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or leave that to reviewers?
I’d left it to reviewers; only, such English-language papers as The Excelsior, Jammu; The Telegraph, Kolkata; Vijay Times, Bangalore, etc. merely rehashed the book’s back-cover blurb, and added only a sentence or two from the publisher’s promotional leaflet.
DNA, Bombay, “humbly put to the reader” 160 words on its discovery that my book is about Indlish which, it said, “is not a new language but rather a khichdi of what all rubbish we are doing to another person's mother tongue”.
I had learnt, during my three decades in an English-language paper, that many who work for them are able plagiarists, who read little, and write less.
Reviewers for The Statesman, Kolkata (a British journalist), the New Indian Express, Chennai, The Hindu, Chennai, Money.com, however, examined the book closely, as did those for regional-language publications.
But none of the reviews till now have taken notice of the insight I sought to present for the Indian learner into the behaviour of the language (in the articles grouped in Chapter VI: Mother tongue, other tongue).
Martin Cutts says in his foreword:
‘The book’s insights are profound and powerful. Had they been available in the 1990s when I lectured all over India for the British Council, I believe they could have helped promote a vigorous flowering of plain language in Indian education, journalism or business.’
The reader will find a summary of the theme on page 95:
Nothing so well illustrates the failings of Indian English as our English-language papers. Every day, these papers prove that we haven’t yet begun using English the way all languages are meant to be used: for exchange of ideas and thoughts; for everyday give and take.
. . . To understand where we go wrong, we have only to contrast the clarity, ease, and flair in our regional-language dailies with the fuddy-duddy ways of our English-language papers.
I’ve tried to identify the real problem with English in India: the way the language is taught:
What's never attempted in our schools and colleges is getting students to understand how the English language behaves, contrasted with how the Indian languages do. If we did, we'd find that there are broadly four major areas in which the English language behaves almost opposite Indian languages. (Page 258)
Those areas I’ve identified, and suggested an easy way out:
If we wish to write contemporary English, we need only to switch from the Victorian way of writing with a string of adjective-laden nouns and work with verbs freed of their burden of adverbs. (Page 269)
I held workshops in Bangalore, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad and Bombay to explain the English language along my empirical method. A question from a post-graduate student of the Communication Department of Bangalore University comes to mind. “What you explained about the English language are such basic things. Yet here we are at the post-graduate stage, and how come none of our teachers ever told us these things?”
Sarbajit Sen, the cartoonist, had asked a friend to read the book. Had it “been of the ‘Learn English’ or ‘Improve Your English’ sort”, Sarbajit said, his friend - Head of the Animation Film-Making Department at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad - “would have thrown it away”. Instead, said Sarbajit, the man was thrilled with the “deeper insight” he found in it. He has decided to show the small chapter ‘Letters we write’ to his colleagues, and ask them to stop writing in the ‘arse first, face later’ mode the book derides.
Sarbajit said he had rarely spent as much time as he did on drawing and revising cartoons for this book. It had awakened him to the servility implicit in the commercialese he had been taught as English.
I have sought to show what’s wrong with the language our English-language press keeps circulating:
The harm done by India’s English-language newspapers does not stop at circulating pidgin (often accepted as Indlish). The contagion fouls our regional languages. The harm goes deeper than the use of absurd language: the absurdity seeps into our thinking. (Page118)
The reviewer for the New Indian Express, Chennai, is one journalist who agrees. He “Sanyal's book should serve as the Bible to journalists who want to write clean, sparkling copies. But I would recommend it more to senior journalists, editorial writers included, who think they know it all.”
Mr S R Ramakrishna, Associate Editor of Mid-Day, gladdened my heart with: “I think it [INDLISH] is more immediately relevant to Indian journalists than The Economist Style Guide.” He set off a trend: newspaper houses such as Mid-Day, Bangalore, and New Indian Express, Bangalore and Chennai, have bought bulk copies for their staff.
In the last group of articles (‘Your reader deserves better’), I’ve aired some ideas how news writers might enrich their copy. I’ve tried to draw journalists’ attention to New Journalism techniques. That experiment changed the way journalists in the west wrote.s
I asked two journalism training school directors if they would prod trainees to emulate New Journalism techniques. Over three months since, there’s been no word. Nor from the Editor of the most reputable newspaper of south India - whom I asked the same question.
And there’s the rub. Neither journalists who work for English-language newspapers, nor their Editors; nor those who train for a career with them; nor those who train them, ever give thought to honing writing skill. They are oblivious to how boring the daily monotone in newspapers is.
“A healthy male adult bore,” John Updike said, “consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.”
Will India’s English-language newspaper reporters - bores extraordinaire - never ponder how much more of readers’ patience they consume with their daily droning?
Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee
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