Section 73 IEA | Court Is Not Helpless When Experts Are Silent: AP High Court Compares Dead Man's Signatures To Uphold Will

"The Signatures Do Not Show Any Hesitancy — They Appear Similar To The Admitted Signature" — In a striking exercise of judicial power rarely seen in Will disputes, the High Court of Andhra Pradesh at Amaravati — in its judgment dated March 6, 2026 — directly compared the disputed signatures of a deceased NRI doctor on two contested Wills with his admitted signature on a partnership deed, without the assistance of any handwriting expert, and returned a finding of genuineness.

The Division Bench of Justice R. Raghunandan Rao and Justice T.C.D. Sekhar held that Section 73 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 expressly empowers a court to undertake such comparison itself, and that this power is not contingent on either party having moved for expert opinion.

The exercise arose in the course of adjudicating the validity of two Wills dated April 5, 1999 and April 17, 1999, executed in the United States of America by late Dr. M. Leela Rama Krishna Prasad, an Illinois-based physician, in favour of the "Muppavarapu Chowdary and Leela Rama Krishna Prasad Trust." His widow Smt. Padmaja had challenged the Wills on multiple grounds, one of which was that the signatures of Dr. Prasad on the disputed Wills bore a marked and telling variation from his admitted signature — a classic ground for raising suspicious circumstances in Will contests.

Signature Variation As A Suspicious Circumstance

Smt. Padmaja's counsel pressed the contention that the signatures of Dr. Prasad on the two disputed Wills — marked as Ex. B11 and Ex. B18 in the trial court proceedings — were visibly and materially different from the signature of Dr. Prasad on Ex. B1, a partnership deed dated January 13, 1997, which Smt. Padmaja herself had admitted as bearing Dr. Prasad's genuine signature. The admitted signature in Ex. B1 was executed approximately two years before the disputed signatures — a relatively short gap, and one which made the variation argument harder to dismiss on grounds of age or physical deterioration alone.

This argument carried legal weight. The Supreme Court in H. Venkatachala Iyengar v. B.N. Thimmajamma, AIR 1959 SC 443 — the foundational authority on proof of Wills — had expressly identified a "shaky or doubtful signature" as one of the paradigmatic suspicious circumstances that can tilt the scales against the propounder. The argument, therefore, was not merely cosmetic: if accepted, it would have added substantially to the suspicion surrounding the Wills and cast doubt on the testimony of the attesting witness D.W.4.

Crucially, neither side had taken steps to place expert opinion before the court on this question. No handwriting expert had been examined by either the propounder of the Wills or by Smt. Padmaja. No application was made to compare the signatures through a government examiner. The question, therefore, was whether the Court could step into this evidentiary vacuum and resolve the issue itself.

The Court's Power Under Section 73 — Text and Scope

The Court extracted Section 73 of the Indian Evidence Act in full and analysed its two distinct limbs. The provision reads:

"In order to ascertain whether a signature, writing or seal is that of the person by whom it purports to have been written or made, any signature, writing or seal admitted or proved to the satisfaction of the court to have been written or made by that person may be compared with the one which is to be proved, although that signature, writing or seal has not been produced or proved for any other purpose. The court may direct any person present in court to write any words or figures for the purpose of enabling the court to compare the words or figures so written with any words or figures alleged to have been written by such person."

The Court noted that the first limb of the provision empowers comparison of a disputed signature with one already admitted or proved — and that this comparison may be performed by a handwriting expert under Section 45, by any person familiar with the handwriting under Section 47, or by the Court itself. The second limb separately empowers the Court to direct any person present in court to produce specimen writing for comparison purposes. Significantly, the section "does not specify by whom the comparison shall be made," the Court observed — and this deliberate legislative silence is what opens the door to judicial comparison.

The Supreme Court's Guidance — Caution Without Prohibition

The Court drew on the Supreme Court's observations in Ajit Savant Majagvai v. State of Karnataka, (1997) 7 SCC 110, where a three-judge bench had itself compared signatures on a vakalatnama with signatures in a lodge register and found them strikingly similar — without expert testimony. The Supreme Court had held in that case:

"As a matter of extreme caution and judicial sobriety, the Court should not normally take upon itself the responsibility of comparing the disputed signature with that of the admitted signature or handwriting and in the event of the slightest doubt, leave the matter to the wisdom of experts. But this does not mean that the Court has not the power to compare the disputed signature with the admitted signature as this power is clearly available under Section 73 of the Act."

The formulation is significant: the guidance from the Supreme Court is one of caution and sobriety, not prohibition. The Court should prefer expert evidence where doubt exists — but it is not disabled from acting where the comparison can be made with reasonable confidence from the materials on record. The High Court, guided by this principle, proceeded to undertake the comparison in the present case.

The Comparison — And the Finding

Placing Ex. B11 and Ex. B18 — the signatures of Dr. Prasad on the two Wills — alongside Ex. B1, the admitted signature on the 1997 partnership deed, the Court carried out its own comparison. The conclusion was clear and unequivocal: "We have compared the signatures marked as Ex. B11 and B18 and the admitted signature of Dr. Prasad, on Ex. B1 — the signatures marked as Ex. B11 and B18 do not show any hesitancy. They also appear to be similar to the signatures in Ex. B1."

The finding simultaneously disposed of the suspicious circumstance argument on signature variation and provided affirmative corroboration for the testimony of D.W.4, the attesting witness, who had deposed that he witnessed Dr. Prasad signing both Wills. A finding of hesitancy or visible dissimilarity would have undermined D.W.4's evidence and bolstered the case for rejecting the Wills. Instead, the court's own examination of the signatures provided an independent basis — distinct from testimonial evidence — for holding the signatures genuine.

The exercise of the Section 73 power in the context of a Will dispute carries important implications. Will contests frequently involve scenarios where the party challenging the Will does not lead any expert evidence — perhaps relying instead on the argument that the burden lies entirely on the propounder — while the propounder also fails to produce a handwriting expert, relying on attesting witness testimony alone. In such situations, a gap in the evidentiary record on the signature question can persist through the trial without resolution.

This judgment confirms that a court is not required to treat that gap as automatically benefiting one side or the other. Section 73 vests the court with its own independent power of comparison, and a court may and should exercise that power where the admitted and disputed signatures are available on record and a comparison is feasible. The exercise of this power does not displace the parties' right to lead expert evidence — but it fills the void when neither party chooses to do so.

The judgment also reinforces that a finding under Section 73, made by the court itself with reference to admitted documents, carries full evidentiary weight as a judicial finding of fact. It is not a preliminary or provisional observation — it is a finding that can and does directly bear on the ultimate question of proof of a contested document.

The Division Bench, after an exhaustive analysis of the Wills on multiple grounds — attestation, testamentary capacity, chain of custody, foreign probate, and the Hague Convention — held that the Will of April 17, 1999 of Dr. Prasad is proved and valid, and that his Indian properties shall devolve upon the Trust constituted under that Will. The Section 73 comparison, while one of several findings, stands out as a rare and instructive example of a court exercising its own statutory power of comparison in a high-stakes Will dispute rather than leaving the evidentiary field unresolved.

Date of Decision: March 6, 2026