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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Vendor of Sweets, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Communication vs. Fear
Generational Difference
Commerce, Taste, and the Good Life
Religion
India vs. the U.K. and the U.S.
Summary
Analysis
On Jagan’s walk home from the store, he passes Truth Printing, the shop to which he gave his work “Natural Cure and Natural Diet” years ago. He resists the temptation to pop in and ask the printer Nataraj whether the work is ready yet. He passes a homeless man and thinks that the man’s existence is a “disgrace to the nation.” Then, walking up to a statue of Sir Frederick Lawley looking over the town Malgudi, Jagan begins to get excited about seeing his son Mali soon. He spots Mali with a group of friends and, though ecstatic at his son’s impressive appearance, keeps walking home to avoid embarrassing him.
Jagan has apparently written a health-food book, “Natural Cure and Natural Diet”—a revelation hammering home that his fried sweets business is at odds with his personal values and practices. When Jagan thinks that the homeless man is a “disgrace to the nation,” it isn’t clear whether he is blaming the homeless man or politicians for the man’s homelessness. But either way, it is clear that Jagan is emotionally invested in “the nation” succeeding and improving. Meanwhile, the statue of Sir Frederick Lawley—a fictional British colonizer—gestures to the history of the UK’s direct colonial rule of India from 1858 to 1947.
Themes
At home, Jagan walks through the house to the backyard bathroom, briefly glancing at and pondering the stars as he crosses the yard. The dilapidated outhouse hasn’t been renovated; Jagan’s own father thought there was no point in renovating a bathroom, since it’s not a place where people ought to loiter. In fact, the house in general has not been renovated: “Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible.”
The phrase “the sanctity of usage” implies that there is something holy about doing things the way they’ve always been done which precludes any “improvement.” Yet while Jagan may have inherited his father’s attitude toward the house, the novel has already dropped hints that Jagan has a tense relationship with his own son, Mali.
Themes
Every morning at 5 a.m. Jagan wakes up, goes to the back yard, and uses a twig from his margosa tree as a toothbrush. He distrusts the bristles in commercial toothbrushes—whether made from pig bristles or nylon—and is very pleased with his father for having planted the margosa tree, which he believes will grow enough twigs “for his generation and the next.”
This passage reinforces Jagan’s dislike of change and the continuity between his generation and his father’s—paradoxically heightening readers’ suspicion that conflict between Jagan’s “generation and the next” (that is, Mali’s generation) is coming.
Themes
Jagan’s wife (Ambika) used to loathe Jagan’s theories about healthy living. She became especially annoyed the time he tried to convince her to eat margosa flowers instead of taking aspirin for a headache. That day, Jagan grudgingly conceded to her preferences and went to Mali’s room to ask where Ambika kept aspirin. Young Mali told him that Ambika kept it up high where she thought he couldn’t reach it. Jagan, alarmed, told Mali that aspirin was poison and promised him “better things to eat than this pill.”
Since the novel begins with Jagan proclaiming the virtues of conquering taste, his promise to give Mali “better things to eat” than aspirin indicates that Jagan wants to instill in his son a taste for traditional, natural remedies over modern commercial conveniences—which Jagan believes to be in some fundamental sense poisonous. Whether Mali will “conquer” any taste for modern consumer goods remains to be seen.
Themes
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