The Girl Who Ate Books

by Nilanjana Roy

  Reading Kanthapura in college was a liberating experience. It was the key to our own world, and to a wider world. The fierce discussions sparked off by Rao’s novel, of a village whose slow life-cycles are savagely interrupted by revolution, led us inevitably to Manohar Malgaonkar, Bankimchandra, O. V. Vijayan. And Kanthapura also let us claim the work of other writers, outside both the Indian and the Western canon—such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s early Peruvian novels, or Chinua Achebe or Naguib Mahfouz.

  Today, when debates over the importance of ‘location’ and ‘audience’ overwhelm the actual work of writers, it is worth remembering that the work seen as one of the most quintessentially Indian in the Indian writing in English (IWE) canon was written in a thirteenth-century French castle in the Alps, according to Robert L. Hardgrave. Raja Rao had written in Kannada and then experimented with French before settling into English.

  ‘The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own . . . English is the language of our intellectual make-up—like Sanskrit or Persian was before—but not of our emotional make-up . . . We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us.’

  That prescription, from the Foreword to Kanthapura, was written in 1937 and holds true for Indian writers even today. The voice of Achakka, the old woman who narrates Kanthapura’s story, is still fresh, seventy years after Raja Rao created her. In Rao’s words, the story ‘may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls . . . stretching her bedding on the verandah’, a grandmother might tell a newcomer the sad tale of her village. Gandhi and the freedom struggle swirl around and change Kanthapura.

  In a later time, a brasher India, traditional village life—in all its richness and also all its starkness—of the kind that Ananthamurthy or Bibhutibhushan or Mukundan wrote about with such intimate love would be threatened by much: tourism, corporate greed, political indifference or corruption. But Rao’s Kanthapura chronicles the first invasive wave that would permanently change and shape the lives of the villagers of Kanthapura—an invasion of new unsettling ideas about how to live, the unease that came along with the joy of discovering ideas of independence or freedom.

  In 1945, Raja Rao wrote to his friend E.M. Forster: ‘I have abandoned literature for good—and gone over to metaphysics. I am not a writer any more . . .’ Forster responded in kind: ‘You have, you say, abandoned literature for metaphysical inquiry. I have abandoned literature for nothing at all. So please let us meet.’

  Raja Rao became a student and teacher of philosophy, but continued to write. David Iglehart, a former student, runs the Raja Rao Publication Project: Rao has left behind four unpublished novels, short stories, essays, poetry in French and correspondence with Indira Gandhi, Octavio Paz, and Andre Malraux. Iglehart has also edited Rao’s Daughter of the Mountain, the second volume of his trilogy based on The Chessmaster and His Moves, to be published soon. He was an active writer, Iglehart reminds us, not someone who should be stifled beneath the camphor of sainthood.

  In 1969, Czleslaw Milosz wrote a poem to Raja Rao:

  Raja, I wish I knew

  The cause of that malady.

  For years I could not accept

  the place I was in.

  I felt I should be somewhere else . . .

  I hear you saying that liberation is possible

  and that Socratic wisdom is identical with your guru’s . . .

  Milosz continues, and ends with:

  No help, Raja, my part is agony,

  struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,

  prayer for the Kingdom

  and reading Pascal.

  Raja Rao’s path was very different from Milosz’s, much less wracked by pain and doubt. But here, at last, is an image of him that might stand for the author as well as the man: not a saint, not an icon, but the priest in his confessional, listening in silence, offering understanding and absolution.

  (From 2006)

  G.V. Desani: Who is H Hatterr?

  There are literate, widely-read booklovers in this world who have not read All About H Hatterr. I know of their existence; I have even met some, but the thought that they exist is chilling. It’s like meeting people who have never read Tristram Shandy, or Gormenghast, or found themselves hallucinating, as Hatterr fans do, about swamis and multiple exclamation marks.

  This has nothing to do with literary snobbery. G.V. Desani’s 1948 classic appears with dreary regularity on lists of books you must absolutely, positively read in order to be considered truly literary, and his astonishing hero has influenced writers from I. Allan Sealy to Salman Rushdie. But the real reason for anyone to read Hatterr has to do with a quality rarely cited in critical texts—never again will anyone write a book with so much exuberance.

