EXAMINATION OF HANDWRITTEN DOCUMENTS OF UNFAMILIAR SCRIPTS: A FORENSIC VIEWPOINT ON VARIOUS INDIAN LANGUAGES

Whether a forensic document examiner should express an opinion regarding authorship on the handwritten documents of unfamiliar language has been a matter of debate since the very origin of science. There is a clear division among the experts of the discipline of whom some are in favour of rendering opinion and the rest strongly against it. The consideration further complicates when this question is raised in a scenario like that of Indian linguistic diversity, where an examiner generally familiar with a single language is upto the challenge of examining documents of more than 18 languages, each of them incredibly different from the others. Thoroughly evaluating the possibilities and limitations via examining 50 such documents pronouncing their link to 10 different Indian scripts- Bangla, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Assamese & Urdu, the authors strongly endorse the inspiration of examination of these unfamiliar scripts and rendering a conclusive opinion by the document experts. The manuscript clearly outlines what it requires to successfully examine this special class documents and how such conscientious efforts smoothens the process of administration of justice.