All About H. Hatterr

All About H. Hatterr is a novel by the Indian writer G. V. Desani, first published in 1948. It chronicles an Anglo-Malay man's adventures in search of wisdom and enlightenment.

H. Hatterr is the son of a European merchant officer and a lady from Penang, and he has been raised and educated in missionary schools in Calcutta. His search for enlightenment takes him to seven Oriental cities, and the book follows him through the teachers, frauds and encounters he meets along the way; Desani described his hero as a portrait of a man of the common vulgar species, found everywhere, both in the East and in the West. The prose is the most distinctive thing about the novel, and Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping style was the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language. Its central figure is presented as fifty-fifty of the species, half European and half Asian, and the book uses that position to make fun of the assumptions of both.

The novel has been championed by later Indian writers, and Salman Rushdie placed Desani alongside R. K. Narayan, treating Desani as the Shandean counterpart to Narayan's more Richardsonian manner.