Orientalism in All About H.

Hatterr

Chapter 2: The Main Study

Since the passing of Edward Said in 2003 and as a result of the attacks on 9/11, the
Middle East that Said critiqued then, has drastically changed, some may argue for the worse.
With the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan; the execution of Osama bin Laden; the overthrow of
the brutal dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen caused by the Arab Spring; and
with the rise of the so-called Islamic State in the face of the Syrian civil-war, the “othering” Said
warned of has once again reignited. New forms of anti-rhetoric and phobias have emerged
depicting a certain group of people with the same blame propaganda and tactics that an obscure
democratically-elected chancellor of Austrian background incited against another group of
people in the not-so-distant past.
We are all aware of the disastrous events that soon followed. Perhaps history will not be
doomed to repeat itself on such a large scale, although given the range of violence occurring in
the world today, the future, appears somewhat bleak. At the same time, this succession of chaotic
events has ushered in a revival of what Said dubbed “New Orientalism” among academics as
well as non-academics critical of Said’s monumental work Orientalism and its influence on how
people view one another, especially biased ideas, notions and opinions centered on the Middle
East. Unfortunately, some of Said’s critics seek to silence any validity of postcolonial theory and
literary criticism, especially theory and criticism that stem from his arguments in Orientalism.
Instead, the New Orientalists and their supporters wish to concentrate on the Eurocentric
components of Middle Eastern studies viewing this part of the world utilizing a one-sided, and
often, stereotypical view of the region’s diverse peoples, languages, cultures, religious beliefs
and sects, governments and ideologies. Any intelligent person would recognize that Said’s
theories and concepts are not infallible or even free from scrutiny. Yet regardless of this reality,
his ideas and viewpoints spark much needed debate that challenges the way knowledge and
information about the Middle East was and still is relayed.

Indian Writing in English

Indian Writing in English is predominantly a twentieth century phenomenon though

South Asian English literature can be presumably traced back to Sake Dean Mohamet’s
publication of his Travels in 1794. The belief that ‘Indian Writing in English’ is a consciously
constructed epithet to distinguish between native English authors and their colonial counterparts
is strengthened when we note the absence of such designations like the Polish or the Irish writing
in English for authors like Joseph Conrad or James Joyce.

This distinctive categorization prevents the assimilation of such products in mainstream

English literature earmarking an identifiable, separate space for its habitation, creation and
circulation. However, the label is not merely an imposition that we suffer silently but one we
collude in upholding for mutual benefit. English literature maintains its pure stock while an
international voyeuristic market is created for Indian Writing in English with contract and sales
figures that no regional author or publishing house can match.

Indian Fiction in English

Indian novels in English are generally categorized under two phases: in the first phase
authors like Ahmed Ali, through works like Twilight in Delhi (1940), try to capture the true
expression of Indo-Muslim culture by incorporating its sounds and poetic images or stalwarts
like Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, attempt to forge a voice/ voices of their own
as distinct from the British in orientation and emphasis. As Muneeza Shamsiesays in “They
made their mark,” these writers were keen “to provide a very different view of India” than that
projected by the colonial writers. The second group comprises the new breed of authors, who can
actually trace back their lineage to Desani: Arundhati Roy, Vikas Swarup, Kiran Desai etc., with
Rushdie leading the pack, who view themselves as writers from the empire that struck back
(Wallia, India Star).

However, with the passing of time, both the groups together became, due to the
worldwide accessibility empowered by their use of a particular language, the sole literary
window to view and comprehend the real India from abroad despite the fact that only 5% of the
Indian population are English-using bilinguals, as per figures cited by Braj Kachru, in The Other
Tongue: English across Cultures(qtd. in Wallia, “Review”). Other linguists have cited
comparable figures and some as low as 2% (Wallia, “Review”).

The general impression of pervasive bilingualism and the centrality of Indian Writing in
English in its ‘homeland’, albeit erroneously, is reiterated by articles like Rushdie’s "Damme,
This is the Oriental Scene for You" for those without direct contact with India. Its condescending
title supports his basic premise that all significant Indian writing has happened only in English as
opposed to the entire regional output which is merely ‘parochial’! The power of such assertions
to shape international opinion and re-write rather erroneously, the rich, hybrid Indian literary
tradition cannot be underestimated.

It is tellingly exemplified by the incredulous response of a Euro-American colleague of

C. J. S.Wallia, a professor of English, to whom he quoted the 5% figure because, after reading
Rushdie's essay, she was under the impression that at least 50% of India's population is fluent in
English (Wallia, “Review”). A more unnerving experience was my own encounter with a British
academic, an ardent fan of Rushdie, who challenged my Indian identity solely on the basis of my
ignorance of Rushdie’s work in 1995!

Govindas Vishnudas Desani

G.V. Desani was born in Nairobi, Kenya July 8, 1909 to Sindhi parents. He had a modest
formal education, no college, never married, and has no known descendants or surviving
relations. Yet during a long and productive life, G.V. Desani helped define modern and post-
modern English literature and establish and secure the stature of Anglo-Indian writers in the
English-language. Later, as an essayist, Desani made unique contributions towards
understanding the Indian bhakti and guru traditions and in interpreting the Buddha's traditional
Theravada teachings on Vipassana meditation for today's seekers and academics. Along the way
he also provided a million-or-so-words worth of cultural and social commentary.
Early Life

When Desani was about five his family returned from Africa to their home in Shikarpur,
Sindh, India (now Southeast Pakistan). In those days Sindh was a religious crossroads filled with
Hindu, Muslim and Sufi adherents and practitioners. The boy was considered a prodigy, but
difficult, by grammar school teachers and a naïve dreamer by his merchant-class family. One
time his father, clearly frustrated by the boy's independent notions, demanded to know his
intents: Would he go into business? "I like books," Desani shot back. "Books, books?" his father
sputtered, "I'll buy you a bookstore!" Another anecdote: "Boy, you don't understand," Desani
was told by a favorite aunt, upon informing her that he would go to England and become famous.
"You don't even know English!" Desani ran away from home several times.

