Few grammar topics carry as much practical weight in a courtroom as direct and indirect speech. Every time a magistrate records evidence “in the form of a narrative” under Section 275 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 310 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023), a witness's first-person, present-tense words are being converted into reported speech. Get the backshift, the pronouns or the time-markers wrong, and the meaning of the deposition shifts with them. For judiciary and CLAT-PG aspirants, this chapter does double duty: it equips you to score the dedicated reported-speech questions that appear in every English paper, and it trains the drafting discipline you will need on the bench. We move from the mechanics — reporting verbs, the inverted-comma convention, the rule of backshift — to the harder cases of questions, commands, exclamations and universal truths, and close with the judicial setting where these rules stop being academic.

Direct vs Indirect Speech: The Core Distinction

Direct speech reproduces a speaker's exact words, enclosed in inverted commas, exactly as uttered: The witness said, “I saw the accused at the gate.” Indirect speech (also called reported speech) conveys the substance of what was said without the exact words and without quotation marks: The witness said that he had seen the accused at the gate. The first preserves the original; the second re-tells it from the reporter's standpoint. The grammatical machinery that turns the first into the second — changing the verb tense, the pronouns, and the words of time and place — is the entire subject of this chapter.

Two structural features mark the divide. Direct speech uses a reporting clause (“he said”, “she asked”) plus the quoted matter set off by a comma and inverted commas. Indirect speech typically links the reporting verb to a subordinate clause introduced by a conjunction such as that (for statements), if/whether (for yes-no questions), or by an infinitive (for commands), and drops the inverted commas altogether. Recognising which form a sentence is in — and converting cleanly between them — is tested directly in the English paper and is presupposed by the active and passive voice transformations that often appear alongside it. A solid grasp of parts of speech underpins both, since you must identify pronouns, conjunctions and adverbs before you can transform them.

The Reporting Verb and Sentence Architecture

The reporting verb is the hinge of every reported sentence. In direct speech it sits in its own clause — he said, she replied, the counsel submitted, the deponent stated — and is followed by a comma and the quotation. The tense of this reporting verb is decisive for what happens next: if it is in a past tense (said, told, asked, replied), the reported clause normally undergoes backshift; if it is in the present or future (says, has said, will say), no backshift occurs and the original tense is retained.

A crucial distinction in legal and everyday English is between say and tell. Say is used without a personal object — he said that he was present — while tell requires one — he told the court that he was present. You cannot write “he said the court” or “he told that…” without an object. The reporting verb may also be chosen to capture the manner of the utterance: admitted, denied, alleged, deposed, contended, warned, requested — each carries a different shade and, in a judgment, a different evidentiary weight. Drafting practice values precision here: a judge who writes that a witness “admitted” a fact says something materially different from one who writes that the witness “stated” it. The correct verb form also depends on subject-verb agreement with the reporter.

The Rule of Backshift: Tense Changes

When the reporting verb is in the past tense, the verb in the reported clause shifts “one tense back”. This is the rule of backshift (or sequence of tenses), confirmed uniformly by authoritative usage references such as the Cambridge and British Council grammars. The standard mappings are: simple present → simple past (“I am ill” → he said he was ill); present continuous → past continuous (“I am leaving” → he said he was leaving); present perfect → past perfect (“I have signed” → he said he had signed); simple past → past perfect (“I saw him” → he said he had seen him); and will → would (“I will appear” → he said he would appear).

Two tenses do not move further back because there is no “further back” to go: the past perfect stays as past perfect (“I had finished” → he said he had finished), and the past continuous commonly stays put as well. Mastery of the underlying tense system is therefore a precondition; if the architecture of tenses and their usage is shaky, backshift will feel arbitrary rather than systematic. In examination terms, backshift errors — leaving a present tense unchanged after a past reporting verb — are the single most common mistake, so the mappings above repay rote memorisation.

Modal auxiliaries follow their own backshift table, and several modals do not change at all — a frequent trap. The modals that shift are: can → could (“I can identify him” → she said she could identify him); may → might (“I may attend” → he said he might attend); shall → should or would, depending on sense (“I shall comply” → he said he would comply); and will → would.

