Legal judgments rarely make for riveting reads, but the purple prose of one Indian judge has been declared so incomprehensible that even the country’s supreme court confessed, “one cannot understand this”.

India’s top court set aside a decision from the Himachal Pradesh high court this week because the text of the judgment was too convoluted, eluding even the lawyers involved in the case.

The case centred on a property dispute involving a landlord and a tenant he tried to evict.

After a two-decade struggle in India’s notoriously slow legal system, the Himachal Pradesh court finally ruled in the tenant’s favour.

Not that that was clear from the judgment, a sample of which read: “[The]...tenant in the demised premises stands aggrieved by the pronouncement made by the learned Executing Court upon his objections constituted therebefore ... wherewithin the apposite unfoldments qua his resistance to the execution of the decree stood discountenanced by the learned Executing Court.”

It went on: “However, the learned counsel ... cannot derive the fullest succour from the aforesaid acquiesence ... given its sinew suffering partial dissipation from an imminent display occurring in the impunged pronouncement hereat wherewithin unravelments are held qua the rendition recorded by the learned Rent Controller...”

Aishwarya Bhati, a lawyer for the tenant, told the Hindustan Times the appeal would ordinarily have taken two days to prepare. “However, in this case I took more than a week because the facts of the case were unclear.”

The judgment has been sent back to the Himachal Pradesh high court for re-drafting.

It is the second recent judgment to raise eyebrows in India, after a sensational corruption trial involving a senior politician in Tamil Nadu returned a guilty verdict, while lamenting the “octopoid stranglehold” of public graft.

“The common day experiences indeed do introduce one with unfailing regularity, the variegated cancerous concoctions of corruption with fearless impunity gnawing into the frame and fabric of the nation’s essentia,” it read.