One incident which lead to his final, dramatic escape, was being sent, with a servant, on
an ox-drawn cart to collect business debts for his father. Instead, Desani somehow found his way
onto a steamer headed for the U.K. He arrived in Great Britain with 40 pounds (and no English),
at 17. After a chilled-to-the-bone London winter (to keep from freezing he stuffed newspaper
into a second-hand overcoat), Desani somehow — and quite quickly — made his mark on the
world's preeminent city. Attractive, brilliant, charismatic, brimming with vitality and self-
confidence, the young Indian was befriended by George Lansbury, a prominent member of the
British parliament. His new patron arranged for Desani to have access to the British Museum and
its fabled reading room.

With a knack for engendering enthusiasm in acquaintances and total strangers alike,
Desani was so often interrupted by fellow rooming house neighbors that he borrowed five-pound
sterling from each, returning the money only when he was ready to move on. For the next 20 or
so years Desani, ever the intrepid traveler, commuted frequently between India and England. He
took bit parts in early British films and worked in India as a stringer for British newspapers and
in India as a stringer for British newspapers.

He did a stint as headmaster at the same grammar school from which he had once been
expelled. (According to Desani, he had the unfortunate duty of relieving the headmaster who had
once expelled him from his position during that brief academic stint.) He gave lectures on
antiquities. Always a seeker, Desani was fascinated by the diversity of the "socio-religion"
underpinnings of the vast British colony.

The War Years

By chance, Desani arrived back in England just as Great Britain joined World War II. In
those days, independence-minded partisans in India and the U.K. saw the war as an opportunity
for India to press for independence. In response, the British Broadcasting Service (BBC)
produced wartime radio broadcasts highlighting positive aspects of India's relationship with
England. Desani, in his mid-30s, was by then a reliable supporter of the Establishment. He
became a BBC-sponsored lecturer and radio commentator. He took part in educational programs
in Hindi and English which described India's heritage and discussed its place in the modern
world. A favorite anecdote of Desani's was the time he spoke to a large prison audience. Ever
polite, he thanked the men for taking the time to come hear his lecture.

The remark brought the house down and immediately won over a notably tough audience.
Desani's only surviving lecture/broadcast is India Invites, initially read at New College, Oxford
in 1941. In addition to Desani, BBC war commentators included T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster,
among others. A key organizer of the effort was George Orwell, later to author 1984 and Animal
Farm. During the war, Desani's avocation became his writings. His literary efforts eventually
gelled into what he dryly called a gesture. Notably, as Desani observed in his introduction to All
About H. Hatterr, there was no market for gestures, only for novels. Later he learned that even
the market for gestures described as novels (or vice versa) was hardly robust.

Genesis of All About H. Hatterr

Following the excitement surrounding the novel’s appearance in 1948— T.S. Eliot
famously claimed, “In all my experience, I have not met with anything like it.”—Desani and All
About H. Hatterr were largely disregarded until being briefly rediscovered in the 1970s by
American academics following the novel’s reissue and the author’s move to the University of
Texas in Austin in 1968 to teach philosophy. Although in recent years writers of no less stature
than Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have laid claim to Desani as a major influence upon
their work, no significant new readings of All About H. Hatterr have been attempted that
resituate the novel in its own significant historical moment or that complicate the modernist
readings that have proven so influential in de-historizing Desani in the first place.

My purpose in this essay is both to historically recontextualize All About H. Hatterr and
to offer a modernist reading of the novel that does not merely locate Desani on the tattered
stylistic coattails of James Joyce but rather reinvestigates the author’s complex relationship to his
most celebrated source of influence as a calculated re-authoring and as a critical response to the
excesses of Indian nationalist discourse. First, however, some general comments about the
novel’s overall structure.

The narrative structure of All About H. Hatterr consists of seven episodes containing
numerous encounters by H. Hatterr with various sages and holy men, who invariably turn out to
be more (or often less) than they seem. Each chapter is prefaced with a “Digest,” which poses the
central question(s) supposedly asked or answered by the action of the chapter. Following the
digest is an “Instruction,” featuring a conversation between Hatterr and a series of Indian Sages,
of Calcutta, Rangoon, Madras, Bombay, Mogalsari-Varanasi, and, finally, of All-India. The first
of these is worth noting because it contains instruction for reading the book.

The Sage of Calcutta tells the story: once an Indian Maharaja was engaged, as was his
wont, in sexual congress with a chambermaid, when a booming voice commands him, “Stop
fool!” Running to the window, the Maharaja sees only a dove flying away. Offering a reward of
half his empire and his empress in marriage to whoever can identify the source of the voice, the
Maharaja is approached by a humble potter who claims that he owned a talking parrot whose
cage was snatched away by a hawk at precisely the time of the Maharja’s engagement with the
chambermaid. The bird cried out “Stop fool!” at the hawk and not the Maharaja.

Though infuriated by this revelation, the Maharaja nevertheless keeps his promise and
offers half his kingdom and his empress in marriage to the poor potter. Hatterr is perplexed as to
the moral of the tale and submits to the Sage that the chamber-maid must have been relieved to
hear that the voice belonged merely to the parrot and not to a deity. Rebuking him for such a
ridiculous answer, the Sage reveals that the moral of the story is in fact that “A wise man,
therefore, must master the craft of dispelling credible illusions. He should be suspicious” (41).

For it was not the potter’s bird who admonished the Maharaj but rather the Empress
herself, an adept ventriloquist speaking through a length of bamboo tube. What interests me most
in this curious tale is that there are no embedded clues leading us to its eventual resolution.
Neither Hatterr nor the reader could possibly be expected to deduce, from the information
provided in the text, the fable’s illogical denouement. Likewise, the reader of Hatterr must be
suspicious and adept at dispelling the credible illusions within Desani’s polyphonic text, willing
to see through the pratfalls of the novel to the social and political commentaries that they often
conspicuously conceal and, therefore, illuminate.

And like the Empress in the story, Desani is a master ventriloquist, writing in “rigmarole
English, staining your goodly godly tongue, maybe” (37), misappropriating the language of the
conqueror and rendering it “other.” Desani, however, does frustratingly little to help us
historicize his only novel. Despite the fact that Hatterr is written at precisely the climactic
moments of India’s independence and the horrors of partition that follow, no clear trace of these
extraordinary historical events is directly evidenced in the events of the novel.

