It’s hard to not see the funny side of the mangled diction often found in attempts by Indians at the so-called formal letter in English. From the ‘Respected Sir’ at the top, through the flurry of heretofores and herewiths in the middle, all the way to the ‘Your most obedient servant’ in the end, it is a performance of humility so over-the-top that readers unused to it assume it must be ironic.

But the diction, and the ideas of what counts as exalted prose style implicit in it, don’t reflect a misunderstanding of linguistic conventions. They often show an entirely accurate understanding of social conventions: that someone writing a letter requesting leave or the expediting of an application knows his fate is in someone else’s hands.

Modernisation, that always incomplete project, was expected to take the fate of individuals out of the hands of other individuals and put it into the hands of impersonal, rule-governed institutions. But no observer of any society, least of all Indian society, could think this transition to the rule of institutions has actually occurred.

Anyone who has spent any time with a district collector or police sub-inspector, requesting a favour, will know that the demand for a bribe is not always, and not simply, a demand for money. It is also a demand for a gesture of abasement, some explicit and observable acknowledgement that one is in the other person’s power. Sometimes, the money changing hands can be almost incidental; the important thing is the abasement.

The overwrought language in these letters come to reflect a simple inequality in power. The more one regards the recipient of one’s communication as a social and political equal, the less one needs to modify the patterns of one’s speech in talking or writing to them. But there is something else that the stilted language reflects: that the request in the letter is genuinely important, and to write of it in more casual or everyday language would misrepresent its significance.

Even in the supposedly egalitarian societies of Europe, there is a close relationship between style of language and seriousness of content. Everyday English may be well and good for a bit of innocent flirtation, but marriage vows need something more solemn and nothing but (say) the hoary words of the Book of Common Prayer will do. The same goes for funerals: modern, ‘accessible’ translations of the Bible can seem to lack the cadence needed to do justice to the expression of deep, sincere grief.

As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a poet and scholar, once observed, ‘modern English largely lacks certain kinds of voice in its repertoire. In earlier centuries English was capable of working with different registers without too much self-consciousness. But we’ve largely lost that unselfconscious capacity to slip between registers, voices or keys in the way we talk publicly, never mind privately’.

The kind of innocent sliding between linguistic registers Williams is describing is evocatively captured in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede , which has a young, rural Methodist, Dinah Morris, fight against her natural reticence and shyness and also the prejudice of her listeners against a female preacher, to give an eloquent and affecting sermon. ‘Dear friends, come and take this blessedness; it is offered to you ... It is not like the riches of this world, so that the more one gets the less the rest can have. God is without end; his love is without end...’ This is not quite ordinary speech, but it isn’t high-blown either. There is only one word here of more than two syllables, ‘blessedness’, and it feels exactly right, perhaps because the next sentence is so decidedly monosyllabic and everyday: ‘the more one gets the less the rest can have’.

A number of Indian cultures retain this capacity to move, without self-consciousness, between registers. Public discourse in Tamil Nadu is marked by a continuous stream of allusions to the aphorisms of the Kural and the poetry of the Sangam era, quoted with no sense of either anachronism or affectation. In like spirit, the rich, colloquial Hindustani of the pre-Partition subcontinent, despite decades of state-sponsored attempts in both India and Pakistan to impose an artificial distinction between Hindi and Urdu, survives in defiance of these state directives.

This messy, mixed-up language survives — for instance, in the flourishing popular poetry of the Hindi film lyric — in part because the combined idiomatic resources of Sanskrit, the many now officially unrecognised dialects of the Gangetic plains, courtly and poetic Persian and classical Arabic, allow us a variety of registers in which to say the same things about human life. What might seem a paradox is, in fact, nothing of the sort. To talk about the most ordinary things in human life — love and loss — sometimes only the most extraordinary language will do.

(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)

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