G. V. Desani

Govindas Vishnoodas Dasani (1909–2000), known as G.V. Desani, was an Indian novelist, poet, short story writer, social commentator, and a scholar and practitioner of ancient Eastern spiritual traditions. A writer's writer, Desani contributed to genre of the 20th Century avant-garde novel. He was best known as the author of All About H. Hatterr (1948), a comic farce which lampooned Anglo and Indian culture, spiritual traditions and the mixtures of the two. A poetic work, Hali (1950), and it's subsequent pairing with his short stories (Hali and Short Stories, 1991) comprised his contribution to world literature. Other writings included straight news reporting, magazine articles, columns and public lectures on four continents.

Born in Kenya, the son of a well-to-do Indian wood merchant, Desani was raised in Sind, now part of Pakistan. He first worked as a foreign correspondent for British newspapers, The Times of India, Reuters, and the Associated Press. During World War II he was a commentator for the British Ministry of Information, the BBC, and lectured on antiquities for the India Railway system. Desani achieved considerable fame with his widely reviewed novel All About H. Hatterr (1948 and many subsequent editions), considered a fine example of mid-20th Century modernism in the tradition of James Joyce.^[1] Hali, a second work of fiction was published in 1952. In 1967 Desani became a Fulbright-sponsored lecturer on Oriental Philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. His credentials were a nearly 15 year engagement in traditional and ancient spiritual and religious pursuits in India, Japan and Burma. Eventually Desani became a tenured professor in the UT Philosophy Department. A final work, Hali and Collected Stories, was published in 1991. The stories were mainly drawn from his many contributions to the Illustrated Weekly of India. Desani's greater contribution was in his devoted study and erudite exegesis of the spiritual traditions of India and his published observations on the world leaders and geopolitics of his time.

Biography

Born to Indian parents in Nairobi, Kenya, Govind grew up in Sindh, now Pakistan. H described himself as very rebellious. He ran away from home twice times at an early age and was expelled from school at 13 as unteachable. A third time he left home and made it to England where, at the tender age of 17, he quickly and cleverly made some powerful friends. He was personally recommended by George Lansbury, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the British House of Commons, for admission as a reader to the prestigious British Museum Library.

By age 25, Desani had become a correspondent for The Times of India, Reuters and the Associated Press. He was sponsored by the Central India Railway as lecturer on antiquities. A circular from the Director of Education, Delhi, stresses the great value of his lectures. Somewhere along the way he became known as G.V. Desani.

Just as Britain entered World War II, Desani returned to Britain. Waiving strict academic requirements, the Imperial Institute, the Council for Adult Education in the British Armed Forces, the London County Council, the Wiltshire County Council, and the Royal Empire Society accepted him as a lecturer and teacher.

One of the few speakers who could fill to overflowing an auditorium of the size of the New Picture House, Edinburgh, or the New Savoy, Glasgow, Desani's public lectures were sponsored by the British Ministry of Information and were widely publicized by the Ministry. His audiences varied from businessmen, teachers, munitions workers and prisons. His talks were broadcast to army, navy, air force and civil defense personnel, to hospitals, resettlement units, prisons and American servicemen stationed in Britain. By the end of the war he had become a media personality.

Recalling his rise as an orator in Britain, Anthony Burgess writes that Desani demonstrated "... in live speech the vitality of the British rhetorical tradition, brilliant in Burke and Macaulay, decadent in Churchill, now dead."

War Years

During the war years, Desani broadcast regularly for the BBC. The BBC's The Listener welcomed him as "... a broadcasting discovery ... a voice singular in its beauty." He lectured at many well-known educational and research facilities including the New College, Oxford, the Rhodes House, Oxford, the Trinity, Cambridge, and the Psychologisch Laboratorium of the University of Amsterdam.

It was, however, the publication in Britain in 1948 of his groundbreaking novel, All About H. Hatterr, that attracted wide attention on both sides of the Atlantic and in India. T. S. Eliot said of it, "... In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it. It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such length."

