Passage From India

Writing in an adopted language is often described, rightly, as a very painful process, a reminder that one does not and cannot truly belong. For the Indian writer G.V. Desani, approaching English — the Queen’s English, no less — as a second language allowed him to do astonishing things with it. His lone novel, the 1948 cult classic “All About H. Hatterr” (NYRB Classics, 320 pages, $15.95), tracks the misadventures of a clever misfit, Hatterr, half-British, half-Malay — a “fiftyfifty of the species” — through the mystical Orient, as he searches for enlightenment, but instead only narrowly averts having his pants stolen. It is a bizarre quest. And yet the plot barely rises to meet the radiant weirdness of the prose, which has wowed everyone from C.P. Snow to Salman Rushdie and Anthony Burgess. It was recently reissued, after falling out of print various times since its publication nearly 60 years ago.Desani was born in 1909 to Indian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, and raised thereafter in India. A fitfully brilliant but “unteachable” student, he was expelled from school as a young teen and decided to educate himself, eventually traveling alone to England. He arrived there with only a dim understanding of the English language, but taught himself how to read and write. The bare facts of a teenage immigrant mastering a new language would be dazzling enough, but Desani’s talent for speech was unusually sharp, as he bounded between the queen’s proper tongue and the slangy “Indian English” cataloged in the colonial-era Hobson-Jobson dictionaries.Desani spent his 20s and 30s shuttling between these two poles of India and England, serving as a newspaper correspondent, a BBC broadcaster, and an occasional lecturer. In 1948, after six years of writing, he published “Hatterr.” It was an instant success. And yet the quality of its accolades — thorough, awestruck praise from the likes of T.S. Eliot (“A remarkable book … I have not met anything quite like it.”) and Saul Bellow — fail to capture the dazzling heights of the book, the utter oddness that inspired one American reviewer to say that describing Desani’s style was like describing “a rainbow to a child born blind.” When it was reprinted in 1972, another American reviewer likened it to a strobe light.Few novels open with warnings, and courageous is the writer who opens with a warning about how the 300 pages to follow never cohere into a novel, but mingle instead at the rank of a “gesture.” (This cautionary note did not appear in the original edition, but it accompanied editions from the 1970s on.) It is a perfect way to enter Desani’s profoundly self-aware world, one in which the language indeed gestures at its own playful impurity, its own lack of regard for etiquette. The sentences aren’t instruments of the plot. Their odd juxtapositions and careful rhythms index a different story, coalescing off the page, of a brilliant writer embracing the once-pejorative identity of the mongrel-linguist with style, pride, and wit: “I write rigmarole English, staining your goodly godly tongue, maybe: but, friend, I forsook my Form, School and Head, while you stuck to yours, learning reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic.” It’s the language of someone who has mastered the rules, just for fun. But submit to them? As a footnote midway through the book blurts: “Don’t be ridick!”Throughout his quest, Hatterr makes frequent reference to the fine tradition of British literature. But his self-deprecating kowtowing obscures his sly disrespect for traditions and protocol. Early on, Hatterr tries to size himself up against one of the language’s greatest talents. “To hell with kittens, I am not literary, I admit you that. But I tell you, man, I have seen more Life than that feller Shakespeare! Things happen to me with accents on ’em! If I were to tell all, right from the au commencement to the la terminaison of my life-story, I should like to see some honest critic pronounce me an inferior to Shakespeare!” Given the situations Hatterr will soon find himself in, it’s not an unreasonable boast. And yet Hatterr’s lecture swells and swells until it reaches its simple and true punch line: “If you want to remain sane, man, keep off the libido!”The book maintains this madcap pace, insightful monologues on the human condition interrupted by strange episodes involving fake healers, bumbling newspapermen, hand-to-hand combat (“He gave me a hell of a nut-cracker kick on the penalty area!”), and marriage — the ball-and-chain in any culture or time period. The story itself can be difficult to follow, but it barely matters. Near the end of a gripping chapter entitled “Archbishop Walrus versus Neophyte the Bitter-One,” Hatterr unfurls his sentence-long contribution to the book of human knowledge: “And I say to posterity, in the Twentieth Century, ‘Life is contrast.'” Later, he declares it a collection of extremes: “ups and downs, light and shade, sun and cloud, opposites and opposites,” and “man-woman, honesty-dishonesty, day-night, perfume-stink.” “Hatterr” is a book obsessed with these pendulum-swings, and it is most brightly manifested in the magical situations that unfold from everyday encounters. On one contrast Desani is particularly sly: that of India and England. Although Desani was composing “Hatterr” during the dying days of British rule in India, it isn’t an angry novel — not overtly, at least. Instead, he draws the reader in with wit, as do wise old men from the Orient who playfully defamiliarize the codes and symbols of the imperial lifestyle in the novel. Belief in magic might be universal to mankind, but in the West, they tell us, the talisman apparently loops around one’s neck: “It is a mystic symbol and it is called the Neck-tie. Their system of mysticism is called Etiquette.” Desani manages to make the customs of the Occident — the rational, normalized West — seem both silly and exotic.In a peculiar way the feverish, Joycean vision quest of “Hatterr” functions as both autobiography and prophecy. Despite its warm reception, “Hatterr” was Desani’s last novel. He would publish an epic poem, “Hali,” and then return to India, in essence to pursue the enlightenment that bewitched his own characters. He checked into Zen and Buddhist monasteries; he tried being buried alive; and he would occasionally spend 22 hours a day intensely walking and meditating. In his 50s, Desani re-entered the modern world as a scholar, teaching philosophy and religion at Boston University and at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic work retraced many of the themes that had propelled the various chapters of his life: spirituality, “biculturalism,” peace, and fellow East-meets-West obsessive Rudyard Kipling.The splashy debut of “Hatterr” coincided with India’s independence from British rule, and perhaps it confirmed what many already suspected: that métèque — the illegitimate, migrant heir to the English language — was no inferior idiom. The bastardized tongue could express genius. The book found a new audience in the early 1970s, its free-form rhythms, experimental form, and spiritual mash-ups emboldening a new and irreverent generation. Now, as it rises for the third time, perhaps its ability to convey the boundless horizons of language — the novel’s true quest — might again slacken, or re-mystify, our prose and fiction. At the very least, the book’s joyfully screwy pages remind us: “This Universe is ultra mysterious!”Mr. Hsu teaches English at Vassar College. He last wrote for these pages on Ha Jin.

Passage From India

Passage From India

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