Though much of the book’s action is set some years earlier during the initial decline of
the Raj, the fact that Desani seems largely to ignore the seismic political events of 1947–8, might
appear to justify those who designate him an apolitical modernist in the same mold as the
canonical Joyce, more interested in stylistic play and aesthetics than in the material realities of
his day.

There are no, for obvious reasons, dispute comparisons with Joyce, but in the same way
that Joyce has been in recent years successfully recuperated from a high modernist aestheticism,
Desani too must be critically re-read against the events that shaped his world and, as I hope to
show, his single work of fiction.

After being turned down by more than a few publishers, and copy edited and corrected
more than a few times, All About Mr. Hatterr, as it was originally named, was copyrighted and
published in 1948 by Francis Aldor. The book was an immediate sensation and attended with
rave reviews. Hatterr was also very favorably received in the U.S. and India. Over the next 40
years, Desani was to revise or expand his beloved book at least four times. Editions continue to
be printed, the most recent authorized edition is from Aleph Classics, New Delhi (2018). Hatterr
made grand fun of all manner of social structure, stricture, status, religious instruction,
spiritualists, and language itself: English, its bastardized stepchild Indian-English, Sanskrit and
Hindi.

Yet the book also offered glimpses of a man seeking to interpret the human condition —
despite its obvious shortcomings — as having — if not a higher purpose — at least a trajectory.
Writing in 2019, reviewers still find new things to say about this 71-year-old novel. A recent
academic paper pointed out that until Desani published Hatterr in London, of all places, literary
Brits doubted the ability and intellect of non-native English speakers to fully master the
language. George Orwell, who had lived and worked in India, was a staunch defender of English
written by native Englishmen. He was none too pleased when Hatterr appeared and he provided
one of the few negative reviews of its initial printing.

In short order Desani's All About H. Hatterr joined with James Joyce's Ulysses and
Finnegan's Wake in fleshing out an exotic, polyglot, supra-national novel that reinvigorated the
Mother Tongue. Hatterr had a major influence on contemporaries including Saul Bellow and
later writers, including Salman Rushdie, both of whom were generous enough to credit Desani's
masterpiece as inspiring their own work in some measure. The anti-hero Hatterr's hilarious and
essentially clueless attempts to reconcile East and West deftly foreshadowed contemporary
challenges of maintaining self, civilization, and true faith in a pluralistic, secular, rapidly-
changing world. In 1950 Desani's highly personal poetic play Hali was published. It is difficult
to imagine two more different fictional works.

While Hali may have puzzled Hatterr enthusiasts (E.M. Forster called it a "private
mythology"), it at least captured well the growing spiritual disquiet — a mid-life crisis? — of the
author. A third book, assuredly illustrating the range and scope of Desani's interests and
intellect, was to be a critical biography of Mahatma Gandhi. (Gandhi, the ascetic-revolutionary
who drove the India independence movement, had been assassination only a few years before.)

The manuscript for this book was literally lost in a tragi-comedy of errors which
included a deceased stenographer's shorthand notes which no one could decipher. In 1951,
Desani returned to India to begin an urgent, highly personal search for.... That endeavor fully
occupied the next decade and a half of his life.

An Intense Spiritual Quest

Having written one madcap spiritual adventure, Desani proceeded to live another. Half-
grudgingly half-supported by a well-off cousin, Desani scoured the Indian sub-continent with the
zeal of an investigative reporter searching for absolute proof of The Other: proof of the divine in
a culture with one foot in modernity and the other in unbending tradition, a multitude of family
religions and rapidly disappearing mystical crafts.

With enormous physical and mental energy, Desani earnestly sought out gurus and other
spiritualists and mentalists across India and — using bravado, sincere devotion, a photographic
memory, and a thoroughly disarming charm — collected all manner of white and black oral
teachings, tantric yantras, mantras, and arcane yogic practices. In one memorable incident,
Desani had himself buried alive, a favorite trick of local yogis, just to see what all the fuss was
about. Upon being retrieved after the requisite number of minutes below ground his conclusion
was that to avoid a panic, which would consume the little oxygen available, you must have
confidence in those who remain above.

Desani recognized early on that the Indian ascetic guru/chela system — spanning and
melding Hindu and Muslim traditions — was unique among the world spiritual paths. The aging
and obscure practitioners Desani encountered saw him as a worthy — or least unworthy —
recipient of their crafts. The challenge of what to do with the gathered materials, the experiences
and of drawing communicable conclusions from those years occupied Desani for the rest of his
life. In the early 1960s, in a climax worthy of any grand adventure, Desani embarked on the most
rigorous of spiritual disciplines: pursuit of Enlightenment.

His first attempt — at a Zen monastery in Japan — was not a success. Subsequently,
however, he spends about a year at the Panditarama Shwe Taung Gon Sasana Yeiktha center for
the practice and study of Theravada Buddhist teachings in Yangon, Myanmar (formerly
Rangoon, Burma). Upon arrival at the monastery, Desani joined a small group of Western
practitioners being introduced to the monastery's famous Abbot, Mahasi Sayadaw.

The master began his standard lecture in Burmese, pointing again and again at a rough
blackboard drawing of a triangle which showed Nibbana (Pali for Nirvana, enlightenment) at the
apex. Finally, the master concluded. "Any questions?" Desani asked, "How much?" The
translating monk flatly refused to render the insolent remark into Burmese. The solemn
discussion turned into pandemonium as Sayadaw demanded "What did he say!? What did he
say!?" Once a translation was abjectly provided ("He fables, 'What does it cost?' ") the Abbot,
according to Desani, roared with laughter.
Soon enough Desani was settled into a long room where his assigned practice was 20-
plus hours a day of walking meditation with the instruction: "Observe." Years later Desani told
his classes at UT Austin that after a few months he became so sensitive that he could 'feel' sound
on his cheek. Eventually the Abbot told him, "You may go."

He also authorized Desani to provide instructions in Vipassana meditation. Traditionally,

such a dismissal would only be provided to a practitioner who had attained at least the first of the
four stages of Nibbana, Buddhist enlightenment. Desani neither claimed nor denied.