  Desani, for instance, didn’t. His next work was the mystic Hali; and then he retreated into the comfortable life of the author-recluse. And in 2000, in the blurred newsprint of the obituary section of an Indian newspaper, next to the Antim Ardas and In Fond Remembrance notices, a brief postage-stamp sized picture of a blurred, young Desani alongside two brief lines informed us of his death. By then, the image of Desani the writer had blurred along the edges as well, and All About H Hatterr had plunged into the obscurity of the remainder bin from which it would need (and receive) repeated rescues from its fans in the publishing and literary world.

  Hatterr fans are a lonely breed today. We know not just the famous lines—‘Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!’, ‘Sir, I identify it (the novel) as a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.’—but all the lovely obscure bits about swamis who trade in secondhand clothes stolen off their disciples and the fact that Desani managed to fit thirteen exclamation marks into one paragraph. There is something slightly deranged about us, and a tendency (as you will have noticed) to digress, that we share with H Hatterr Esquire.

  ‘The Issue: The following answers the question: Who is H Hatterr?’ unleashes Desani’s torrential prose, and his unmatched ability to beguile you into trickster territory, holding your attention for three pages until he answers the question—sort of—on the fourth. Hatterr, born a year after Independence, was an early example of the only kind of Indian protagonist the Indian novel in English could possibly have: a man on the margins, a hero who belonged to two worlds and to neither. ‘Biologically, I am fifty-fifty of the species,’ writes Hatterr, introducing us to his European, Christian father and his Malay, Oriental mother and swiftly kicking them offstage as he does so.

  So there you have it: our first bona-fide homegrown, school-of-Indian-writing-in-English literary character was not Indian at all. Decades later, writing in partial homage to Desani, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children would also be half-caste—Anglo-Indian, in his case.

  Hatterr belonged to the same no-man’s-land—territory claimed by three of India’s greatest writers, Rushdie, Desani and Saadat Hasan Manto, in works spurred by or written about Independence. And Hatterr, with his permanent logorrhea, his rapidfire, utterly Indian English patter, his frantic capering around a world that includes pukka British clubs and ash-coated fakirs, could also belong to Manto’s lonely lunatic asylum. In Manto’s iconic short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, the lunatics occupy the no-man’s-land between India and the newly created Pakistan; Hatterr’s no-man’s-land, between the Orient and the Occident, is wider, but no less lonely.

  Readers tend to miss the isolation of Hatterr on first reading: the man proceeds from swami to circus act to charlatan fakir with a frenetic speed and an unstoppable energy calculated to short circuit introspection. But it’s there in All About . . ., Desani’s introduction, showcased as the familiar loneliness of a writer without an audience, a voice rendered loquacious by the fear that he might be talking only to himself.

  ‘Planning a rest, I submitted the manuscript to a typist place, to be typed, three copies please. It came back t
he same week. The rejection slip pronounced it ‘Nonsense’. Besides, the lady said, it wasn’t the sort of nonsense young girls in the office ought to see. I apologized, postscripting me a mere slave of the critics. Then I passed it elsewhere. And he referred it to a well-known psychiatrist friend of his (at a clinic). The doctor posted it, with an invitation to me to meet him—professionally. It was hawked around, three copies please, and finally kept by a very kind person. She typed a quarter and returned it. Her brother, a clergyman, was coming to stay in the house. Chance might lead him to the manuscript. I apologized again . . .’

  This is still the voice of Desani, in character as Desani-the-author, not the voice of Hatterr himself. ‘In all my experience,’ T.S. Eliot wrote famously of the book, ‘I have not quite met anything like it.’ (The closest parallel to Hatterr’s voice might come not from Eliot, Burgess, or Joyce, or even Laurence Sterne, but from John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.)

