India has always been a country with a complex identity. Depending on the status of one’s birth, it can be a place of opulence and privilege, or of the most oppressive serfdom. The members of the lowest castes have historically been viewed as something almost inhuman by the members of the highest castes. Therefore, the transition between traditional customs to more modern viewpoints is not subject to generalization. It must be taken generation by generation, from caste to caste. The Vendor of Sweets presents the problem as experienced only by people of relative privilege.

Jagan would like his son to follow Gandhi, renounce worldly pleasures and material goods, and to honor the doctrines of Hinduism. Mali, on the other hand, sees such ambitions as beneath him. Not only is Mali unwilling to see things from Jagan’s perspective, it seems as if he has lost the capacity to even try. 

Money—and what money signifies—is at the root of many of the novel’s contradictions. There is nothing inherently evil about money. However, it creates situations where suffering is inevitable because of human fallibility. Jagan says that money is an evil but continues to accumulate it through unscrupulous means.