A century-old district gazetteer describes a river boundary between two estates one way; the parties' own witnesses describe it another. Can the gazetteer's author simply be presumed to be who the book says he was, writing when and where it claims? In State of Bihar v. Radha Krishna Singh, (1983) 3 SCC 118, the Supreme Court confronted exactly this kind of reliance on historical works and warned that "admissibility of a document is one thing and its probative value quite another — these two aspects cannot be combined." Section 89 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) is the provision that sits at the admissibility end of that distinction — and understanding exactly where it stops is the whole point of reading it correctly.
89. Presumption as to books, maps and charts.
The Court may presume that any book to which it may refer for information on matters of public or general interest, and that any published map or chart, the statements of which are relevant facts, and which is produced for its inspection, was written and published by the person, and at the time and place, by whom or at which it purports to have been written or published.
Section 89 corresponds to Section 87 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, and the wording is carried forward without a single substantive change — confirmed by comparing the text above, sourced independently from vidhijudicial.com and writinglaw.com, against the official BSA-to-IEA correspondence table published by the Bureau of Police Research and Development. It sits at the tail end of a cluster of "documentary shortcut" provisions — Sections 80 through 89 — each of which lets a court skip formal proof of a document's authorship or origin in defined, low-risk circumstances. Section 89 is the last and, in some ways, the loosest of that cluster: unlike most of the sections before it, it does not require the book, map, or chart to have been produced by any government authority at all.
What "May Presume" Actually Does Here
Read the section's own language carefully and it grants exactly one thing: a discretionary presumption that a book, map, or chart was written or published by the person, and at the time and place, that it purports on its face to have been written or published. Nothing more. It does not presume that the book's contents are accurate. It does not presume that the author had firsthand knowledge of what they wrote. It does not even make the presumption mandatory — "may presume" under Section 4 of this Act leaves the court free to decline the presumption altogether if the surrounding facts make it unsafe to draw.
| What Section 89 Does | What Section 89 Does Not Do |
|---|---|
| Lets a court presume who wrote or published the work, and when/where | Say anything about whether the work's contents are true |
| Applies to books on matters of "public or general interest" | Apply to a private diary, ledger, or personal correspondence |
| Applies to a published map or chart whose statements are relevant facts | Guarantee the map's surveying accuracy or cartographic precision |
| Gives the court discretion to presume or refuse to presume | Force the court to accept the presumption in every case |
Why Radha Krishna Singh Still Frames How This Section Is Read
The dispute in Radha Krishna Singh arose from a long-running battle over the impartible estate of Maharaja Harendra Kishore Singh of Bettiah, who died in 1893 without issue. Genealogical claims stretching back generations were fought out partly through old gazetteers, family histories, and published accounts of the estate's succession. The Supreme Court did not deny that such works could be looked at — it denied that looking at them proved anything beyond their own existence and apparent authorship. The Court's insistence that admissibility and probative value are separate questions maps directly onto Section 89's own structure: the section clears a document past the threshold of "who wrote this and when," but everything about whether to believe what is written remains a live, separately contested question of weight, decided under the ordinary rules of appreciation of evidence — not shortcut by this section at all.
Two Conditions Doing Real Work: "Public or General Interest" and "Relevant Facts"
The section does not open its presumption to every book, map, or chart in existence. A book only qualifies if the court would refer to it "for information on matters of public or general interest" — a phrase that reaches gazetteers, encyclopaedic reference works, standard treatises on history, geography, or trade custom, and similar works consulted by the public generally, but excludes a privately circulated memoir or a work of purely personal significance. A map or chart, by contrast, is not limited by the "public or general interest" qualifier at all; instead the Act requires only that it be "published" and that its statements be "relevant facts" to the proceeding — a distinct, narrower gate suited to how maps are actually used in litigation, typically to establish a specific boundary, distance, or geographic feature rather than general background information.
A Practical Illustration
A civil suit over an ancient temple's ownership relies on a nineteenth-century district gazetteer describing the temple's founder and the community that historically managed it. Section 89 lets the court presume, without formal proof through a separate witness, that the gazetteer was written and published by the government officer credited on its title page, at the time and place it states. That presumption gets the book into evidence on the authorship question. It does not, by itself, establish that the gazetteer's account of who founded the temple is historically accurate — the opposing party remains entirely free to contest that account on its merits, call rebuttal evidence, or point to inconsistencies, exactly as Radha Krishna Singh held was necessary before genealogical or historical claims sourced from books could be accepted as fact.
How Section 89 Sits at the End of This Chapter's Presumption Cluster
Placed against the sections immediately before it in this chapter, Section 89 is deliberately the least demanding. Sections 82 and 83 (maps and law reports) require government authority behind the document. Section 84 (powers-of-attorney) requires notarial or consular authentication. Section 89 requires none of that institutional backing — only that the work be the kind the public or the court would naturally consult, and that it be produced for inspection. The trade-off for that lighter threshold is the section's own built-in modesty: where Sections 80, 82, and 83 use the mandatory "shall presume," Section 89 uses the discretionary "may presume," precisely because a privately authored book or a commercially published map carries less inherent reliability than a government record, and the Act calibrates the strength of the presumption to match.
Key Takeaways
- Section 89 BSA carries forward Section 87 IEA unchanged, confirmed against two independent sources and the official BSA-to-IEA correspondence table.
- It creates only a discretionary ("may presume") presumption as to who wrote or published a book, map, or chart, and when and where — never as to the truth of its contents.
- Books qualify only if consulted for information on matters of public or general interest; maps and charts qualify if published and their statements are relevant facts to the case.
- State of Bihar v. Radha Krishna Singh, (1983) 3 SCC 118, remains the governing authority for keeping admissibility (Section 89's domain) strictly separate from probative value (a question of weight, decided independently).
- Unlike the government-backed presumptions earlier in this chapter, Section 89 requires no official authority behind the work — the trade-off is its weaker, discretionary form.
Conclusion
Section 89 closes out this stretch of Chapter V's presumption provisions on a deliberately narrow note: courts may take a book's or map's stated authorship at face value, but nothing in the section touches whether what that book or map says can be trusted. That line — drawn sharply by the Supreme Court decades before the BSA existed, and preserved without change in the 2023 Act — remains as important to litigators today as it was under the old Evidence Act. Sections 88 down through 80 of this same presumption cluster follow next.