  Here is a small sample, from a conversation between Baw Saw and The Sheikh:

  I learnt of the ways of the Occidental people from my master Angus . . . And I possess the Etiquette-Garter, the Honi! Soot quay Malay-pence! Soot quay Malay-pence! I am the Sheik of the London County Council, the Ell See See! Behold, I am wearing my Ell See See! Know, this is the source, the device and the secret of my prosperity! With this neck-wear, this mystic material, I am a burrasahib! A man! I am Eaten! I am Westmoreland! I am Shrewsbury! I am Arrow! I am Charter’s House! I am Rugby-Football! I am Gun Co. Winchester! I am all-in-all! And CLC besides! With the aid of this neck-wear, I have helped others, given countless concrete lessons of pukka Occidental wisdom to the needy, as I myself once was! Verily, O beloved, I am a burrasahib! Listen to me and fathom the world! Pay the fees, and see the world! Ek dum, och aye! Och aye!

  Exactly ten years before Hatterr, Raja Rao had published Kanthapura, struggling, as he wrote in the Introduction: ‘One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own.’ In the same decade, Mulk Raj Anand had struggled with the ‘unleavened bread’ dilemma in his work, from Untouchable to Across the Black Waters: the complexities of conveying Indian speech, Indian ways of thought, in a language that was at once ours and alien. (Anand often came off sounding like Kipling in reverse, but he did try.) R.K. Narayan, from 1935 when Swami and Friends was published to 1948 when Mr Sampath came out, had found an easy Indian English that still seems neither forced nor dated. But even in the 1940s, after more than a century of writing in English, most Indian writers struggled to loosen their tongues, to find their own voice.

  Hatterr invented his own: a mongrel hybrid that transliterated Indian phrases, borrowed and mauled Greek and Latin tags, mocked English-English, and turned language into a three-ring circus, shifting from juggler to trapeze artist to clown.

  It’s been over six decades, and All About H Hatterr has dated—in the same way that Tristram Shandy or Anthony Burgess’s Enderby quartet has dated, the way any great classic should date. Desani resisted literary ossification—in a brief encounter with a Betty Bloomsbohemia (‘the Virtuosa with knobs on’) in his introduction, he writes: ‘As for the arbitrary choice of words and constructions you mentioned. Not intended by me to invite analysis. They are there because, I think, they are natural to H. Hatterr. But, Madam! Whoever asked a cultivated mind such as yours to submit your intellectual acumen or emotions to this H. Hatterr mind? Suppose you quote me as saying, the book’s simple laughing matter? Jot this down, too. I never was involved in the struggle for newer forms of expression, Neo-morality, or any such thing! What do you take me for? A busybody?’

  But despite his (and Hatterr’s) best efforts, the book invited analysis. Saul Bellow found that Desani was one of the few writers he could read while he worked on his own novel. Allan Sealy’s Trotternama—another classic that bounces dangerously in and out of existence, like Hatterr, revived by one generation, forgotten by the next—romps down the yellow brick road Desani had built for Indian writers back in 1948. ‘I learnt a trick or two from him,’ Rushdie said once of Desani, and perhaps, more than the linguistic exuberance, what Indian writers received from Hatterr was permission.

  The book opens with a ‘Warning!’ and a conversation between an Indian middle-man and the Author.

  ‘Sir,’ says the middle-man, ‘if you do not identify your composition a novel, how then do we itemize it? Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.’

  ‘Sir,’ says the Author, ‘I identify it as a gesture. Sir, the rank and file is entitled to know.’

  But there is, the middle-man explains, no immediate demand for gestures. There is, however, immediate demand for novels, and the Author gives in.

  Or perhaps not. Desani’s ‘novel’ is really a breathless, joyful performance, a gesture stretched across 316 pages, and perhaps that’s why it remains unforgettable, despite its periodic descents into oblivion. Over the last few decades, Hatterr revivals have depended on the largesse of Western critics and publishers rather than the growing maturity and changing tastes of the Indian reader.

  And since the West has its own set of classics, and India is reluctant to claim any story that is not a success story, All About H Hatterr remains not so much lost as not yet quite found. Damme, that’s the Occidental-Orientale scene for you.