All About H. Hatterr– Publication and Impact

The first edition of All About H. Hatterr by Aldor in 1948 was acclaimed by Edmund
Wilson and Forster and expedited by T. S. Eliot who readily acknowledged, “In all my
experience, I have not met with anything quite like it” (A Biographical Note). An instantaneous
sensation, it was rapidly reissued by the Saturn Press in 1950 (UK) followed by a revised edition
for the American readers in 1951 by Farrar, Straus & Young. Quite dramatically, by the end of
1951, the previously enthusiastic West relegated Hatterr to “just a little savory from the
colonies” forcing it out of print only to reincarnate it as “a modern classic” with Anthony
Burgess’s introductory endorsement in 1970.
 It sank again into obscurity till Salman Rushdie, after receiving the 1981 Booker prize
for Midnight's Children finally, though breezily, acknowledged Desani’s debt and brought
Hatterr back under the spotlight. The Penguin (India) 1998 reprint 1 is said to have been
prompted by Rushdie’s condescending, offhand understatement regarding the influence of
Desani, “My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him” (emphasis mine) in his
introductory piece in the New Yorker's 1997 retrospective on Indian fiction published by
Vintage.

In fact, Rushdie borrows the title for this article (without acknowledging) from Rehan
Ansari’s stage adaptation of Hatterr for Modest Productions – Damme, This Is the Oriental
Scene for You! It was performed throughout February 2000 at Toronto's Theatre PasseMuraille.
London's Ridiculusmus Theatre produced another adaptation in 1996 and 1997.

To return to Rushdie, he often uses compound words where a native calque is combined
with an English word to masquerade as Indian English neologism. Actual Indian English
compounds combine a native calque with an English word to signify a third referent (with
specifically Indian characteristics), e.g. ‘lathi-charge’. Both Rushdie’s and Desani's compound
words merely stage this effect, e.g. ‘dia-lamp’, ‘khansamah-cook’ where the native calque is
rendered superfluous (Khair).

Hatterr’s pendulous swing from instant recognition to total obscurity and resurgence is
paralleled by the extreme responses it drew from several quarters. Promptly banned in Ireland on
its appearance and drawing the ire of George Orwell on its ‘untimely appearance’ – “This is no
time to play the fool single-mindedly!” – it is the only book to be named Book of the Year on re-
publication in 1970 (News from the Republic of Letters).
It has been variously labelled as “a capacious hold-all of a book” (Burgess), “a word-
bending novel” (Hindustan Times Online), “a gestural critique of Indian nationalism” (Eric D.
Smith), “a species of modernist experimentation” (Amardeep Singh), “a post-modern…post-
colonial…postwallah” (Anonymous), “verbal extravaganzas in the English (more or less)
language” (The Nation), “first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English
language”(Rushdie)
(www.mcphersonco.com/authors/gvdesaid.html;http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/user/319051.html;
http://www.desani.org/talking-points).

Perhaps the truth about All About H. Hatter lies somewhere between the two assertions
made in the work itself: the flaunting defiance against the masters – “I write rigmarole English,
staining your goodly godly tongue” – and the deceptively naïve plea of spontaneity, “Damme, I
am not in the least aesthetic, but the above vernacular came out of me spontaneously,
absolutely!”

The Author-Text-Hatterr Link

The close connection between Desani, his novel and its protagonist seem to get ‘curiouser
and curiouser’ as Alice says in Wonderland, presenting before us a case of triple marginalization.
All About H. Hatterr is penned by an author who does not fit into his family and homeland, and
yet, ironically, goes on to become the spokesperson of that very homeland sponsored by none
other than the British Ministry of Information.

He promptly vanishes out of sight for over a decade after a sensationally successful debut
novel which makes Amitav Ghosh hail him as a hero for his self-inflicted “voicelesness” on
supposedly realizing the “incommensurability of what he wanted to say with the language he was
saying it in” that presumably haunts most Indian writers in English ("Food for Thought"). He
next emerges as an expert on Oriental philosophy imparting his knowledge to Occidental
students, and finally, dies in seclusion on foreign shores. In brief, Desani typifies the restless
maverick with no nation to call his own. This perpetual peripatetic produces a work that keeps
dipping into obscurity after every glorious rebirth, never quite scaling the heights of ‘a universal
masterpiece of all time’.

The work focuses on a protagonist who is simultaneously a hero and anti-hero of

indeterminate origin, neither British nor Indian, never getting things right and always proving to
be the proverbial loser. All three – the author, his work and his protagonist – are permanent
outcasts who do not belong: their fictional and real narratives crisscross a no man’s land and
their ‘selves’ are quintessentially the ‘other’ in whatever zone they occupy.

The Making of ‘Hatterr, the Hero’

H. Hatterr’s self-introduction, “Biologically I am 50-50 of the species” (31) reiterates his

original ambiguity. His antecedents include a European father “Christian-by-faith merchant
merman” (seaman) of indeterminate origin, and a mother of equally vague nationality – a “Malay
Peninsula-resident lady, steady non-voyaging, non-Christian human (no mermaid)” (32).The
British government of India wrests him from the widowed mother and hands him over to the
English Missionary Society to “rescue the baptized mite…from any illiterate non-pi heathen
influence” (33). The succinct description of the Reverend running the Society – “The sort of loco
parentis who’d shower on you a penny and warn you not to squander it on woman, and wine,
and song!” (32; emphasis author’s) – explains the necessity of escape which Hatterr duly
executes but not before usurping the stereoscope which he identifies as “my second love after my
mother” (32) and launches on the path of itinerant self-education and self-instruction through a
myriad of life experiences. It signals the shaping of a heterogeneous hybrid entity forever
occluded from society who, oxymoronically, for that very reason, can lay claims to the title of
“Everyman” (31; emphasis author’s).