The modals that remain unchanged are would, could, might, should, ought to, used to, and crucially must when it expresses logical necessity or obligation that continues (“You must sign” → he said I must sign). When must expresses past obligation that is being reported as completed, it is often rendered had to (“I must leave now” → he said he had to leave then). This list is confirmed across standard references including Cambridge and Grammarly. Because modals carry the force of permission, possibility, obligation and ability, mis-shifting them in a deposition can alter the legal meaning — “he said the accused could be there” (possibility) is not the same as “he said the accused was there” (assertion of fact).

Changing Pronouns: The Rule of Person

Pronouns in reported speech change to reflect the new point of view — that of the reporter rather than the original speaker. The governing principle is sometimes called the rule of 1-2-3: first-person pronouns in the quotation change according to the subject of the reporting verb (the speaker); second-person pronouns change according to the object of the reporting verb (the listener); and third-person pronouns remain unchanged.

So in He said to me, “I trust you”, the I (first person) becomes he to agree with the subject “He”, and you (second person) becomes me to agree with the object “me”, giving He told me that he trusted me. The third person is invariant: She said, “They have left” → She said that they had left. In judicial recording this rule is doing heavy lifting: the witness speaks in the first person (“I saw…”), but the deposition, cast as a narrative, must consistently re-anchor those pronouns so the reader knows who acted. Inconsistent pronoun handling is a classic source of ambiguity in poorly drafted depositions and in examination answers alike. Pronouns being a sub-class of parts of speech, you should be able to classify each one by person before transforming it.

Words of Time and Place

Because reported speech is normally uttered at a different time and place from the original, adverbs of time and place are shifted to preserve the original meaning. The standard substitutions — confirmed by Cambridge, British Council and other reputable usage guides — are: now → then; today → that day; tonight → that night; yesterday → the day before / the previous day; tomorrow → the next day / the following day; last week → the previous week / the week before; next week → the following week; ago → before; here → there; this → that; and these → those.

Thus He said, “I signed this document here yesterday” becomes He said that he had signed that document there the day before. A vital caveat: these shifts are not automatic. If the report is made on the same day, at the same place, the markers need not change — reported speech tracks actual circumstances, not a mechanical table. If a witness deposes “I am here in this court today” and the statement is recorded contemporaneously, a slavish “there…that day” would be wrong. This sensitivity to real-world context is exactly what separates a competent answer from a merely rule-following one, and it mirrors the judgment required when a magistrate converts live testimony into a written record.

Reporting Statements (Assertive Sentences)

Assertive (declarative) sentences are the baseline case. The conversion steps are: (1) keep or choose a reporting verb such as said or told; (2) remove the inverted commas and comma; (3) introduce the reported clause with the conjunction that (which may be omitted in informal writing but is retained in formal drafting); (4) apply backshift of tense; (5) change pronouns by the rule of person; and (6) shift time and place markers as the real context requires.

Worked example: The complainant said, “I have lodged the report at the police station today.” → The complainant said that he had lodged the report at the police station that day. Note the chain: have lodged (present perfect) backshifts to had lodged (past perfect); I becomes he; today becomes that day. In formal legal prose the conjunction that is almost always preserved — “the witness deposed that…” — because it cleanly subordinates the reported clause and avoids the run-on ambiguity that omission can create. This is the structure that the narrative form of a deposition under Section 275 CrPC most often takes.

Reporting Questions (Interrogative Sentences)

Questions require two changes beyond the usual backshift. First, the reporting verb changes from said to asked, enquired, demanded or similar. Second, the interrogative word order is undone: the reported clause reverts to statement order (subject before verb), the question mark disappears, and any auxiliary used only to form the question (do/does/did) is removed.

For yes-no questions, the reported clause is introduced by if or whether: He asked, “Did you see the accused?” → He asked whether I had seen the accused. Note that the question-forming did vanishes and the main verb see takes the backshifted past-perfect form had seen. For wh-questions (who, what, when, where, why, how), the question word itself serves as the conjunction: The Judge asked, “Where were you on that night?” → The Judge asked where I had been on that night. No if/whether is added, and again the word order is statement order, not question order. In cross-examination this transformation is constant: the question put to the witness is in direct interrogative form, but the recorded version, in narrative deposition, renders it as reported speech — which is precisely why Section 310 BNSS permits the magistrate, in discretion, to retain portions in the original question-and-answer form when the precise wording matters.

Reporting Commands, Requests and Advice (Imperatives)

Imperative sentences — commands, requests, advice, prohibitions — are reported not with a that-clause but with an infinitive (to + verb). The reporting verb is chosen to capture the force of the imperative: order/command/tell for commands, request/beg for requests, advise for advice, forbid for prohibitions, warn for warnings. The structure is: reporting verb + object + (not) + to + base verb.