  (From March 2010)

  6

  Goodbye, Britannica

  In my home in Delhi, sometimes I’ll take one of the old books off the shelf, dust it, run my finger down the spine, and open it to be confronted with evidence of that long career as a practising bibliophagist: a telltale triangular gap on one of the pages of an old Kaye Webb-edited Puffin edition, a torn-off corner from the collected Brahmosangeet, the pages sticking together from humidity and disuse. There must have been an age at which I stopped wanting to consume the books I loved, and like other bibliophagists, I’m unable to explain why you want to eat books in the first place or why, having honed that appetite, you would grow past it into other pleasures.

  As an adult, some foods have the ability to take me back to the past: biting into fresh filo pastry in some cafe in Europe once, I stopped mid-mouthful, as the papery taste of a particular favourite (Kids and Cubs, Olga Perevskoya) flooded back. Thin pasta will do it; rabri, with its blotting paper texture; grits; caramelized onion skins; zucchini blossoms; the first bite of a paper dosa. All of these distinct and different tastes bring back a rush of unreasonable book love, and the memories of what we read in the other city where I grew up, a Delhi so mellow, so village-like, so relatively small, compared to today’s megapolis, that it is a city of the imagination, as fabulous and distant as Pataliputra, as distant as Mohenjodaro.

  The Rowland Road house, built of books collected by a previous generation of ancestors, had a curious but not uncommon effect on everyone who lived in it and visited the house: it became hard to buy books, beyond a certain point. We had nothing as grand as a family library, just wall shelves filled with handsome leatherbound volumes, but I sensed back then how a library could be both pleasure and burden, how it could open some doors and close others just as firmly.

  Inherit a library, and you inherit wealth; but you also inherit someone else’s way of ordering the past. If you lived in the Rowland Road house, fiction was easier to buy than encyclopedias; and while the massive tomes up on the stacks were there to be used, we used them gingerly, aware and fearful of damaging something that was, in the most literal sense, ancestral property. I would find this pattern repeated when, many years later, I watched the inhabitants of grand old houses auction their books off: all too often, the amassed and now unwanted collections had been put together by the generation before, not the generation of now. It is not that easy to make space for new readers in houses built of old books.

  In my parents’ house in Delhi, there were not that many old books, and there was the parallel luxury of empty bookshelves in the sturdy government bungalows of my childhood. My father, Tarun Roy, was a Cuttack boy, and he told us marvel
lous stories of cycling for kilometres to his school, of the fact that the local ghosts included ghostly cows (with flaming hooves) among their cohorts. When we visited his hometown many years after we’d heard the Collected Cuttack Tales, I realized how rich he and his three brothers had been: their ‘gardens’ included the fields, the rivers, the forests in a way we children of the city could not begin to imagine.

  My Thakurma, Bibhabati Debi, Baba’s mother, was a writer, in an unfussy way, producing short stories in Bengali with the same practiced flick of her wrist that she used to turn out roasted coconut treats and puffed rice and jaggery moas. She kept her writings in a black-leaded tin trunk, her home-made sweets in an old Lactogen tin, both containers equally battered and utilitarian. My Thakurda, Shibesh Roy, Baba’s father, had been a manager at Andrew Yule, but he had the instincts and the ink-stained, comforting cheerfulness of a born schoolteacher. The four brothers had grown up reading in their years in the small town of Cuttack, because their parents considered books and reading important, but in my father’s memories of his childhood, there was also a thrumming underlying current of hunger. The big libraries—not large, but capacious enough—were in Sambalpur or Behrampur. The school library, as with most school libraries across India, was a one-room sparse affair, and there were few bookshops within walking or cycling distance.

  In that earlier, quieter, sleepy Delhi, it was possible for a government official to cycle to the imposing sandstone fortresses of North and South Block, as my father occasionally did. It would be unthinkable in today’s more hierarchical bureaucracy, but it was perfectly normal in those days for a panjandrum like a secretary or a joint secretary to invite a humble deputy secretary or under secretary to carpool, so that one fat white Ambassador took all of them to office. Petrol was scarce in Indira’s India, but then there weren’t that many places where you could live it up in the Delhi of the 1970s and even the 1980s, especially on the meagre salary the sarkar handed out to government servants in those days.