G.V. Desani was born on July 8, 1909 in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of an Indian merchant, and was reared in India. In the late 1930s, and throughout the war, he was a BBC broadcaster and lectured on India throughout England. All About H. Hatterr was written and published in 1948, causing an immediate sensation and eventually achieving permanent fame as one of the greatest Anglo-Indian novels of the century. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, Mr. Desani studied Buddhism and Hindu culture in seclusion in India and Burma. He came to the United States in 1970 to teach at Boston University and subsequently the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Professor Emeritus of religion and philosophy. Mr. Desani died in Dallas, Texas, in November 2000.
The long prose-poem, "Hali," was originally issued in 1950, adapted for the stage in London, broadcast several times over BBC radio, and then, after being pirated three times, was suppressed by the author for twenty years until this publication. "Hali" is a complementary opposite to All About H. Hatterr: it is the writer's vision of cosmic creation and human destiny, marrying Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and other Indian religious traditions into a cathartic drama. E.M. Forster said of it: "Private mythologies are dangerous devices. You have succeeded wonderfully... It keeps evoking heights above the summit of normal achievement where the highest aspirations reach." The Times Literary Supplement termed it "haunting," and The Librarian declared it "as near a work of genius as one can judge." This is the definitive fourth edition, and also the first authorized U.S. publication of this work. "Desani's speculations remind one of Borges; his intensity recalls Kafka; his literary inventiveness recalls Joyce. ...These stories are as delightful as they are deep." -- Austin American-Statesman "A master of subtle metaphysical comedies, a fabulist, fantasist, moralist and keen satirist of life's follies, absurdities and ego trips." -- Publishers Weekly [Hali and Collected Stories is] "impressive in its use of religious and personal mythology -- and lushly descriptive of a sensibility and a culture that is part English, part Indian, and uniquely Desani's own." -- Kirkus Reviews
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