Chapter 5 - Love and Castration in G. V. Desani

Summary

Desani leaps into a bewildering formal landscape in All About H. Hatterr that adapts the history of psychoanalysis in India to give the threat of castration – what Freud theorized as a kind of traumatic passivity – a thematic and comic centrality. Psychoanalysis will be the target of satire, as Desani engages the complicated interweaving of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, colonialism, and financial survival through the cycle of misfortunes that befall his protagonist. H. Hatterr may suffer a spectrum of losses in the novel as he becomes the butt of everybody’s joke, but Desani turns that passivity on its head. Drawing from a counter-tradition of psychoanalytic theory in India, I consider how Desani upends sexual difference and propose that in India the threat of femininity is no threat at all. In Desani’s novel, the possibility of castration is ever-present, yet is reinterpreted and downgraded; the novel celebrates the impotence that castration promises and claims impotence as a central aspect of love.