Heritage: Govindas Vishnudas Desani

[I dutta <idutta@UIUC.EDU>]

Article from Outlookindia.com
An Oriental Gent

'There are only two great novelists,' he once said. 'One's Joyce, the
other, your humble servant.'
Sheela Reddy

Govindas Vishnudas Desani ended life as obscurely as he began it. At
39, when he suddenly appeared on the London literary scene in 1948
with his first and only novel, All About H. Hatterr, no one knew
anything about Desani except that he had just published a novel that
received rave reviews and was hailed by the likes of T.S. Eliot,
E.M. Forster and Edmund Wilson. For the next five decades, his novel
did not lack admirers, from Anthony Burgess to Salman Rushdie, who
hailed it as "the first great stroke of the decolonising pen". But
when Desani died at the age of 91, on November 15, 2000, no one, not
even his publishers, noticed that the author of the first Indo-Anglian
classic had passed unlamented into the night.

Three weeks later, a small notice appeared in the obit columns of The
Hindu declaring that G.V. Desani, Prof Emeritus of Philosophy,
University of Texas, and author of All About H. Hatterr (in that
order) passed away at Texas, US.

"It is sad that no one noticed the demise of one of India's most
original and remarkable writers," says one of Desani's few friends,
Khushwant Singh, who was so charmed by Desani's novel that he was even
persuaded into proposing his name for the Nobel Prize.

But even Singh, who saw him intimately in the next two decades, learnt
nothing of Desani's origins. "He never spoke of his parents and seemed
to have no family whatsoever. He died a bachelor," says Singh. Desani
was born on July 8, 1909, in Nairobi, Kenya. When he was four years
old, Desani's father, a merchant, took his family back to Sindh, where
Desani presumably lived until the age of 17, when he went to study in
England for two years. But Desani's attitude to family was always as
offhand as H. (for Hindustaniwallah) Hatterr's towards his parents:
"It was there (India) that my old man kicked the bucket rather in a
hurry. The via media? Chronic malaria and pneumonia-plus." Desani does
not waste many words on Hatterr's mother either: "I don't know what
happened to her.  Maybe, she lives. Who cares?"

For Desani, life seems to have begun at 30, when he returned to
England in 1939. Working as a bbc broadcaster, he spent the war years
writing his first and only masterpiece. Published in 1948, All About
H. Hatterr, as Desani readily admits in his frontpage, Warning!, is
not really a novel at all. Forced to categorise his rambling,
delicious comic quest for truth amidst lying godmen and cheating
sadhus, Desani reluctantly itemised his
"autobiographical...medico-philosophical grammar...human
horseplay...design for diamond-cut-diamond" as a novel.

Literary London was agog. Critics raved. Burgess enthused: "It is the
language that makes the book, a sort of creative chaos that grumbles
at the banks...philosophical terms, the colloquialisms of Calcutta and
London, Shakespearean archaisms, bazaar whinings, quack spiels,
references to the Hindu pantheon, the jargon of Indian litigation and
shrill babu irritability seethe together."

But Desani was condemned to the fate of any writers' writer:
improvident, living off the little he could earn through lecture
tours.  But he was not a man to doubt his own genius. When he visited
India, in the first flush of his literary triumph, and was staying at
Singh's home on Janpath, a small literary evening was organised to
meet the famous author. "There are only two great novelists," Desani
told his audience in Singh's living room. "One is James Joyce and the
other is your humble servant."

It was this conviction that fired him to pursue the Nobel Prize. He
landed one day at Singh's office in the Indian High Commission in
London, armed with a sheaf of papers. It was the paperwork for
forwarding his name to the Nobel committee. Having discovered that the
committee only considers the names forwarded by either Nobel laureates
or a government, Desani zeroed in on the only 'government' he knew.
Singh was at that time working in the high commission and was easily
persuaded to propose Desani's candidature. "It is quality that
matters, not quantity," Desani told Singh loftily, when he feebly
pointed out that Desani was the author of only one novel.

Eventually, lack of funds forced Desani to move back to India. He was
already interested in the occult and religion, dragging Singh off
during their London days to mass hypnosis sessions and the like. But
the next 14 years were spent largely as a recluse in India, practicing
his Mantrayoga and writing a column for Singh when he became editor of
The Illustrated Weekly.

But as far as books went, Desani had lapsed into a silence that lasted
almost as long as his life. He used the quality-quantity argument
whenever chided about not writing, post-Hatterr. When pressed harder,
he claimed that he had in fact completed a manuscript which was
stolen.  "It's been a severe setback," he explained to the sceptical
Singh.

It's almost as if he was overcome by his first spurt of brilliance and
was afraid of not matching up. Two years after All About Hatterr,
Desani published a slim volume, Hali=97A Play. It was, as T.S. Eliot
pointed = out rather apologetically in the foreword, "not likely to
appeal quickly to the taste of many readers". He was not far wrong,
and Hali vanished for the next 38 years until it reappeared as Hali
and Collected Stories. The flair for comedy is still evident in the 23
short stories, so is the spoofing on colonialism and convention, but
somehow the zest and inventiveness of Hatterr, which never ceases to
amaze his select circle of admirers, is gone. It's almost like the
story that Desani invented at the beginning of Hatterr, about "an
oriental gent who spent the better half of his life digging up a
pyramid" only to find under it a family of mice. That disillusioned
philosopher turned in disgust to writing. It was the other way round
for Desani: he stopped writing and escaped into philosophy.