Hatterr’s self-reflexive self-construction – H[industaaniwalla] “nom de plume” Hatterr–

indulges in a naming extravaganza with double ‘a’ ‘t’ and ‘r’s anticipating the extravagantly
absurd situations he is implicated in and lending a carnivalesque aura to the narrative (33;
emphases mine). Banerrji, his slave and deliverer are not excluded either, with the additional ‘r’
in his name. Both the name and origin of Hatterr are carefully planned to converge with the final
nugget of wisdom that the protagonist anti-hero is supposed to have gleaned from life’s
experiences, “Life is...contrast” (275).

Hatter’s quest is for three things – [1] wisdom from the seven sages or “the illustrious
grey-beards” of India (33), [2] some easy money and [3] the elusive charms of certain females,
including a washerwoman and a lion tamer – in brief, wisdom, capital and carnal knowledge,
apparently uneasy bedfellows, which nevertheless, as Benjamin Slade points out, fit ‘hand-
glovishly’ (to coin a Hatterrism) with those set down in the ancient Sanskrit Dharma Shastras
(Law Codes): Manusmriti (social philosophy), Arthashastra (wealth, material gain and kingship)
and Kama Sutra (love and pleasure) (Slade).

All encounters culminating in the various misfortunes and mortifications of the anti-hero/
hero effect a glorious spoof of both Oriental and Occidental metaphysics (the pursuit of
Brahmagyanas well as the epic hero’s quest for the Holy Grail), reducing the novel to a mock
epic.

Hatterr’s plain desire to get by without much ado, Banerrji’s lopsided perspective and
idolization of the perpetually blundering Hatterr, the sages or world at large always taking
Hatterr for a ride – all signal an attempt at multiple/ contrasting perspective-based character
construction with hilarious incongruities between each perspective. It is a unique, almost risqué
device of character construction with no stable point of definition replicating Bakhtin’s
everchanging state of simultaneous ‘becoming’ and ‘being’.

An apt instance may be cited from Chapter II “...Versus the Impresario” where Hatter’s
abject failure to seduce Rosie Smythe, ending up as a lion’s human meat-plate and his resultant
impulse to flee the scene is interpreted by an ecstatic Banerrji as “a death struggle between the
inborn goodness in man and the Vienna libido school “wherein Hatter has roundly “shamed the
devil” and emerged as a “true spiritual devil-may-care” (96)!

The Hatterr-Banerrji relationship also debunks both the colonial hierarchy of races and
the notion of the white man’s burden, while simultaneously and apparently upholding it.
Banerrji, the always-inevitable rescuer of the equally-always-down-in-the-dumps, Hatterr
economically, legally, socially and ego wise, remains forever the supplicant native, gratified at
getting any chance to assist such a great being! [Such role reversals, occasioned by the colonial
relationship between the Indian and the British were not rare, as instanced by pundit Sarman
Trivedi’s panegyric to his pupil, the famous Orientalist Sir William Jones, whom he taught
Sanskrit, “To you there are many like me, but to me there is none like you, & you are like
yourself – there are groves of night flowers, yet the N. F. [night flower] sees only the moon”
(Trivedi 25, n. 1)].

An uproarious and calculated comic invention, the Anglicized Indian Banerrji is a perfect
foil to the Indianized Hatterr; Banerrji’s semi apologetic formal English can still be heard in the
bureaucratic corridors of India. Their exchanges, frequently at cross purposes highlight the fact
that all ridiculousness, in the end, is relative and that it could provide a fresh perspective on the
mutual interdependence of the colonizer and the colonized (Mahajan).

Nomenclature is a crucial signifier of the work’s seriocomic ambience: a newspaper

owner who employs Hatterr is called Chari-Charier (Chapter I); a tear-prone neophyte, Baw Saw
and a covetous crook masquerading as the guru, Always-Happy XX, appear in Chapter III; a
malaria infected hallucinating sect-leader Ananda Giri flourishes in Chapter IV; the plain
advocate Y. Beliram reinvents himself as 504 Sriman Vairagi, Paribrajaka, Vanaprasthi, Acharya
Yati Rambeli(gigantic belly)[ in both the Hindi and Bengali language, ‘yati’ and ‘ram’ carry the
sense of ‘huge’ or ‘extreme’ depending on the context and ‘beli’ is a deliberate mis-spelling of
‘belly’.] while defending Hatter – the list is exhaustive.

Imposture and masquerading are, more often than not, the crux of the metamorphoses in
the text. Thus impurity, exclusion, reversal unabashedly celebrated with least regard for
established boundaries in All About H. Hatterr. It becomes in effect, the deconstruction/
demolition of all that is regarded as serious and significant in life.

Several critics view Desani’s handiwork as a critique of ‘modernism’ but in my view his
protagonist is an experimental combination of [a] the de-centered postcolonial self, one that is
both inextricably tied to the historical and geographical location while yearning to be free of the
constructions of the imperial power and wary of the replacements; and [b] the fragmentary
postmodern self, usually perceived as a 'modern' being that searches for unity. The resultant
inter-actionist self at once creates many selves and many worlds, but rejects the totalizing claims
of each, thus bracketing postmodernism and postcolonialism as contesting signifiers for the same
signified.

Generic Affiliation and the Meta-Fiction of Publication

The self-reflexivity noted in the construction of the novel’s characters extends to the
generic labelling of the work as well, echoing the maxim of expediency and rearguard action that
Hatterr is forced to adopt after every encounter:

Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, if you do not identify your composition a novel, how
then do we itemise it? Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.
Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled
to know.
Indian middle-man (to Author): Sir, there is no immediate demand for gestures. There is
immediate demand for novels. Sir, we are literary agents, not free agents.
Author (to Indian middle-man): Sir, I identify it a novel. Sir, itemise it accordingly.
(“Warning!” [12])

The name game involved in Desani’s initial labelling of his work as a “gesture” and its
final baptism as a “novel” makes it a novel by default or more accurately, a novel gesture. If
Desani’s language, with its bizarre compounds and horseplay with words is any indicator, he
perhaps intends the reader to come up with this final nomenclature that challenges all existing
modes of categorization. There is a definite method in madness at work since the process of
generic identification underscores instability and is more a matter of survival rather than an
adherence to a pre-determined format which duplicates the protagonist’s impromptu existence.

