Court caseAIR 1958 Pat 445

The defendant sent the plaintiff a letter containing defamatory matter. The letter was written in Urdu script. The plaintiff did not know Urdu, so he had the letter read out to him by another person, who thus came to know its contents. The plaintiff sued for defamation, contending that the letter had been published to the third person who read it. The question was whether that reading could be attributed to the defendant as publication by him. The plaintiff then sued for damages for defamation, contending that the defendant was responsible for the publication of the letter to that third person.

The Patna High Court held the defendant not liable. A letter addressed and sent to the plaintiff alone is not published merely because the plaintiff himself chooses to show it to another or have it read. Publication by the defendant could be found only if it were shown that the defendant knew that the plaintiff did not know Urdu and that the letter would therefore necessarily be read by some third person. No such knowledge was proved, so there was no publication by the defendant and the suit failed.