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Commerce, Taste, and the Good Life
Themes and Colors
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.
In The Vendor of Sweets, religion represents a detached, generous outlook on reality that, the novel suggests, is very difficult to sustain—and that can easily be perverted into a cowardly avoidance of worldly problems. The novel’s protagonist, Jagan, is a semi-devout practitioner of Hinduism: he regularly reads the Bhagavad Gita, a central scripture in Hinduism, and prays to the gods for guidance in his family home’s puja room. When he practices his religion sincerely, Jagan’s beliefs allow him to detach himself from money concerns and overinvestment in worldly outcomes. Yet Jagan is inconsistent in his religious practice. For example, he reads the Gita at the sweet shop he owns and allows himself to be distracted from the scripture any time the cooks he employs cease frying sweets. And while he tries to use his piety to try to stave off anxiety—particularly anxiety about his feckless son Mali—he usually fails. Moreover, when the novel ends, Jagan has finally forsworn his worldly business and worldly cares and plans to go on a permanent religious retreat—yet the novel suggests that Jagan takes this retreat to avoid the problem of Mali and Mali’s girlfriend Grace, who are refusing to get married, rather than to express genuine religious devotion. Thus, the novel represents Jagan’s Hinduism as a noble belief system that encourages emotional detachment and generosity—that the average person will find difficult to follow and that Jagan specifically uses as an excuse to avoid his interpersonal problems. This nuanced take suggests that religious ideals are often admirable and worth striving for, though many followers may very well struggle to follow a faith’s precepts in full.
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Religion ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Religion appears in each chapter of The Vendor of Sweets. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Religion Quotes in The Vendor of Sweets
Below you will find the important quotes in The Vendor of Sweets related to the theme of Religion.
Chapter 1 Quotes
“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.”
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The Cousin (speaker), Jagan (speaker)
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7
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This paragraph, which opens The Vendor of Sweets, finds Jagan—the eponymous vendor of sweets—talking to a “listener,” his cousin, about conquering both “taste” and “the self.” The paragraph introduces two questions that will animate the rest of the novel: What is the relationship of “taste” and commerce to a good life? And what role should religion play in a good life?
First, Jagan is advising the cousin to “conquer taste,” a phrase that implies overcoming one’s materialistic desires for tempting food in particular and for tempting commercial goods more generally. Yet Jagan himself sells tempting food as a commercial good to others. This ironically suggests that even if Jagan has begun conquering himself, he hasn’t fully extricated himself from the web of commercial relationships that keep people controlled by their own “tastes” and passing desires. The ironic contrast between Jagan’s advice to the cousin and his actual commercial behavior emphasizes that, throughout the rest of the novel, Jagan will need to decide whether his current business accords with his own deeply held beliefs.
Second, Jagan refers to “our sages” when justifying his claims about conquering taste and the self. The word “sage” means a wise man, but it can have religious connotations, and later the novel will reveal that Jagan is a devout Hindu. Notably, Jagan himself admits that he doesn’t know why one should conquer taste or the self but refers to implicitly religious teaching to justify his belief that one should. Jagan’s inability to justify the religious teachings he accepts from others suggests that he needs to figure out for himself what role his religion is going to play in determining his behavior.
As long as the frying and sizzling noise in the kitchen continued and the trays passed, Jagan noticed nothing, his gaze unflinchingly fixed on the Sanskrit lines in a red-bound copy of the Bhagavad Gita, but if there was the slightest pause in the sizzling, he cried out, without lifting his eyes from the sacred text, “What is happening?”
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Chapter 2 Quotes
Everything in this house had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible.
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Chapter 5 Quotes
Gradually his reading of the Bhagavad Gita was replaced by the blue airmail letters.
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The only letter Jagan rigorously suppressed was the one in which Mali had written, after three years’ experience of America, “I’ve taken to eating beef; and I don’t think I’m any the worse for it. Steak is something quite tasty and juicy. Now I want to suggest why not you people start eating beef? It’ll solve the problem of useless cattle in our country and we won’t have to beg food from America. I sometimes feel ashamed when India asks for American aid. Instead of that, why not slaughter useless cows which wander in the streets and block traffic?”
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Chapter 6 Quotes
Prayer was a sound way of isolating oneself—but sooner or later it ended: one could not go on praying eternally, though one ought to.
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Chapter 7 Quotes
“Do you make your images there?”
At this, the man burst into a big laugh and said, “Did I not tell you what I do now? I make hair dyes. I can make the whitest hair look black.”
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Chapter 8 Quotes
He went on talking and Jagan listened agape as if a new world had flashed into view. He suddenly realized how narrow his whole existence had been—between the Lawley Statue and the frying shop[.]
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“It would be the most accredited procedure according to our scriptures—husband and wife must vanish into the forest at some stage in their lives, leaving the affairs of the world to younger people.”
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Chapter 12 Quotes
They sent out three thousand invitations. […] Jagan’s whole time was spent in greeting the guests or prostrating himself at their feet as if they were older relatives. The priests compelled him to sit before the holy fire performing complicated rites and reciting sacred mantras; his consolation was that during most of these he had to be clasping his wife’s hand; he felt enormously responsible as he glanced at the sacred thali he had knotted around her neck at the most auspicious moment of the ceremonies.
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Chapter 13 Quotes
“If you meet her, tell her that if she ever wants to go back to her country, I will buy her a ticket. It’s a duty we owe her. She was a good girl.”
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