Murder In India

CALL THE NEXT WITNESS -- Philip Woodruff--Harcourf, Brace ($2.50).

One morning Gopal Singh went out on the veranda of his house near the Himalayan foothills and handed his wife, Pyari, some women's dresses to hem. Said Pyari: "Isn't it enough that you should make your house a byword . . . must [you] bring your whore's clothes here? . . . Take back your filth!" Gopal Singh slapped her face. Screamed Pyari: "Why don't you shoot me? . . ." Half an hour later, Pyari was dead. Said Gopal's father: "We must say she died of cholera." Said Gopal: "She must be burned at once. ... It must be too late for a post-mortem." That evening, Pyari's body was burned on a pyre beside the Ganges.

Call the Next Witness reports how Gopal Singh was brought to "justice." Philip Woodruff (the pseudonym of a Briton who has worked for many years in India) never tells his readers whether Gopal Singh actually did shoot his wife. But he gives them an exciting description of the religious, tribal, political and human intricacies that make Indian legal procedure as cryptic as the Indian rope trick. They also make Call the Next Witness one of the year's most striking and unusual novels.

What Price Duty? When the local police constable told Sub-Inspector Ghulam Husain that Pyari had died and been cremated the same day, he hurried over to see Gopal Singh's father. "It's my duty," said he mournfully, "to enter . . . a charge of murder against your son." "Would anything convince you that your duty was different?" asked the father. Sub-Inspector Ghulam murmured something about 1,500 rupees ($450). "You can get to hell out of here!" barked the old man. "He'll hang," warned Ghulam.

Gopal's family was rich and powerful, but Sub-Inspector Ghulam realized that, having lost his bribe, he must not lose his case. So he kidnapped a member of Gopal's household and brutally third-degreed him until the servant talked. But Ghulam did not hand over this information to his superiors ("It is an axiom in Indian courts that the police are never to be believed"). He sent it to the dead woman's family, who were as rich and powerful as Gopal's.

When Pyari's family realized that there was not enough evidence to convict Gopal, they hired a brilliant lawyer and ordered him to manufacture the best evidence that money could buy. Then Gopal's family began to confect evidence for the defense. Both families finecombed their tenants and employes, singling out those whose lives depended upon their landlord's bounty, and ruthlessly training them as "witnesses." Others who yearned to stand in well with the British Raj or with the Congress Party were bribed with promises of political preferment. One clerk, who worked in the British magistrate's office, sold "evidence" to both sides so profitably that he "very nearly paid for the wedding of his second daughter." Genuine witnesses mysteriously disappeared, or were threatened with penury or death.

When the case came into court there was enough "evidence" to fill a tome, and enough "witnesses" to fill a small village. The decisive witness was Pyari's old Brahman nurse--a venerable old lady whose countenance seemed pregnant with honest purpose. She told the court that she had witnessed the murder. First, she said, Gopal had pointed his gun at Pyari and threatened her. "It . . . never occurred to you to move or scream?" asked the defense. "I am only a woman;" snapped the old lady indignantly.

A bus driver eagerly confirmed part of the nurse's story (the prosecution had threatened to foreclose the mortgage on his bus line if he did not). A devout Brahman also confirmed the lie. "For him the question of whether his evidence was right or not depended not on whether it was literally true, but on whether Gopal had actually murdered his wife. If he had, any evidence which tended to convict him was good evidence. . . ."

The verdict of guilty was delivered by the judge--an Englishman for whom the spectators had high respect. ("In India . . . an honest judge is one who takes presents from both sides and then gives an impartial decision.") Gopal went to his death (by hanging). So did the old nurse whose evidence had convicted him (she was found poisoned). Justice had no doubt triumphed, but by means that must always mystify Britons.

Unlike most books about India, Call the Next Witness is not politically partisan--except in so far as Novelist Woodruff writes with the air of an honest Sahib, looking down on the turgid Indian scene through a monocle, and thinking how very odd it all is.

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