More than “priestly mumbo‐jumbo”: Religion and authorship in All About H. Hatterr

Abstract

This essay proposes an unconventional approach to the late colonial and postcolonial Indian writer G.V. Desani, author of the famously difficult novel All About H. Hatterr (1948). The essay draws on heretofore overlooked biographical materials, Desani’s own literary journalism, as well as the many revisions Desani made to the novel itself, to argue that Desani’s central theme may not be linguistic hybridity, as previously thought, so much as the anxiety of a late colonial Indian author as he struggles to represent an evolving relationship to a kind of Hindu religious practice. Desani’s picaresque novel reflects an evident fascination with the Hindu religious authority figures it satirizes; it also contains numerous “self‐distancing” mechanisms, including eight separate prolegomena – all of which help to create confusion about the author’s responsibility to his text. As he continually revised the novel, Desani introduced new footnotes and appendices to distance himself further from his text, suggesting a continuing anxiety about his own authorship. Finally, this deferral of authorial responsibility, it is posited, may be a mirror of the Hindu religious ascesis Desani practiced in his personal life.

Keywords:

• G.V. Desani
• All About H. Hatterr
• religion
• authorship
• biography
• India

Notes

1. For this observation I am grateful to Christina Hoffmann, a graduate student in my fall 2005 seminar on “Global English”.