Amitava Kumar - Writing Badly is Easy

First published in Amitava Kumar, Lunch with a Bigot: The Writer in the World , Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. See pp. 119-24.

The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress, Philip Roth, New York Times Book Review , 15 July 1979.

Such interviews or essays demystify writing. As a reader you are able to see writing as a practice and as a process.

Melissa Febos, Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?, Catapult , 23 May 2017.

The search for lessons in style is everywhere. An inadvertent result of the Wikileaks expos, the Indian Express reported, was that it led to criticism of the long-winded language used by diplomats in India. According to the report, the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi asked trainee diplomats to read the leaked cables and get a hang of the brevity with which thoughts and facts had been expressed. We can blame history but even the British were amused by the ornate style that has come to be called Babu English. Here, for instance, is an example presented by the British Library:

The aforementioned quote is from a book published in 1891. But why go so far back in time? Just consider the language used in the courts in India. If you have been reading about the judgments delivered by the honourable judges you will know that their principal feature is the use of obscure, archaic phrases.

Communication is not a goal, it seems, only a bewildering attempt at pomposity.

If such judgments do perform a public role, it is in forcing us to imagine the use of a new language that is unpretentious and elegant.

Here are the opening paragraphswhich I need to cite at length to demonstrate just how badly written they areof the sessions court judgment delivered in 2012 in the Aarushi Talwar murder case:

The cynosure of judicial determination is the fluctuating fortunes of the dentist couple Dr. Rajesh Talwar and Dr. Nupur Talwar, who have been arraigned for committing and secreting as also deracinating the evidence of commission of the murder of their own adolescent daughter-a beaut damsel and sole heiress Ms. Aarushi and hapless domestic aide Hemraj, who had migrated to India from neighbouring Nepal to eke out living and attended routinely to the chores of domestic drudgery at the house of their masters.

The mise en scene is Flat No. L-32, Jalvayu Vihar, Sector 25, N.O.I.D.A., a suburb of New Delhi. The Dramatis Personae are Dr. Rajesh Talwar, his wife Dr. Nupur Talwar, the accused of this case, Ms. Aarushi and Hemraj, who were bludgeoned and thereafter, jugulated to death on the intervening night of 15/16 May, 2008, Mr. Umesh Sharma and Mrs. Bharti Mandal.

The parties are ad idem that the case is based on circumstantial evidence. Skipping expatiation on prosecution story, a vignette of facts as unveiled is that on 15.05.2008 at about 09:30 P.M. only Dr. Rajesh Talwar, Dr. Nupur Talwar, Ms. Aarushi and Hemraj were last seen in the house by Umesh Sharma, the driver of Dr. Rajesh Talwar and in the morning of 16.05.2008 Ms. Aarushi was found dead in her bedroom, which was adjacent to the bedroom of accused persons and in between these bedrooms there was a wooden partition wall. The dead body of domestic servant Hemraj was found on the terrace of the house on 17.0.2008 and there is nothing to suggest that intruder(s) perpetrated this fiendish and flagitious crime.

Did the judge assiduously follow a manual of bad writing to produce such monstrous prose? And can we really blame the British for such horrors? What would George Orwell, a proponent of clear prose, have to say about such writing? Im tempted to say that he would find it flagitious, but he would probably use plainer language to describe it. Avoidable ugliness could be one of his milder terms of rebuke. Sheer humbug could be another. Orwells advice in his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, provides a simple recipe for achieving clarity and coherence:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?