All About H. Hatterr broke publicity records for a book published that year (Writer, London). The tone of the reviewers was of surprise and awe (Newsweek, 1951). In the United States, too, Hatterr earned high critical acclaim. Orville Prescott, in his Book of the Week review, in The New York Times, said of it, "... To describe a rainbow to a child born blind would not be much more difficult than to describe the unique character of All About H. Hatterr ... as startling as a unicorn in the hall bedroom. Reading it issues dizzy spells, spots before the eyes, consternation, and even thought."

Saul Bellow, in The New York Times, chose it for his 1952 Book of the Year selection, (calling it) the book "I love."

Desani's Hali, a difficult-to-classify poetic work, which followed his All About H. Hatterr, after five years, was introduced by T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster. Eliot described its imagery as "... often terrifyingly effective," and Forster wrote, "... It keeps evoking heights above the 'summitcity' of normal achievement," ('summitcity' "where the highest aspirations reach").

Return to the East

After his return to India in 1952, Desani spent nearly 15 years in intense 'spiritual' pursuits. Under guidance of numerous gurus and sadhus, who Desani found based on referral and reputation, he practiced many forms of mantra and tantric yoga, and tested other methods of Hindu and Buddhist mental culture. According to papers he presented in India, Burma and the U.S., Desani's quest often living in remote, primitive conditions. His sādhanā's varied. Sometimes he would be holed up in a country house for weeks or months; in another case he was told to walk through a particularly dangerous forest area. Later Desani spent months in intense mediation at a Zen monestary in Japan.

In 1960, at the invitation of the then Burmese Government, Desani devoted about a year at the Panditãrãma Shwe Taung Gon Meditation Center in Yangon, Myanmar (formerly Rangoon, Burma) in the practice and study of ancient Theravada Buddhist techniques. At the conclusion, Desani was selected by the Burmese Foreign Office, the Ministry of Religion, Government of Burma, to address a specially-invited audience of the Diplomatic Corps in Rangoon on Buddhist ethics and techniques. Justice U Chan Htoon, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Burma and the President of the World Fellowship of Buddhists presided.

Division of his work

Desani's work can be divided into the purely creative and the contributions to international understanding. Dr S. Radhakrishnan, then Ambassador of India to the USSR, and Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions in the University of Oxford, and later President of India and among the distinguished Westerners, Prof. Edmond Blunden, Oxford, Lord Butler, the Minister of Education in Britain, Prof. Vincent Harlow, Oxford, Sir Harry Lindsay, Lord Reginald Sorensen, Prof. E.L. Stahl, Oxford, Mr. R.J. Cruikshank have spoken warmly of that aspect of Desani's work. The Marquess of Zetland, then President of the Royal Asiatic Society, and formerly Secretary of State for India and Burma, as far back as 1951, referred to him as, "... a bridge between East and West."

Desani lived the last years of his life in Austin, Texas where he settled in 1967. He shared a professorship in Oriental Philosophy at the University of Texas with professor Raja Rao. After he retired in 1978 some of his former students looked after him; ill and reclusive, he died in relative obscurity in Ft. Worth on 15 November 2000. He was 91 years old.^[2]

Bibliography

Novel(s)

• All About H. Hatterr, Aldor, London 1948.
  • revised edition, Farrar, Straus & Young, New York, 1951.
  • further revised, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1970.
  • further revised with a new chapter, Lancer Books, New York, 1972.
  • with further additions and revisions in the Penguin Modern Classics series, Penguin Books, London, 1972.

Short Stories & Others

• Hali, Saturn Press, London, 1952. (A prose poem.)
• Dozens of signed columns, Illustrated Weekly of India, 1962–67.
• Mainly concerning Kama and her Immortal Lord, Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Government of India, 1973.
• Hali and Collected Stories, McPherson, Kingston, New York, 1991.

External links

• G.V. Desani memorial website (desani.org), maintained by former students
• Memorial resolution, University of Texas
• A photo of G. V. Desani
• References