Examples: The officer said to him, “Stop.” → The officer ordered him to stop. She said to me, “Please help me.” → She requested me to help her. He said, “Do not sign the document.” → He advised / forbade me not to sign the document (or forbade me to sign, since forbid already carries the negative). Note that the imperative has no grammatical subject of its own — the recipient of the command must be supplied as the object of the reporting verb, so “them”, “me” or “the accused” is added for clarity. This pattern, confirmed by standard references, matters in recording undertakings, directions and warnings, where the reported form must make unmistakably clear who was directed to do what.

A subtlety worth noting is the treatment of the polite marker please and of let-imperatives. Please is not carried over literally; instead it is absorbed into the reporting verb requested — She said, “Please be seated” becomes She requested me to be seated. First-person suggestions formed with let us are reported with suggested or proposed and a that-clause containing should — He said, “Let us adjourn” becomes He suggested that we should adjourn. By contrast, let used to seek permission or express a third-party command keeps the infinitive pattern — He said, “Let him go” becomes He ordered that he should be allowed to go. These finer patterns separate full marks from partial credit and, in drafting, ensure that a recorded direction is neither softened nor strengthened beyond what was actually said.

Reporting Exclamations and Wishes

Exclamatory and optative sentences shed their emotional punctuation in reported speech and are recast as statements describing the emotion. The interjection (Alas!, Hurrah!, Oh!) and the exclamation mark disappear; an appropriate reporting verb — exclaimed with joy/sorrow, cried out, wished, prayed — carries the feeling instead.

Examples: She said, “What a fine judgment!” → She exclaimed that it was a very fine judgment. He said, “Alas! I have lost the case.” → He exclaimed with sorrow that he had lost the case. The litigant said, “May you live long!” → The litigant prayed that I might live long. Observe that the exclamatory pattern “What a / How” is unwound into a plain assertion intensified by very or great, and that wishes (optatives) take wished/prayed that with might replacing may. These forms appear less often in pure drafting but regularly in the English paper's transformation questions, so the patterns are worth keeping at your fingertips.

Exceptions: When the Tense Does Not Backshift

Backshift is a strong tendency, not an iron law, and the exam rewards candidates who know when it is suspended. The principal exceptions are: Universal truths and habitual facts — statements that are permanently true keep the present tense even after a past reporting verb: The teacher said, “Water boils at 100 degrees.” → The teacher said that water boils at 100 degrees (not boiled). Facts still true at the time of reporting may optionally retain the present: She said, “I live in Delhi” may be reported as She said that she lives in Delhi if she still does.

Further exceptions include: when the reporting verb is itself present or future, no backshift occurs at all (He says he is busy); the past perfect cannot move back further and stays; and certain modals (would, could, might, should, ought to, must) are already “back” and remain. There is also the matter of conditional and hypothetical structures, which often keep their form. In the legal context, a deposition stating a continuing state of affairs — “the boundary wall stands on the eastern side” — may legitimately retain the present tense in the narrative if the fact persists, illustrating again that reported speech must answer to reality, not merely to a conversion table.

Reported Speech in Judicial Drafting and Depositions

This is where grammar meets the bench. Under Section 275 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 — carried forward as Section 310 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — evidence in warrant cases “shall ordinarily be taken down in the form of a narrative”, though the magistrate may in discretion record any part in question-and-answer form. The narrative form is reported speech: the witness's first-person, present-tense testimony is converted, sentence by sentence, into third-person, backshifted prose that becomes part of the record and is signed by the magistrate.

The stakes of getting this conversion right were underscored in Naim Ahamad v. State, 2023 SCC OnLine SC 89, where the Supreme Court (Rastogi and Bela M. Trivedi JJ.) held, in the context of Section 277 CrPC, that evidence should be recorded in the language of the witness, because “the text and tenor of the evidence and the demeanour of a witness in the court could be appreciated in the best manner only when the evidence is recorded in the language of the witness.” The Court warned that where a dispute arises about what a witness actually stated, “it is the original deposition of the witness which has to be taken into account and not the translated memorandum in English prepared by the Presiding Judge.” Translation and reported-speech conversion are different operations, but the warning is the same: every layer of re-telling — from the witness's mouth, to the narrative record, to a higher court's reading — risks distortion if the grammar of reporting is handled carelessly. A misplaced backshift or a dropped pronoun can change “the accused was present” into “the accused might have been present.”

