Ambiguity at Its Best!: Historicizing G.V. Desani's 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 dehistorizing Desani in the first place. My purpose in this essay is both to historically recontcxtualize 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. For example, from chapter one: