in 1963; as the events of The Vendor of Sweets takes place over several years, this detail suggests that the novel occurs broadly in the early-to-mid 1960s—less than two decades after India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The protagonist of The Vendor of Sweets, Jagan, participated in the Indian independence movement in his youth and was a devoted follower of the movement’s most prominent leader, Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948). Various indigenous groups began rebelling against British presence in India early in Britain’s colonization of India. The Indian National Congress, the indigenous nationalist party that eventually achieved Indian independence from Britain, was founded in 1885. Mohandas Gandhi began leading the Indian National Congress in the 1920s and through the Congress organized many nonviolent demonstrations against British colonialism and for Indian self-rule. In The Vendor of Sweets, protagonist Jagan recalls participating in one such demonstration, during which he removed a Union Jack and replaced it with an Indian flag—a symbolic gesture for which the colonial police beat him and put him in jail.

Like R.K. Narayan’s first novel, Swami and Friends (1935) and the vast majority of his other works, The Vendor of Sweets takes place in the fictional southern Indian town of Malgudi and deals with social concerns such as conformity, religion, and the influence of British colonialism on Indian culture. The Vendor of Sweets also places itself in dialogue with ancient Indian literary traditions through allusions to Sanskrit classics such as the Bhagavad Gita, a central Hindu scripture that forms part of the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata (c. 4th century B.C.E.); another central Sanskrit epic called the Ramayana (c. 8th century BCE); and the work of Kalidasa, a Sanskrit author and dramatist active circa the 4th and 5th centuries C.E. Though R.K. Narayan only met English author Graham Greene (1904–1991) once in person, Greene was instrumental in getting Narayan’s first two novels published, and it is possible that Greene’s representations of serious moral and religious crises in novels such as The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951) may have influenced Narayan’s depiction of Jagan’s crisis of conscience and turn to Hindu religious retreat in The Vendor of Sweets. Finally, contemporary British-Indian novelist and short-story writer Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967) has praised the dynamism and concision of R.K. Narayan’s writing, especially in his short stories; it is possible that he influenced her Pulitzer-Prize-winning short story collection The Interpreter of Maladies (1999).