Court and bureaucratic vocabulary and its conventions
I can follow a legal notice or an administrative order
Look at these examples. Can you spot the grammar pattern?
This order takes effect immediately.
Case registered under section 420.
The documents submitted by the applicant were examined.
Pay attention to the highlighted parts. What do they have in common?
| धारा | section (of an act) |
| अधिनियम | act, statute |
| वाद | suit, case |
| आवेदक | applicant |
| प्रतिवादी | respondent, defendant |
| तत्काल प्रभाव से | with immediate effect |
Sentences are long and single-clause, the passive is near-universal, and the agent is named only when the law requires it. Numbers and dates are spelled out alongside the digits.
Indian courts work substantially in English, and legal Hindi is in large part a calque of English legal drafting. Recognising the English structure behind a Hindi sentence often makes it readable at once.
Apply this grammar in C1 course exercises
Practice ExercisesReading a calqued English structure as though it were native Hindi syntax.
English calque read as native syntax
Legal Hindi largely follows English drafting; use that to decode it.
dvara confused with se
dvara marks the agent of a passive in formal registers.
This order takes effect immediately.
Standard closing formula in both traditions.
Case registered under section 420.
dhara plus a number, exactly like the Russian statya.
The documents submitted by the applicant were examined.
dvara marks the agent in the passive, like the Russian instrumental.
Practice in course
Apply this grammar in C1 course exercises
The Government of India standard for Devanagari spelling, followed for all written forms here.
Kamta Prasad Guru's grammar, the standard prescriptive reference for Hindi morphology and syntax.