Culture And Language: A Need For Clarity In English Prose

With the modern readers’ insistence on clarity, the demarcation between literature and Journalism has ceased to exist. The edit page of a newspaper, with certain exceptions, has moved away from the Journalistic jargons and bombasts. Literature, on the other hand, has tended to become more friendly to the ordinary readers with its rejection of egoistic efflux and unnecessary verbosity. Literary structures have become simpler to draw the attention of the readers to the subject matter while retaining the life and grace in the sentences. The appeal of Ruskin Bond to both the elites and the commoners is just an indication of the demand of the age. His narratives of superior clarity and grace mixed up with lyricism speak of high artistry in Indian English prose. The expository prose from the monks of the Sri Ramakrishna order is another example of a sincere motive in the interpretations of the Scripture.

When it comes to the notes and explanations of the Scripture, lucidity and a sattwic effort to be understood, is a necessary condition. The writer takes up the task to interpret the Gita, the Upanishads, the Quran, the Bible or a text by Vivekananda or Rumi or Sri Aurobindo. The commentator must have a sattwic attitude to make the texts clear for the common readers, although he is not asked to shun his artistic appeal. Endnotes must be as less as possible. We have noticed a horrible tendency of putting four or five pages of endnotes in a one page article! This is just awful and should not be done. This is the worst form of inflated ego in a writer.

Vivekananda was simple, direct, forceful, was able to generate his personality into his flowing English prose. Listen to his honesty and charm even when he is writing against the deceptivity in some people:

I hate this world, this dream, this horrible nightmare, with its churches and chicaneries, its books and blackguardisms, its fair faces and false hearts, its howling righteousness on the surface and utter hollowness beneath, and above all, its sanctified shopkeeping. 1

This is in the high tone of a Hebrew prophet like Jeremiah, chastising people for hypocrisy. The passage is a significant proof of how masterfully Vivekananda could combine the phrasal and the clausal parallels in a heat of eloquence. The great monk also foreshadows the descriptive style of a modern writer like Ruskin Bond in his letters:

As I am writing to you, before me, reflecting the afternoon’s glow, stand long, long lines of huge snow peaks. They are about twenty miles as the crow flies from here, and forty through the circuitous mountain roads. 2

This is a very natural piece of word-painting. Quiet and relaxative, this immediately reminds us of Jim Corbett’s prose of relaxation in his narratives of adventure like The Man-Eaters of Kumaon and The Leopard of Rudraprayag and of Jawaharlal Nehru’s natural descriptions in a serene and leisurely mood. The monk also sounds quite futuristic in his smart descriptive technique, which we see so often in modern epistolary writings:

It is a beautiful mountain park I am living in now. On the north, extending almost all along the horizon, are peak after peak of the snow-clad Himalayas---- forests abounding. It is not cold here, neither very warm; the evenings and mornings are simply delicious. I should live to be here this summer, and when the rains set in , I go down to the plains to work. 3

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Fine, fluent, clear and quite English, this is from the hands of a creative artist of an exceptional calibre. There is a person behind the words with his physical presence. There is no colour impression except for the white peaks; no gorgeous details. And yet it presents before our eyes a distinct image. The writer’s consciousness is replete with the memory of the Himalayas and he knows the art of a masterful clarity. An inferior writer would have given us images on images in abundance. It seems rather unfortunate from the point of view of literary art that he was too busy with his works. Within his short life, whatever he wrote, he wrote forcefully and in very clear terms. And here and there the dormant artist peeps in with a remarkable expressive skill.

It is true that we need a bit intricate structures and phrases sometimes to express certain intense realizations, as we see in The Master as I Saw Him from time to time. But then, the basic habit of clarity is an asset for any writer. Even Sri Aurobindo was a different writer after 24 November, 1926, after he had withdrawn into a single room for the rest of his life. It was the time for his great letters. What V.K. Gokak has written about these letters will throw light on Sri Aurobindo’s art. Let us have a look at Gokak’s inspired commentary:

The Master plays with an idea or image, word or sound: refutes current estimates; corrects by an Olympian glance critical misapprehensions; takes us through numerous ways to the primordial source of song. He lets fall casually in two or three letters, a whole body of aesthetics. An angelic humour flashes across the letters like gentle lightning now and then and the style is almost always limpid and crystalline, its lyric beauty contrasting sweetly with the architectural and epic grandeur of his major prose. 4

Sri Aurobindo became a relaxed preceptor after 1926 and all the complexities in his prose were gone after that. He was then wishing to pass on to his disciples whatever he had achieved. This indicates that when one is interpreting difficult things, a complicated treatise, a system of spiritual discipline, even the densely metaphorical Kathamrita(The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna), one has to come down to meet the reader on his plane. If the interpretation becomes more difficult than the original text, then the act of interpretation or translation becomes useless. Every sentence should be carefully constructed or discovered with the target audience in mind. Here is an interpretative letter from Sri Aurobindo, which breaks the popular notion about him as a complex writer. This will also indicate his link with Sri Ramakrishna:

The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realization beyond it; the Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishwari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realization through it. This yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential, for without it there is no fulfillment of the object of the yoga.

The act of total dependence on the Divine Mother is the chief link between Sri Ramakrishna and Sri Aurobindo, the two complimentary schools of thought. One insists on encircling the post of the Mother by holding it firmly; the other calls Her the golden bridge, the magnet of our difficult ascent. Reaching the supreme heights of spirituality, both of them find a language of great clarity and force. One spoke it metaphorically, but clearly. The other wrote it out plainly, as much could be written of the Truth in terms of language.

Let us come down to the mortals from the gods of language. While writing book reviews, one has to remember the task of summarising lucidly the content of the book and its style, as Dr. Prema Nandakumar does, as the sannyasis do with their sattwic nature. The reader expects to know about the book quickly, if he or she is not in a position to read the original. The reviewer fails in his/her task, when he/she makes an abstruse thesis out of the book, losing virtually all tracks to the book. This tendency in us has to be checked in order to write effectively for the readers, who come to the reviewer with a great expectation. Here is Dr. Prema Nandakumar writing on Dante and we may note in her English prose the presence of the artist and the clarifier at the same time:

The Journey ends only when the knowledge of love rushes in and pours on Dante’s being. When man’s “will and desire” are attuned to the love of God, the Heavens of the Ideal become the Earthly Paradise.

The question may well be asked: “What about the very difficult thought? Can it be expressed clearly, in a simple structure?” The answer is not hard to find. If one hundred percent of an article cannot be grasped, we have to suspect the author as a very egoistic person. There may be a difficult part in an essay or a treatise or a narrative. But then, if the whole unit goes above our head, the purpose of writing becomes useless. The reader is now a more enlightened person in a mass society. We should not take him/her for granted.