For the aspirant, the lesson is that reported speech is not a school-grammar relic but a daily judicial skill. The same discipline applies when drafting a judgment that quotes counsel's submissions, a charge that reports the prosecution's allegation, or an order that records an undertaking given to the court. For the full set of language skills the judiciary English paper tests, see the English for Judiciary hub, and pair this chapter with active and passive voice, the other great transformation tested in tandem.

Common Errors and Exam Strategy

The recurring mistakes in reported-speech questions are predictable, which makes them avoidable. First, failing to backshift after a past reporting verb (writing “he said he is ill” instead of “he said he was ill”) — unless one of the universal-truth exceptions applies. Second, retaining interrogative word order in reported questions (“he asked where was I” instead of “he asked where I was”). Third, confusing say and tell — tell needs a personal object, say does not. Fourth, over-applying time-marker shifts mechanically when the real context does not warrant them. Fifth, mis-handling modals, especially leaving can as can or wrongly shifting must.

A reliable method for the exam: read the sentence-type first (statement, question, command, exclamation), because that fixes the conjunction and reporting verb; then check the reporting-verb tense to decide whether backshift applies; then transform pronouns by the 1-2-3 rule; then adjust time and place words against the actual context; and finally re-read the whole sentence for sense. Building this checklist into muscle memory, alongside firm command of tenses and subject-verb agreement, converts reported speech from a source of dropped marks into a reliable scoring area — and, more durably, into a drafting habit you will carry onto the bench.

One last point of technique pays dividends under time pressure: practise converting in both directions. Many papers ask you to turn indirect speech back into direct speech, which means reversing the whole machinery — restoring inverted commas, undoing backshift to recover the original tense, re-introducing question or imperative structure, and resetting pronouns and time-markers to the speaker's standpoint. The trap here is the reverse of the usual one: candidates forget to “unshift” a verb (writing “he had seen” inside the quotation instead of the original “I saw”) or fail to recover the question's interrogative word order. Working a handful of sentences each way, daily, builds the two-way fluency that distinguishes a confident answer from a hesitant one. Combined with the case-anchored understanding of why reported speech matters in a deposition, this two-way drilling turns an abstract grammar rule into a tool you can wield instinctively — first in the examination hall, and later in chambers when the fidelity of the record is on the line.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between direct and indirect speech?

Direct speech reproduces a speaker's exact words inside inverted commas — He said, “I am present.” Indirect (reported) speech conveys the substance without the exact words and without quotation marks — He said that he was present. Converting between them involves changing the tense (backshift), the pronouns, and the words of time and place.

What is backshift of tenses and when does it apply?

Backshift is the shifting of the reported verb “one tense back” when the reporting verb is in the past tense — present simple to past simple, present perfect to past perfect, will to would, and so on. It does not apply when the reporting verb is present or future, when the statement is a universal truth (“water boils at 100 degrees”), or when the past perfect is already in use and cannot move back further.

How are questions converted into indirect speech?

Change the reporting verb to asked, enquired or similar, drop the question mark, and restore statement word order. Yes-no questions take if or whether — He asked whether I had seen him. Wh-questions use the question word itself as the link — She asked where I had been — with the auxiliary do/does/did removed.

Which modal verbs change in reported speech and which do not?

Can becomes could, may becomes might, shall becomes should or would, and will becomes would. The modals would, could, might, should, ought to, used to and must (when expressing continuing obligation) do not change. Must expressing a past obligation is often rendered as had to. Mis-shifting modals can alter legal meaning, so they repay careful study.

How does reported speech relate to recording evidence in court?

Under Section 275 of the CrPC, 1973 (now Section 310 of the BNSS, 2023), evidence in warrant cases is “ordinarily” taken down in narrative form — which is reported speech: a witness's first-person testimony converted into backshifted, third-person prose. In Naim Ahamad v. State, 2023 SCC OnLine SC 89, the Supreme Court stressed that the original deposition, not a later translation or memorandum, governs disputes over what a witness said.

Do words of time and place always change in indirect speech?

No. The substitutions — now to then, today to that day, here to there, this to that — apply only when the time or place of reporting differs from the original. If the report is made on the same day at the same place, the markers stay the same. Reported speech tracks the actual circumstances, not a mechanical table, which is why context-sensitivity earns marks.