For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

While the basic facet of psychology that one who is close to death speaks the truth, has substance, we have to be cautious in a factious society that men and women are apt to depart from truth, persuaded by hostility and other peculiar pressures.

Many factors induce the dying human to surrender to his passion and make assertions to rope in his enemies or exaggerate events with a view to absolve himself from culpable aspects. To avoid self-incrimination is a natural tendency, to implicate innocents for reasons of vendetta, to forsake the fear of death for the sake of settling old scores are not unnatural.

Our society is neither particularly religious nor worried about death and after. Motivated suicides are common. Human bombs are popular and wreaking vengeance by facile falsehoods cannot be ruled out. We live in times of aggravated materialism where life and death are measured in terms of pleasure and pain and friction and faction. This is unfortunate but true and therefore dying declarations cannot be glibly accepted as truth-telling before the Almighty.

There is another dimension to dying declarations. Torture is so prevalent and victimisation of women and children so common that these helpless beings are certainly credible when they pour out their story of agony without particular malice to anyone.

Indeed, corroboration of dying declarations can never be rigid as a proposition. It depends on varying circumstances and the sensitive appreciation of the situation by the judge as well as the manner of reproduction of the dying declaration which will be the decisive factor.

A child is apt to speak the truth, a bride is apt to unfold the tragedy of dowry death. Tutoring is rare and spontaneous veracity natural. The naive tribal is unlikely to concoct fiction and the weaker party will be the last to fabricate a story against his oppressor unless there are very strong environmental factors or malignant motivations to invent tales.

The book, as I paged through it, amazed me at the enormous case- laws incorporated, the profound explanations on myriad nuances and at the considerable effort to make the law in the book embrace everything from alpha to omega.

The author is a valiant writer, scholar and has strained every nerve to ransack all the sources to secure the relevant material required (as the publisher has pointed out). I still wonder how a book could ever be written on the law of dying declaration running into 1200 pages and weighing a kilogram.

The enviable industry of the author proves that dying declarations do not die with the maker of the departing statement, it lives after his death to prove what perhaps is the living truth.

I should conclude with paying a compliment for the tireless lucubration of the author.

V. R. KRISHNA IYER