Life & Background
Govindas Vishnoodas Desani was born in Nairobi in 1909 to a Sindhi merchant family and raised in Sindh, in what is now Pakistan. He ran away to England at eighteen, was sent back, and returned in 1926, educating himself in the reading room of the British Museum. During the Second World War he lectured for the British Ministry of Information and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, becoming a well-known public speaker. All About H. Hatterr appeared in 1948 and was admired by T.S. Eliot and championed by E.M. Forster. He then spent fourteen years in India and Burma studying with monks and yogis, publishing almost nothing. From 1968 he taught philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin for two decades, and wrote a column for The Illustrated Weekly of India. He died in Texas in 2000.
All About H. Hatterr
H. Hatterr, son of a European merchant seaman and a Malay woman, orphaned and raised by missionaries in India, narrates his own education in a torrential and unreliable English. The book is organised as seven chapters, each pairing an encounter with one of the Seven Sages of India — of Calcutta, Rangoon, Madras, Bombay, and elsewhere — with a piece of instruction, a digression, and a catastrophe. Hatterr is repeatedly swindled, beaten, stripped, and thrown out; his friend Banerrji speaks in florid Shakespeare-quoting officialese and offers useless advice. The plot barely matters. What matters is the voice: legal jargon, Hindi, Latin tags, advertising copy, and Babu English piled together at speed.
Desani's achievement is linguistic. Where Raja Rao argued that English must be bent to carry Indian rhythms, Desani simply did it, inventing a manic hybrid that treats the coloniser's language as raw material to be looted rather than mastered. Anthony Burgess, in his introduction, called it a whole language rather than mere Indian English, and Rushdie identified Desani as the direct precursor of the voice he used in Midnight's Children — the line from Hatterr to Saleem Sinai is explicit and acknowledged. The book was largely ignored for decades because it fitted no category: too comic for the serious postcolonial canon, too difficult for a popular one.
Why Desani Matters
Desani is the missing link between Raja Rao's generation and Rushdie's, and All About H. Hatterr is the first Indian English novel to treat the language itself as the site of the postcolonial argument. Rushdie has named it as the book that made his own style possible, and it is now standard on syllabi covering language, hybridity, and the Indian English novel — usually taught alongside Rao's Kanthapura foreword as the two opposite answers to the same problem.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- All About H. Hatterr1948
- Hali1950
- Mostly About Women1970
- Hali and Collected Stories1991