Is There an Approver’s Testimony?

          The crux of Shahid Amin’s Approver’s Testimony, lies in the flawed nature of testimonies regarding events that become a part of the historical archive.  In his essay he analyses how the testimony of the approver (Mir Shakir) regarding the Chaura Chauri incident was constructed and constituted and how it functioned as “material” for judgment which later got accepted as the official pronouncement of the event. Amin’s attack is on the tyranny of the law that participates actively in the production of knowledge regarding the past. The judicial discourse, as he argues, is predicated on and legitimated by the testimony of the approver who himself is an actor in the event, and has therefore experienced it. By being coerced into the role of someone who provides testimony, the judicial environment dislocates the rebel by recasting it into the role of the approver. That the approver participates in facilitating the narrativization of the event would suggest that he has some degree of agency, except that Amin sees this agency as being controlled and shaped by the prosecution itself which acts as the ultimate agent. It is then possible to think of how subalternity is produced within the judicial environment. To that end firstly, Amin says that the approver does not exist on his own as a subject of will. To be an approver is to be in a position that is “designated” to someone only because he produces the AT”. It is his statement that makes him the approver.

This lack of subjecthood is also reinforced through the idea that the approver does not belong to any context and functions outside the bounds of relationships because these are “immaterial” to the testimony he produces. How detached is the testimony from the actual event is the question to ask when Amin explicitly argues that it is a “sealed text”.  Thirdly Amin suggests that the approver as a term of reference also does not exist within the literary corpus of law. It belongs to the “vocabulary” of the police and  prosecution. It does not have an equivalent in terms like ‘accomplice’ or ‘witness’.  The noun “approver” is only connected to the verb ‘approve’ This means that the approver can only exist in its functional capacity as an interlocutor or intermediary between the binaries of “what happened” and “what is said to have happened”, with the latter being pre-meditated or determined by the judicial committee.  In so far as the approver’s testimony as a “narrative” is given a “directedness” by the questions of the prosecution, one can ask how this directedness shapes the approver’s memory of his experience of the event? The approver recalls that which he is asked to recall and therefore his testimony is both fragmented and not his own. In that way it is also possible to think of memory being subaltern. Approver's testimony is not a "confession", because a confession follows the subject’s will to do so. It is a “construct” of the prosecutions view of the event and its pre-history.  All these explanations suggest that the approver does not exist outside of the institution of the law. Then can there be an approver’s testimony in the first place? Is it an idea deceiving altogether, especially when it conceals the power of the judicial discourse that produces it?  If the judicial discourse compromises the notion of the subject’s will and agency and is implicated in the act of remembrance,  narration and entry into collective imagination then what idea of justice are we left behind with? Can testimonies recover the past or they further the distance from it?  In one way, the approver’s testimony is a fictionalization of a past event under certain pre-conditions. Can it exist outside of fiction?