I WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD when I discovered that I was among the victims of a large-scale burglary. Classics in a range of languages from Sanskrit to Tamil, classics which brought together awesome myths and earthbound tales, classics which would help connect past and present: all these were more or less lost to me even before I knew they were mine. A few, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata or The Thousand and One Nights were familiar, but only as the fables of childhood. They were merely eating-time stories, bedtime stories, too accessible, too local, to be classics.
As I said, I was nineteen; for years I had been indoctrinated in the honour list of classics. As proof, I had just received a degree (“BA Honours”) in English Literature from Bombay University. My teachers, a dedicated lot, had done their best. But despite their efforts, I was left with the unhappy conclusion that the “real” classics lived in a distant place. Between their home and mine stood insurmountable geographical obstacles. The makers of the classical canon, the pundits of Great Literature, never looked like us, spoke like us, or ate things we did. What they wrote became classics because they were “European,” mostly English. (The Americans got only an endnote or two.)
So in 1974, emerging from the safe (all-women) portals of Bombay University’s Sophia College, I had to acknowledge a subversive suspicion. In the real world, literary life did not begin with Chaucer or end with T. S. Eliot. My friends and I took to ransacking the lost-and-found bookstalls of this real world, and read what we could find of that other, unmentionable baggage of classics. Thanks to Macaulay and Co., we had to look for English translations. The Thousand and One Nights, for example, came back to us via Burton or the Penguin Classics. (We didn’t know then that in the India of the nineties, our lost and found classics would be under threat once more, this time from Hindu fundamentalists.)
But in those days of innocence and discovery, I also stumbled on books in English by non-English authors. They took me far from the classrooms I knew, but not far enough. Then I came across a strange and wonderful book, a novel called All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani.
All About H. Hatterr is a quicksilver-tongued “autobiographical” of an Anglo-Indian seeking wisdom from the “seven sages of India.” The language swells and flows in torrents, but its originality is tempered with a carefully designed structure. If Hatterr, the eponymous hero, takes the reader on a wild roller-coaster ride, the “entire holus-bolus” has a Desani in masterful control.
When I first read Hatterr, I immediately knew it was an important book. But a classic? I mean, is it allowed? Can a classic be so funny, make a fine art of standing Classical Language on its venerable English head? Can a classic be written by a “fifty-fifty,” starring a hybrid hero, cooking up a dish of kichdi, the eclectic, nourishing, do-it-yourself subcontinental stew?
All About H. Hatterr, Desani’s only novel, first appeared in 1948. It went into a second printing in the second week of publication, and revised editions were published in 1951, 1970 and 1972. The 1972 edition, which is what I have, has a warm and admiring introduction by Anthony Burgess. Desani’s novel managed to get the visa required for writers with strange names to travel in the English-speaking world. It attracted praise from the likes of my old BA Honours guru, T. S. Eliot, who said, “In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it. It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such length.” But possibly because of its resistance to being classified, the novel disappeared from the limelight. It is now, as far as I know, out of print. Though the novel remains a treat to the cognoscenti, and though Salman Rushdie has acknowledged that he “learnt a thing or two” from Desani’s bag of tricks, the book remains underground.
Clearly, Desani was aware that his creation was, and would remain, an oddball. This self-reflexive quality is one of the delights of the novel:
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 as 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.