This ‘itemisation’ as Desani so ingeniously defines it, occurs after a hilarious account of
its labor throes – typists refusing to type such “nonsense” highly inappropriate for young women
typists and clergymen (2), the only self-typed copy of the manuscript doing the rounds of various
publishers and being mutilated by umpteen copy readers who indignantly correct the spelling and
sentence construction (3-4), enraged publishers demanding to know the ABC of the book(4-5),
with sundry psychiatrists, counsellors, grocers, soldiers, accountants throwing in their opinion
for good measure (5-7).

The account of the work’s publication is actually the tale of its repeated rejection in
keeping with the carnivalesque topsyturvydom. Further, Desani refrains from narrating how the
book actually gets published (apart from the succinct epigraph, “Warning!”) thus making its
birth account as indeterminate and fictional as the main narrative and its protagonist. At the
conclusion of the tale, or rather, the fictitious account of the emergence of the novel-gesture,
which misdirects the reader completely, comes the denial/ death of the author in the same vein –
Desani disclaims all authorial responsibility with the statement, “What follows is wholly H.
Hatterr, his work, do believe: and God bless the Duke of Argyll!” (9).

Placing Hatterr beside Don Quixote as the inhabitant of a self-authored text, Desani signs
out with the ambiguous, almost oxymoronic declaration – “I’ve told the truth: or, my major
Fault! have I!” (9) challenging the reader to accept the veracity of his statement and in the
process to redefine the concept of veracity itself. Paradox thus becomes the central paradigm for
the work, its genesis, the author and the protagonist, and permeates the linguistic texture as well.

Novel Structure

The subterranean method in madness, mentioned earlier, becomes more pronounced as

we encounter the making of fiction. Despite his numerous disclaimers, Desani’s novel-gesture
(as I shall persist in calling it) has a rigorous structure: the two epigraphs labelled “Warning!”,
and the production account followed by a “Mutual Introduction” of the inscribed author
(Hatterr), serve as a kind of combined prologue for the seven chapters recounting Hatterr’s
encounter with the seven sages.

The rear is brought up by an epilogue labelled “An Afterthought” supposedly penned by

another fictional character in the work, a lawyer who, as mentioned previously, prefixes the
pompous title of “504 SrimanVairagi, Paribrajaka, Vanaprasthi, Acharya” to his more simple but
nevertheless comic name “Yati Rambeli” (gigantic belly) to suit the lofty task of providing a
worthy defense for the hapless Hatterr. Apart from undermining the very defense it intends to
uphold, the ‘naming ceremony’ is a dig at the aristocrats’ and god-men’s tendency to legitimise
and iterate their political/ religious status by claiming a long line of descent from royal/ holy
forbears.

Seven chapters form the mainstay of the book where Hatterr, seeking lucre, lust and
illumination, encounters seven sages across India who take on increasingly presumptuous names
as the work progresses – sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay,
“right Honorable sage of Delhi, ”wholly worshipful of Mogalsarai-Varanasi” and “naked
Holiness number One, the Sage of All India himself!” – matching the ludicrousness of the ‘life
experience’ encountered and the lesson learned thereof.

Save for one, where Hatterr gains a princely sum of Rs 1000/- (Chapter IV), all the
escapades conclude in inevitable disaster with Hatterr, very much the modern prototype of the
‘gull’ in classical drama, barely escaping by the skin of his teeth. Each of the seven chapters is
given an intriguing and often half-finished title – Chapter I. “The Sage, He Spake...,” Chapter II.
“...Versus the Impressario,” Chapter III. “Archbishop Walrus versus Neophyte the Bitter-One,”
Chapter IV. “Apropos Supernatural Agent...,” Chapter V.

“Assault below the Belt,” Chapter VI. “...Salute the ‘Kismet’” and, Chapter VII.
“Punchum and Another, with Contempt” – that literalise the ensuing content. For instance,
Chapter V. “Assault below the Belt,” is literally an assault on Hatterr’s loincloth by a demented
Naga sanyasi to relieve Hatter of his hidden stash of money so as to release him from the
clutches of “Evil-Triumphant” green monster (223)! This literal title is followed by a supposedly
information-at-a-glance kind of “Digest” that perversely mystifies and misleads.

Chapter III, for example, is about the young, handsome, “master schemer” fake swami
(133) Always-Happy, who partners Hatterr to remove competition and then forces him to flee
before sharing the spoils by declaring Hatterr as having performed the “last sadhana” (144), i.e.,
castrated himself to attain eternal celibacy, of which proof would be publicly demonstrated “the
coming morrow” (145). But the “Digest” completely obfuscates the storyline even as it hints at
the final outcome:

DIGEST

Oyez! oyez! Assemble, ye fellers! Hear this dreadful charge! A reduction ad absurdum. An
agent-on-earth of the Governor of the Hades Himself, versus one Neophyte the Bitter-One. A
partnership, a Quisseperabit? do, and the consequences thereof. Questions: Is youth a desirable
age? Why is it easy to sit upon a mountain and not on a needle? Why Life prevents a feller from
carrying a carrot to a donkey, instead, makes him carry a donkey to a carrot – more or less? (98)

The chapter proper, which follows the “Digest,” comprises three sections:

• “Instruction” – imparted by each sage in each chapter, which has a bearing upon the
subsequent narrative.

• “Presumption” – a worldview or premise adhered to by Hatterr as in Chapter VI titled

“...Salute the ‘Kismet’”: ‘Kismet’, i.e., fate – if at all anything, and as potent as suspected
for centuries – is a dam’ baffling thing! It defies a feller’s rational: his entire conception
as to his soma, pneuma and psyche! (225-26; emphasis author’s)

• “Life-Encounter” – an episode-debacle (to coin another Hatterrism) in Hatter’s life

where he inevitably falls into questionable company; gets thoroughly hoodwinked;
expresses his bewilderment in a hail of exclamations; flagrantly and disastrously
flouts the advice he has sought from the sage (mahaajan) and reaches his own conclusion
that that harks back upon the “Presumption”.

