What does "all my mods" mean in a sculptor's will? To anyone outside the trade, the phrase is meaningless. To another sculptor, it could mean the finished models in the studio, the modelling tools used to make them, or both. The Act's own example for Section 101 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA) is built on exactly this kind of gap — a document whose words are perfectly legible but simply do not mean anything to a general reader.
101. Evidence as to meaning of illegible characters, etc.
Evidence may be given to show the meaning of illegible or not commonly intelligible characters, of foreign, obsolete, technical, local and regional expressions, of abbreviations and of words used in a peculiar sense.
Illustration.
A, sculptor, agrees to sell to B, "all my mods". A has both models and modelling tools. Evidence may be given to show which he meant to sell.
Section 101 reproduces Section 98 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 without any wording change — confirmed against two independent bare-act sources.
Five Categories, One Underlying Problem
Read closely, Section 101 is not one rule but a list of five distinct situations where a document's words, however clear on the page, do not communicate anything to a reader without outside help: characters that are physically illegible, expressions that are foreign to the reader, expressions that have gone obsolete, expressions that are technical to a trade or profession, and expressions that are local or regional in usage. Add abbreviations and "peculiar" private usages, and the list covers most of the practical ways a document can be linguistically opaque without being ambiguous in the sense Sections 96 through 100 address.
The distinction matters. Section 96 bars evidence to fix language that is genuinely ambiguous or defective on its face. Section 101 does something different — it lets in evidence not to resolve a competition between possible meanings, but simply to translate. The sculptor's "mods" is not ambiguous to another sculptor; it only looks ambiguous to someone outside the trade. Evidence under Section 101 supplies the missing vocabulary, after which the document's meaning may turn out to be perfectly clear.
| Category | What Evidence Supplies | Typical Example |
|---|---|---|
| Illegible characters | A reading of the handwriting itself | A doctor's handwritten prescription, deciphered by a pharmacist familiar with the writer's hand |
| Foreign or obsolete expressions | Translation or historical usage | A Persian revenue term in an old land grant |
| Technical expressions | Trade or professional usage | "FOB" or "ex-works" in a shipping contract |
| Local or regional expressions | Custom prevailing in that locality | A land-measurement unit specific to one district |
| Words used in a peculiar sense | The particular author's or trade's private usage | "Mods" meaning models and tools, as between sculptors |
The Supreme Court's Approach to Technical and Local Terms
The principle behind Section 101 has been applied well beyond wills and trade catalogues. In Godhra Electricity Co. Ltd. v. State of Gujarat, (1975) 1 SCC 199, the Supreme Court had to construe the phrase "gross revenue" in a decades-old electricity supply agreement whose drafters were long gone and whose commercial context had shifted considerably by the time the dispute arose. The Court held that where a contract's language, though not ambiguous on a bare reading, was understood by the parties in a particular commercial sense at the time of drafting, surrounding circumstances and subsequent conduct could be looked at to establish that sense — the same underlying idea Section 101 codifies for technical and local expressions: the words themselves are the starting point, but they were never meant to be read in a vacuum stripped of the trade or locality that gave them meaning.
A Modern Illustration: The Software Licence
Consider a software licensing agreement that grants a customer rights to use a "perpetual seat licence" and separately references "concurrent floating users" for a module add-on. Neither phrase is ambiguous to anyone in the software industry, but to a court unfamiliar with licensing terminology, both are opaque. If a dispute arises over how many people could lawfully use the software at once, expert evidence from someone in the software trade — explaining that a "seat licence" ties to a named individual while a "floating user" licence caps simultaneous logins regardless of who is logged in — is exactly the kind of evidence Section 101 permits. It does not change what the contract says; it makes the contract's already-fixed meaning intelligible to the court.
Where the Line Still Holds
Section 101 does not reopen every dispute over a document's meaning to outside evidence. Where the words used are commonly intelligible, unambiguous, and used in their ordinary sense, there is nothing for Section 101 to translate, and Section 97's bar on contradicting plain language that applies accurately to existing facts continues to control. Section 101 has work to do only where the document's own vocabulary — not the underlying facts — is the source of the difficulty.
Key Takeaways
- Section 101 BSA carries forward Section 98 IEA verbatim, illustration intact — confirmed unchanged across two independent sources.
- It covers five distinct sources of linguistic opacity: illegible writing, foreign or obsolete words, technical trade terms, local expressions, and words used in a private or peculiar sense.
- The evidence it admits translates the document's existing words rather than contradicting or adding to them — a narrower and different function than the ambiguity-resolution rules in Sections 96 to 100.
- Courts have long accepted this logic outside pure evidence-law contexts, including for interpreting technical commercial terms (Godhra Electricity Co. Ltd. v. State of Gujarat, (1975) 1 SCC 199).
- The claimed technical or local meaning must be shown as genuine established usage, not a convenient reinterpretation manufactured for litigation.
Conclusion
A document does not fail simply because its author wrote in the vocabulary of their own trade, region, or era rather than in language a stranger could parse unaided. Section 101 makes sure that vocabulary gap does not defeat an otherwise clear document — letting evidence step in to translate, not to rewrite. Anyone dealing with a will, contract, or record full of trade jargon or dated phrasing should treat this section as the route to making that language intelligible in court, not as an invitation to argue over what the words "really" meant.