http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/the-returnh-hatterr/300661/
| The Return of H Hatterr |
| SPEAKING VOLUMES |
| Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi October 09, 2007 |
| In 1948, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead ruled the US bestseller lists, alongside Thornton Wilder and A J Cronin. It was also the year that T S Eliot won the Nobel Prize, though he found time to comment on flamboyant new novelist G V Desani’s All About H Hatterr in an often-cited quote. |
| “In all my experience, I have not met anything quite like it,” Eliot wrote. “It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such length.” |
| Hatterr was published just a year after Independence, exactly a decade after Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, 13 years after R K Narayan’s Swami and Friends and 13 years before V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas. The first, bewildered but enthusiastic responses to this maddeningly elusive classic of modern Indian literature came from the US and the UK. |
| A performance of Hatterr was staged in India around 1950 — I would have loved to have seen this — and by the 1960s, Prof. P Lal’s legendary Writer’s Workshop group had published it. But the Indian reaction of the time is muted, as though Hatterr, a novel that called itself a gesture and featured a narrator who is “fifty-fifty of the species” raised an instinctive discomfort in us. |
| The New York Review of Books will bring All About H Hatterr back into print this month, ending its now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t publishing history. Most of Desani’s readers who still own a copy of the book have the 1985 edition. Mine met a Hatteresque end when it was eaten by a cow, presumably sacred, in one of our bouts of moving house. |
| Those who haven’t come across Hatterr know of it in the same way one hears about a distant, eccentric, slightly disreputable but unstoppable family relative. Some lines from the book— “Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you’—have become catchphrases, and many can quote the epigraph: |
| “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.” |
| Reading Hatterr today, what stands out is the way in which its irrepressible energy and humour conceal both bitterness and a muddled spirituality. In Hatterr, the protagonist’s spiritual quest is a joyous exercise in parody; but in the only other novel he would publish, Hali, Desani wrote in a more serious mystic vein, even if he came off sounding like an imitation of Raja Rao at his woolliest. |
| “Fifty-fifty” Hatterr, subject to a “local litigation for my possession”, capers from one grand digression to another, but beyond the wit and wordplay, Desani’s analysis could be sharply pointed. Instead of the present, benevolent view of the multicultural, globalised writer, Desani offered a picture of the bastard writer, claimed and disowned by two cultures, a traveller without a home shuttling between languages, tolerated rather than lionised: |
| “He gave up digging for good; and — fall of man! — he climbed down; evolved backwards. From the high station of a seeker of wisdom and learning, he went below; to the lowest bottom-rung of the human progress-ladder. He decided to become a writer! — belong to the frisky fraternity of autobiography-makers, the fellers who keep a tally of their does, and, in the sunset of their days, make an oyez to humanity, asserting the motto, Everyman, I will be thy guide! — damme, clowning and vaudeville-turning!” |
| Despite its invisibility in some decades and its exasperating unavailability in others, All About H Hatterr is remarkably influential. Perhaps this is more accurately a case of literary seepage rather than literary influence. Salman Rushdie credited Desani with inspiring his own bombastic, exuberant experiments with Indian English, and Hatterr is sometimes known as the book that inspired, in part, Midnight’s Children. (The use of capital letters in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things was an example of a mocking Hatterism taken far too seriously.) But if Hatterr has a true literary descendant, it has to be I Allan Sealy’s Trotternama — a book that, like its progenitor, stands in periodic need of rescue from oblivion. |
| Perhaps as the NYRB edition of Hatterr comes out, it might set off a trend in favour of resuscitating lost classics. Desani was sceptical of happy endings, but he did believe in gestures, preferably grand.The author is Chief Editor, EastWest and Westland Books. The views expressed here are personal |
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