For example, the surmise about “Antithesis” cited below (Chapter I, 61), is actually the
illustration of the “Presumption” with which the chapter begins:
 PRESUMPTION: ‘An international school of thought (minus a headmaster-elect) is
antithesis.
‘Antithesis’ is my parlance for the fellers who always oppose. They hate mankind.
They maintain that human nature is rotten to the core!
I am often tempted to agree with the school, and join the classes of hate.
(41; emphasis author’s)

The closed circularity of the novel with its prologue, epilogue and the main body of seven
chapters in between, parallels the closed circularity of each chapter, giving an impression of
concentric circles that flow and merge into one another. This cyclical narrative pattern, its
symmetric rigor, makes one wonder whether Desani wants to illustrate the containment of
carnivalesque hedonism within absolute boundaries as in the actual confinement of carnival
space in the fairground or whether the spilling over and disintegration of boundaries is a
“gestural critique of Indian nationalism’s practice of cultural compartmentalization... where the
material and spiritual spheres constructed by Indian nationalist discourse clash and expose one
another’s constructedness in highly illuminating and comic ways” (Smith; emphasis author’s)

Novel Style
The ‘seven cities-seven sages’ syndrome draws our attention to the numerological
significance of the number ‘7’ in all aspects of life across all religions and cultures. The Biblical
Book of Genesis mentions seven days of creation, the number of ayats in surat al-Fatiha are
seven, Hindu marriage is synonymous with ‘saatpaakebandha’ and all three religions –
Christian, Islam, Hindu – envisage seven heavens. Music has seven basic notes, Ingmar
Bergman’s famous film is titled Seventh Seal, James Bond is Agent 007, and the Potter series
virtually revels in foregrounding the number – Harry Potter is born in July, the seventh month of
the year; Hogwarts offers seven years’ of schooling, each Quidditch team has seven players
while Voldemort’s seven horcruxes can prove apocalyptical. The list could be infinite.

Given Desani’s in-depth knowledge of several religions, scriptures, Oriental and

Occidental philosophy, his choice of seven chapters and seven sages cannot be dismissed as
mere coincidence. It brings to the fore a niggling question regarding the ambivalent nature of
Desani’s authorial intent – is he challenging and/ or debunking all knowledge and belief systems
that sustain human civilisation, thereby predicting a holocaustic future for mankind or is “the
great comedy of intellectual blunders, a subtle defence of Indian metaphysics”(Slade) through
the strategy of paradoxical reversal? The doubt deepens when we consider some of the major
stylistic features of the text.

Apart from parody, farce, bathos and antithesis that rule the roost, Desani regales the
reader with bizarre, unexpected summation of events, arriving at ‘life-lessons’ that turn all
conventional logic upside down and yet manage to encapsulate the essence of experience. For
example, in Chapter I, Hatterr’s encounter with the First Sage (of Calcutta) that culminates in
him being divested of his money, clothes, and job and where the sage is revealed as a dealer of
second-hand clothes cleverly extracted from his devotee-visitors, Hatterr arrives at the
conclusion that mankind might be categorized as belonging to two groups, “the Hitters (fellers
who hit others without scruple or reserve)”like the Sage of Calcutta and, the “two sorts of
contrasting ruddy crabs” – those that turn Hitters after their first experience of being hit, and the
second sort that “bear...up “and seek compensation elsewhere. Hatterr realises that he belongs to
the latter, that is, the basest category of “ruddy crabs” when he feels an inexplicable urge to bash
up a total stranger – “an intellectual sahib feller” walking along the street:

‘For no dam’ reason, and without malice, I wanted to assault him, and to act in the
retributive.
Which observation sums up the antithesis school: it is, above all, retributive!
compensatory!
This desire for retributing, though without malice, satisfies the fellers who have had a
mean deal from life. (60-61; emphasis author’s)

The novelty of language (coinage of words like “retributing”, excess of italics, and
unconventional use of exclamation marks) notwithstanding, we can perfectly understand and
empathize with Hatterr’s desire for the “retributive! compensatory!” that assails many of us in
similar situations. The half dozen encounters that follow in subsequent chapters, throw up similar
nuggets of experience-acquired wisdom.

The two major figures of speech that Desani indulges in are oxymoron and litotes –
figures that accentuate contrast and indeterminacy. While oxymoron entails a more or less
straightforward juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory words for effect (Chakrabarti 166-
67), Desani indulges in what can best be termed an extended or expanded oxymoron where
incompatible ideas and contexts, rather than words or phrases are juxtaposed, leading to hilarious
yet illuminating insights but in the process also introducing confusing contraries as exemplified
below where oxymoron lays bare, the essence of religion as a profitable enterprise:

The divine wisdom business ... is as good a market as any if one wanted to operate!
Like any other business it is a battle-ground. Thereon, an eternal unto-death struggle is
being waged between mugs, suckers, and the opposite smart-sort. You can work your
climaxes, and spectacular actions, in religious business, as in any the Burgler [sic] versus
the Burgled class-war of the world.

Moreover, out East, the holy man ramp is cozy for the craft-full: due, no doubt, to the
superstitiously devout tendencies of the population. (122; emphasis mine)

Litotes, as Elizabeth McCutcheon argues with reference to Thomas More’s Utopia, are
deployed to “deny the contrary” and make a positive assertion, and hinges upon four sorts of
opposites, “contraries, relatives, privatives, and contradictories” but often turn ambiguous due to
the presence of implied mediaries between the two opposite extremes, for e.g., denying that
something is black does not automatically label it as white although black/white is the
conventional opposite pair.

Ambiguity is also heightened by the “psychological peculiarity of negating a negation,”

for instance “not uncommon” is considered weaker than “common” by Otto Jesperson because
of the double “detour through two mutually destroying negatives” – “not” and “un”
(McCutcheon263-74). Desani’s litotes range from the quirky but comprehensible “not indigo
blood” (68) and “non-Christianity professing countries” (153) to the more exotic “nil
desperandum”, i.e., optimistic (184), with various degrees of “denying the contrary” that spreads
an aura of ambivalence and ambiguity across the text.

