The Authority of Law and the Production of Truth in India Daniela Berti (bio) Authors who have analyzed the linguistic mechanisms by which power is exercised in a formal setting have focused on courtroom interactions and on the strategic use of language in a legal context. Courtroom studies have been undertaken since the 1980s and 1990s by authors working on ethnomethodology or conversation analysis (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Matoesian 1993; Conley and O’Barr 1998; Drew and Heritage 1992). By drawing mostly on Foucault’s notion of “micro-power” (1977:26-27), these authors have studied how lawyers and judges regulate the turn-taking process, the role of silence, the forms of questioning or of interrupting, and the imbalance of power that emerges from courtroom dialogues. The aim of these works has been to study how power is concretely enacted in a day-to-day situation by examining the face-to-face interactions that constitute courtroom proceedings and the microdetails of discursive practices. Here, power is seen as emanating from courtroom-defined speaking roles, from linguistic mechanisms of talk in the courtroom, and from professional speech styles. It is the power to control a setting where rules and turns of speech are very different from those in everyday conversation, where some are authorized to speak and others are restricted to giving answers, and where, by using a legal technique of interrogation, professionals transform a dialogue into a self-serving monologue (Conley and O’Barr 1990:21). Some of these works focus on the “rigidity” of court interactions and on the asymmetrical distribution of communicative resources (Conley and O’Barr 1990:21). Others have shown the more creative, improvisational nature of these features of speech, the “relative narrative and conversational freedom” of the lawyer and the witnesses that enables them to produce various strategies to utilize these interactions for their own pragmatic purposes (Gnisci and Pontecorvo 2004:967). In a case-study involving an Italian political leader, Gnisci and Pontecorvo show, for example, that although the formal asymmetry of roles during the hearing might make the legal professional appear as the “powerful director of the conversation” (2004:982), observations of trial interactions reveal that the witness disposes of various devices to make their point: they can change the topic, broach other topics, comment on evidence, modify the duration of turn, or interrupt. Within this study they show how a form of arena for verbal combat is created with the witnesses orienting their strategies to give an “elaborate answer” that not only aims at satisfying the requirements of the question, but also at imposing their own line of argument. The authors also note that although one option available to the witness is to simply provide no information at all, by saying that he or she does not remember or by evading the question, there are few replies of this kind compared to elaborate answers due to the negative effect they may have on the witness’s credibility (Gnisci and Pontecorvo 2004). This article draws on this idea of shared control over trial interactions between witnesses and legal professionals to analyze a criminal case observed at Shimla District Court in Northern India. In this case, the complainant along with other prosecutor witnesses turned hostile during the trial and denied all previous accusations. Unlike the high-profile Italian case mentioned above where witnesses were linguistically equipped to engage in a “war of words” (Gnisci and Pontecorvo 2004:981) with the legal specialist, the case analyzed here is in a setting where the linguistic authority of the legal professionals, who speak English and who have mastered judicial procedures, starkly contrasts with the poor content of the replies given by the witnesses, who do not understand English and are completely unfamiliar with juridical notions. By focusing on the mechanism of narrative production and on how oral and written statements are produced in court, I will show how the witness’s replies, even though they consist in simply nodding or saying “I don’t know” or “It is not true,” succeed in demolishing the prosecutor’s case and in preventing the judge from convicting the accused. More generally, the case analyzed here demonstrates how the power of...