Language

The most consistent source of ambiguity and hilarity however, is the language deployed
in this novel gesture. The incessant heteroglossia and plurality of voices invoke the Bakhtinian
notion of dialogic exchange that privileges “neither a live-and-let-live relativism nor a settle-it
once- and-for-all authoritarianism but a strenuous and open-ended dialogism” that allows all
voices to “talk...to themselves and to one another, discovering their affinities without resting in
them and clarifying their differences without resolving them” (Don Bialostosky, qtd. In
Chakrabarti 67-68).

Desani plays havoc with English grammar, syntax and coinage, which is reminiscent of
Caliban’s use of received language to hit back at his master Gita Hariharan succinctly labels
Desani’s language as an “eclectic, nourishing, do-it-yourself subcontinental stew”: a view made
more explicit by Salman Rushdie’s epithet of “decolonizing pen” whose “dazzling, puzzling,
leaping prose” taught Rushdie, among other things, how to “dislocate” the English language and
“the importance of punctuating badly in order to allow different kinds of speech rhythms or
different kinds of linguistic rhythms” (http://www.desani.org/talking-points).

However, Desani’s decolonizing agenda advances beyond words and punctuation to

challenge the pedagogic imposition of Western systems of culture and knowledge with hysteric,
inappropriate mishmash of quotes and allusions from Shakespeare to Freud; The Bible to
Darwin. A single instance of an agitated Banerrji’s recourse to the entire Shakespeare canon to
urge Hatterr to defend himself against legal summons, will suffice: “The Bard has said, who
steals my purse, steals trash! Nevertheless, Mr. H. Hatterr, ahead of us is Double, double, toil
and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble! I am not a sob-sister, but, excuse me, the situation
reminds me of Hamlet. To be! But firstly, let us be calm, honest Iago...” (112).

Desani’s “irreverent ear for the Anglo-Saxon tongue” reaches beyond colonial resistance
to prove a “linguistic groundbreaker” (“Book Review”), by “bending orthography, stretching
syntax, mixing in shards of Hindi, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, German and a goodly
dose of balderdash, whilst tossing in references to Whitman, Shakespeare, Socrates, Freud and
appeals to Kama and Laxmi as well as to Allah and Christ” (Ehrenreich). The hedonistic
hybridity of usage and expression sampled towards the close of Chapter V will provide an
inkling,

To hell with Reason! To hell with judging!

After the evidence of human cussedness as provided by the Mysore plaintiff, and
the blind ambition of man as symbolized by the kid Always-Happy, I have no opinions, I
am beaten, and I just accept all this phenomenon, this diamond-cut-diamond game, this
human horse-play, all this topsy-turvism, as Life, as contrast.
 As to Truth, the great generalization is, ‘Dam’ mysterious! Mum’s the word! As to
Life, the locus classic ‘contrast’! (154; emphasis author’s)

In his “Introduction” to the 1970 edition of All About H. Hatterr, Antony Burgess effects
an unusual association of ideas when he uses the French word “meteque” (originally a pejorative
term to designate an outsider, especially from the Mediterranean, living in France whose
physical appearance and general demeanor are considered unpleasant), to refer to Poles and
Irishmen (presumably Conrad and Joyce) who in conjunction with Desani “have done more for
English in the 20th century (...they have shown what the language is capable of, or demonstrated
what English is really like) than any of the pure-blooded men of letters who stick to the finer
rules” (qtd. in Slade).

Such is their impact that Burgess is forced to resort to the process of designification,
reinvesting a racist, zenophobic term with a positive connotation that celebrates the ‘gloriously
impure’, the constant novelty of inappropriate usage that could only have been affected by
outsiders and not native English speakers.

To conclude, in the larger context of English Literature as a whole (I consciously reject

the category ‘Indian Writing in English’ for reasons stated at the beginning of this
article),Desani’s Hatterr is symptomatic of the “effect of imperialism and incipient
decolonization on the development of the British novel” in the first half of the twentieth century,
where “discourses of colonialism intersect with the familiar categories of race, class, and gender”
and brings to the forefront a whole range of questions regarding the “relationship of empire and
aesthetics” (http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~william-kupinse/ENGL7453.htm). Some of the
crucial issues that need to be addressed are: to what extent do “colonial texts productively
challenge received linguistic and generic forms” and whether “writers from colonial spaces [are]
obligated to take up the mantle of de-colonization” and what is the resultant impact on Indian
and English literature as a whole (http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~williamkupinse/
ENGL7453.htm). Desani’s novel gesture attempts an answer in his signature style – chaotic,
befuddling, antithetical – by producing a manifesto of subversion:

The trump card of us Balaamite fellers is the mumbo-jumbo talk: the priest craft
obscurantism and subtlety: (...Wherefore, pious brethren, by confessing I lie, yoiks! I tell the
truth, sort of top holy trumpeting-it, by the Pharisee G. V. Desani: see the feller’s tract All
About..., publisher, the same publishing company): a language deliberately designed to mystify
the majority, tempt ’em to start guessing, and interpreting our real drift, and allegory, what the
hell we mean: pursue our meaning on the sthula (gross), the sukshama(subtle) and para
(supreme) plains, and levels, and still miss the issue and dash their heads against the crazy-paved
rock of confusion. (120; emphasis author’s)

Thus, we arrive at Hatterr’s key observation, “the aphorism of all aphorisms, the doctrine
of all doctrines, the rune of all runes, the Hinduism of all the Hinduism, the mantra-supreme”:
“Abscond from charlatans and deceivers as thou wouldst from venomous snakes” (252). After
hearing this advice from the final sage, the Sage of All-India, Hatterr absconds that very night:
“The reader will have noticed that I disobeyed all the 6 instructions given me by my preceptors,
the Sages of Calcutta, Rangoon (now resident in India), Madras, Bombay, Delhi and
Mogalsarai- Varanasi. But I posthaste obeyed the 7th Instruction All-India gave me” (252). It is
ironic, of course, that Hatterr should flee from charlatans and frauds, being such an exemplary
one himself. However, it is suggested through reference to Desani’s veiled politico-historical
allusions, this advice seems particularly directed at the populace of the newly independent India,
whose national identity, constructed in opposition to that of its colonial counterpart, rests on a
foundation of the kind of charlatanry and false essentialism that Desani comically exposes
throughout All About H. Hatterr.